It is 1.12 in a nut shell. There are effective ways to counter carriers that will work vs AI, but are much harder to do vs a player.  Though being advent it's not so easy, probably you have to get lot of disciples as the Advent Heavy Cruiser does not haev an ability to catch up to carriers easily.  Then again it is AI so he probably won't run with the carriers.

The thing is that while i was going towards the carriers with my crusaders/illuminators (split in 4 groups each to FF 1 carrier) the fighters/bombers did a massacre to my fleet. The best bet was focus his caps (usually the AI tends to retreat after losing/getting badly hurt his caps) but i didnt that, ill try so next time.

The defenders (wich are supposed to protect the fleet against strikecraft, and i had about 25 of these) did nothing more then run around like headless chickens (if you want to micro 25 ships to attack a bomb squad each while taking care of the rest too, go ahead Oo).

The only anti-craft ability i can think from advent caps is the kinect push (or how its called) from the carrier, wich doesnt do that amazing damage even on level 3, and it wont take care of a 100ish craft army.

The point stands still: why run thru all that hassle when you can just build more strikecraft? They are virtually unstoppable, and a balanced swarm (70% fighters, 30% bombers maybe) can take care of pretty much anything? Strikecraft spamming for advent seems even more valuable due to the lower energy weapon cooldown passive aura from the carrier cap (again).

You could just trow a couple of radiance, crusaders and guardians to take care of the "ground" survivability... Maybe its just the way advent has to be played?

1) Are you saying that flak frigs had little to no effect on the strikecraft?  That's the obvious counter.  Are you saying its ineffective?

2) The passive aura from the carrier cap doesn't apply to strikecraft.

Well the strategy to steal antimatter would be awesome, if all races could do that and if the disciple werent so squishy, and if the amount stolen was somewhat effective but iirc its like 15 AM every cd while the disciples (low hp, very low armor) are owned in a matter of seconds.

The real counter to strikecraft are supposed to be flak ships but they're absolutely uneffective. Ofc i realize that if a carrier costs 20 supply, and a vasari flak (ie) 5, you'll need 3 or more flak for each advent carrier (else would be unfair for the carriers) but still with high quantities of flak the result doesnt change much.

Dont forget the light frigs that are supposed to go chasing the carriers are light armor (are they?) therefore even the fighters squads are not that bad for blasting em down. Do you guys really find light frigs useful lategame? (1.4k + supply?).

And btw, why the aura from the cap would not apply to strikecraft? Iirc all the advent strikecraft have beam weapons.

I do build flaks. Just not 40 I'll try with more and more, and ill also try sending em in first. Operation meatshield ftw.

Ever since the carrier/strike craft boost, certain games the ai seems to do nothing but spam them. These games seem to be pretty rare (for me at least). It does get annoying though.

Strikecraft are terrible at killing Flak, not to mention that they shoot back, so that's a feasible strategy.

BTW: TEC flak has 4 guns, Advent has 6 guns, Vasari has 2 missile launchers.

http://files.filefront.com/outnumberedgalaxy/;13092854;/fileinfo.html

This is a simple map with preset armies. One side has a wave of carriers with some disciples, the other has a wave of flak, with some illuminators and carriers to support. The flak player is outnumbered in fleet supply by nearly 2:1, but that shouldn't stop you from winning this easy scenario. Keep in mind that this isn't even counting the help that certain capital ships would give. Hint: Upgrade the defense vessel weapons, they're low tier upgrades. Don't let the supporting ships die too early, they speed things up a ton later on.

Thanks so much, I will give it a try.

Two Halcyon's with maxxed TK push + hordes of strike craft around them = dead graphics card, seriously, i had a fleet with about 200 strikecraft (not squadrons) in it, and one enemy advent carrier blew half of them up in a very short amount of time. Fortuneately said fleet hosting 200 strikecraft was 16 capships

Flaks are more effective in Entrenchment (as of 2.5) as well due to all the improved bank targetting code.