Teal, I wasn't actually talking about Advent ships. Or their shields. That part you quoted was in regards to Guardians helping reduce the damage of Meteor Storm from the Transcendia, that's all Here's what you do, though. Build one (Transcendia), give it 3 armor upgrades, Mass Disorient, Meteor Storm, and either 2 weapon upgrades or 2 fighter upgrades. Build 3 hangars and 2-3 repair bays behind it, and then as many beam turrets as you have slots for on the sides and a few very slightly in front of the Transcendia. Fill your squad slots with fighters (after mines if you want to deploy mines). When the AI jumps in, select all your fighters and quickly pick off their siege ships and if it's a TEC/Advent, their Ogrovs and Adjudicators after the siege ships.

After that, your defenses will never, ever fall to a single AI attack. Your Transcendia's Meteor Storm will take out all their LRFs and Cobalts after 3-4 casts, and you'll barely lose any beam turrets and not even come close to losing the Transcendia.

Again, though, I wasn't talking about their ships. Shield mitigation can be adjusted for each individual entity. I was only proposing reducing the mitigation on their beam turret and only their beam turret. Not the entire race.

Exactly. It only happens on Advent worlds. Take this for example. You're playing any race, doesn't matter what. You have a TEC, a Vasari, and an Advent AI with the same defense layout. You have your fleet, ready to attack. It will take you ~3 times as long to destroy the Advent defenses than either the TEC or Vasari, or it will take you ~3 times as many ships to do it in the same amount of time. Just because their turrets have shield mitigation now.

Here's some fun math:

Let's take, for ease, an un-upgraded Gauss turret and un-upgraded Beam turret with Synergy.

They both have 3,000 hp, 12 armor. With Synergy, the Beam turret has 60% mitigation and 2.5 shield hp restored per second. Because they have the same armor they'll get the same effective hp bonus so I'll ignore that. They also have the same hull restore/sec so I'll ignore that as well.

Then let's take 20 TEC Javelis frigates, un-upgraded: 71.5 damage per shot with a 6.5 second cooldown = 11 DPS. They have ANTIMEDIUM attack, which does 50% damage against MODULE armor, so 5.5 DPS per ship.

20 ships x 5.5 DPS = 110 DPS against a TEC turret, and 3000/110 = ~27.3 seconds to destroy it.
20 ships x (5.5 DPS x 0.4) = 44 DPS against a Beam turret, and 3000/44 = ~68.2 seconds to destroy it.

That's about 2.5x longer to destroy a Beam turret with the same hp and 60% mitigation. In reality, Synergy adds shields and a hangar adds shields and shield regen, so you'll have the Beam turret with an extra 1,750 shield hp to burn through, and a 6.5/s recharge rate which becomes non-negligible.

I meant no hull upgrades. The Advent turret gets benefits of the entire beam line of weapon upgrades, the TEC turret AFAIK only gets the range increase/ROF upgrades, it gets no bonuses from any weapons research.

But in any case, I specifically was not taking into account damage output first because the amount of damage they do is not directly relevant to how long they take to destroy (the LRFs and Ogrovs/Adjudicators should never be in range of them, for example) and because I have a feeling a fully upgraded TEC turret would do less damage over its lifetime than a fully upgraded Advent turret (beam research line should be something like +30% damage, and another +50% from Synergy, plus 1750 shields and 6.5 shield hp/sec restore).

Hey here's an idea, build a starbase of your own next to those defenses as TEC, and explode it!

I don't know, the defenses are strong, but you have to factor in the huge cost of deploying them as well.

you also cant use the maxed 60% from synergy

im mean you really need like 4-5 hangers to be able to reasonably stand againd enemy SC attacks

an assuming you have one or two repair docks and a phase disrupter you end up with only having 11-17 ish beam turrets

thats still alot but if you cluster them all by hangers and so they get max synergy its hard to get them to sufficantly cover a gravity well

and this is also assuming that people want to take the time to place every structure manually

is that fixed now?

 well anyways it would still leave your civilain structures vulnerable and unguarded planets that are in the next gravity well will be vulnerable as well

Some interesting points in this thread.

Still, as far as I can see the only really "unfair" (and I use that word loosely) difference between the races defences is the shield mitigation on the advent turrets. It really does make them a class above TEC / vasari turrets, and at similar cost and the same tactical supply (1 unit), they become overpowered.

It would be good to see some uniformity between the races in this regard. Either all static defenses should recieve *some* shield mitigation bonus (in which case they become very powerful), or they should all recieve none.

Warp in your own fleet filled with nothing but fighters and flaks assuming equal fleet supply.

  I was reading another thread and ran across something, that i consider very likely to this thread here:

                We are assuming the Advent are OP, their turrets are heavy and very hard to break down with their shielding from the synergy ability + shielding + regen from the hangers give shields ability.

The Tec and Vasari dont have this and it puts them at a disadvantage.

But,

The Vasari Starbase is moveable, the Advent and the Tec are not, the Tec have torpedo launchers i believe, and the Advent have the new Ajudicators. The Vasari have no torpedo craft at all. But their Starbase rushes in the grav wells it inhabits and can outclass any module killer frigate in the game. Also, the Vasari can cover and entire grav well, where the Advent and Tec Starbases cannot, and if i need to "move" my Starbase, then i have to hopefully do it early before too much upgrading, so as to lose as little capital as possible when i salvage it and re-build it on the other side of the well. For stars this may not be a problem, as we can field 4 Starbases per race there. But not on planets.

The point im trying to make here, is simply that yes, perhaps the Advent rule in the turrets in their own worlds, but not all of the battles they fight are in their own worlds, and certainly the maxed Starbase, turrets and re-inforcing hangers to produce this little OP, doesnt always happen. How often does it happen, really? In a real game, i dont know, often? once in a while? rarely? Often enough to nerf it down so it can be taken out early because its seen in a small context and seen as OP?

Then what of the Vasari Starbase? Do we nerf it as well?  Or do we balance it with moveable Advent and Tec Starbases, and if we do in fact do that, we take the edge the Vasari have in one area and nullify it, and if we nerf the Advent turret to balance it against the Tec or Vasari attacking frigates then we take away that edge as well and nullify it. And the Tec being able to produce such quantities of ships for lower resource costs than the other two races? Well if we balance that, then we have approximately homogenous ships from approximately homogenous races fighting to see who will win. And perhaps evenly balanced as that may be, even granting that wins might even be a reflection of better skill on the players part if all parts are equal; It still takes away racial identity, in the uniqueness and inherent advantages of one part over another.

Isnt it more fun to get the heck beat out of us trying to invade an Advent homeworld with turrets and hangers and Starbases kicking my back? 

Or as Advent jumping into a Vasari world with a roaming Starbase stalking around the grav well and proceeding to kick me off the planet, either that or stay and die? 

Or as Either Advent or Vasari to jump into a Tec world, our guns blazing and caps roaring and shields revving! 

Only to get handed our heads from a fleet 3 times bigger than the Vasari or me put together?  Haha, i know its not balanced in each section and each part, but i think, this is my own opinion, okie?  But i think the Devs wanted it to be a hectic and riproaring war!!  With each side having definite and visible strengths, but also lacking in other areas where the other races have their own strengths. It makes for a neat game, not a homogenous one. Perhaps not perfectly balanced, but i think that kind of balance it not a good thing.  It takes away the Strengths and the drama and the worry, if it takes me five more minutes to take this guy out, then i might be over run. Sometimes that is fun, all the things that go into it. I think the devs put a lot of this stuff in on purpose. And i rather like it to be honest. 

Just my opinion, but i hope i have made some logical sense for my side of viewing things.

Take care and keep modding!!!

-Teal

Hello everyone.

This is quite a interesting thread.

I must admit, that i only play with with my friends online and so I never met a Advent world with the described defense setup. To reach this massive amount of defense it has to be late game (don't count some bottleneck maps, but I prever random ones). So I can assume there are large fleets at hand. If I attack such a world which is defended with 2 Hangars 3 repair platforms and 27 Turrets (that should be maximum) and a Starbase I would attack the Hangars with all my Bombers and Fighters. With a sufficient fleet, the two Hangars should go boom with the first bombing run. And then ... no shields anymore for turrets.

Nobody has included in his( or her) math that the shields are just a borrowed abilitiy by the Hangars. With no Hangars there are no shields. All the other races have the individual bildings upgraded. So kill a Tec Hangar don't disable the flak of the other Hangars. With other Words a chain is not stronger than the weakest link. But if all insist on atticking the strongest.....

And now correct me please if I'm wrong.

I haven't had a chance to play with the advent yet on Entrenchment, but would making several tech. levels to get their turrets maximum shield regen. and mitigation solve the problem of them wiping out small numbers of ships, and still allow the advent to keep their higher survivability late in the game? And maybe do the same thing for the hangar shield restore {edit} and shield projection, or whatever it's called{end edit}. Not huge nerfs, but I think that along with maybe knocking down the range of meteor storm to maybe 14000 would do the trick, and still leave a really tough set of defenses to crack.

While I don't have entrenchment yet, I've been paying attention to beta feedback and alot of entrenchment posts. One thing that has only been briefly mentioned is the advent need a better defense because they have the worst logistics and economy. The Vasari has phase stabalizers and cannon strikes that allows they to move almost anywhere they want on the map. The TEC starbases can become frigate factories, allowing them to replace their units one gravity well away. The advent have no such logistical short cuts, their nearest resupply point is their closet friendly planet. Sure, a lone starbase in a neutral or enemy gravity well can give the existing ships time to recover, but that doesn't replace your loses, and you weren't argueing against just the starbase, only starbase with alot of defenses.

Why is this important? The advents fleets, like its defenses, work best in groups, so the fewer areas you need to split you fleet, the better. While just how many fleets you need depends on the map, ideally it will just be two, one for defense and one for offense. Before, unless its 1v1, you'll want to keep 40-50% of your fleet supply close to home or at least open so you can start building them when an attack comes. A fully upgrade defense should push it back to 20%, as you want those extra ships in your attack force sense as said, you really don't want to fail and have to fall back and then try again.

And one last thought, are all of the sides balanced offensively? If not, and if the advent are weaker, perhaps they should be allowed to be slightly OP in defense to make up.

I think one thing that isn't being sufficiently addressed by anyone is the fact that the Advent don't get any anti-strikecraft defenses.  The Vasari get a phasic trap for their hangers, and TEC get flak cannons.  The Advent starbase and associated defenses are thus more vulnerable to strikecraft (the dominant force in the game, IMHO).  The shield/mitigation stuff is what Advent gets for NOT getting anti-strikecraft stuff.  So if they get a nerf, don't they get a raw deal?

Also, you have to look at the overall picture.  The devs have stated that they balance "by race" not "by unit."  Of course, that doesn't mean that they always get the balance right, but I'm still not convinced at this stage that there is an issue.