Yeah, with that many Hoshi's you won't even scratch a cobalt. He'd repair ships like crazy. Dunovs would help with that as well. I'll agree with the magnetize ability on your strike craft. But the 'weapons disabled' clue is the best one. Most of your ships were just sitting there defenseless, getting beaten up while his cobalts and SC worked them over. One reason you've never seen this is most TEC players don't go for the Hoshi upgrade that allows the disabled weapons. They leave it on 'auto-repair' and let them manage themselves.

On the surface, it doesn't look that scary. So, you attacked what seemed to be the threat ( Caps, and SC ), and ignored the real threat, the weapon disabling Hoshis.. Which left you defenseless for the cobalts and SC. I wonder if it would have worked better with a few Kol's ?

An interesting technique, and one we'll probably all be seeing a lot more.

You can't do the Skirantra cluster trick against Dunovs, because they'll magnitize the Skirantra.  Like most anti-strike craft abilities, the only real counter to magnetize is to keep your strike craft spread out so any one casting won't slaughter your entire strike craft force.  Keep in mind that magnetize also damages the unit the strike craft crash into, not just the strike craft.  It's not as effective as flak burst at purely killing strike craft, but it actually turns them into damage against enemy frigates and caps which is where it shines.

This seems to be primarily the work of Dunovs wasting your strike craft, and Hoshis disabling everything else, leaving you with minimal damage output.  Jam weapons works wonders, but it doesn't kill anything, so if you have no damage output a couple seconds later it's all for nothing.

Personally, I think if Vasari end up in a massive "all out" fleet battle late game they're in serious trouble.  This faction more than any seems to shine in small skirmishes rather than huge fleet battles, so I really feel that to be successful late game as Vasari you have to keep the enemy divided into smaller fleets.

Hoshikos have heavy armor, so anything that attacks well vs. heavy armor (LF, support, bombers, HC...) would be good against them, you just need to make sure you have a lot more of them then he has hoshikos or they will just sit there and look stupid.

Not to mention the fact that the Cobalts are perfect for carrier-killing, so without any other ships higher on their targeting list (Light Frigs pretty much always go after Flak first), they chase your carriers first.

If you've got Distortion Field researched, definitely micro them so you keep as many Hoshikos out of combat as possible. Skirmishers with Interference can inhibit them by doubling AM cost (doubling cooldown time isn't as effective, since the cooldown for Repair Bots is something like 4 seconds).

Overseers are your best answer to Hoshikos. Although they don't repair over time, their Reactive Nanite Armor instantly increases current hull points by 200 and armor points by 2 (to a maximum of +2 armor and normal max hull + 200). Its also stackable, so having 10 Overseers using RNA on one target instantly replenishes 2000 hull points. Cooldown time is roughly on par with the Hoshi, 4 seconds.

Vasari are a late-game race.  TEC is an early game one.  Advent is middle game.

It was a 4 player map.  The other 2 players dropped, leaving only me and him.  Still, it was a "small" map compared to the huge maps some people play.  It was the topmost random map you can play on medium maps.

Rushing him is fine, but I wasn't able to this particular game due to issues I won't go into.  Either way, I'm not asking about overall strategy (rush, turtle, boom, etc), I'm asking about tactics, counters, etc.  I didn't lose because I failed to rush.  I lost because of failing to deploy the right mix of units, or failing to use them correctly.

Vasari is definitely the strongest early game faction.  However, those strengths taper off and their only redeeming factors late game are their civilian phase techs and those wonderful phase missiles that penetrate shields.  Not enough if Advent or TEC get the upper hand.

Personally, I'd say that Advent have the edge over TEC late-game, but it's less pronounced than Vasari's early game advantage.

TEC has the better economy, for sure, but Advent has the better fleet.  It's highly presumptuous to say that either faction is better.  Economy means jack shit if the enemy fleet is just steamrolling your's time and time again while money just stockpiles because you can't use it all, and a strong fleet means jack shit if you don't have the cash to keep it at full fighting strength.

If Advent are down to their homeworld and have a massive fleet defending it, TEC can just build a few superweapons and nuke it out from under you.

I've seen a lot of people analyze that TEC is second best the whole way through, and Advent's advantage begins earlier on if played right.  Other people seem to think as you say, that Vasari have the early game, TEC mid, and Advent late.  While the Vasari are pretty blatantly skewed towards the early game, I tend to think that TEC and Advent have different strengths and weaknesses at mid and late game, and which one is stronger will depend on the styles and skill levels of the players, as well as the map layout.

Your missing Halcyon and rapture in that fleet . Vasari will strikecraft your fleet too death(having the best sc) with some verry simple support too it's sc. So I would say at least get a halcyon.

Grtz,
[_]-Flipkik

You've updated to the most recent version, haven't you?  RA got a massive nerf in one of the patches, so it's really no better than the other high level civvy techs for the other factions.