Okay I've never figured out how to upload screenshots to this forum, but here's a screenshot I made and put on the web.  This is my cap pulling.  Trust me, that's 28 assailants (purple).  About 10 seconds later, everything is gone.

http://www.wegame.com/view/28_assailants_evaporate_3/

Ten seconds are very long time.

In the picture you have 16. So either you miscoutned, or half of your 28 already died by this time.  My money is on you had bad judgement of time.  I could wipe your fleet way faster than that guy, for one thing he didnt micro his fighters or assailants, but I know it would take more than 10 seconds.  Your fleet was entirely inadequate to fight him, by jumping in you lost automatically.

You should find a free site to post replays if you want people to analyze what happened.  I use sendspace ..I have seen people use fileden.  You just go to the directory where the replays are saved and upload it to one of these, then give the link.

That said, this guy had 4 carriers which are the hard counter.  He also must have had more than 14 Illuminators...I see an Illuminator blowing up in this picture, so assuming your assailants were shooting at them, I am guess he had over half as many Illuminators as you had assailants to begin with.  Illuminators are also more powerful than Assailants.  So his force was a bit more powerful than yours in general, but also was made up by about 1/3 of a hard counter to assailants, namely the fighters, so you were at a disadvantage.

Now, 28 Assailants is nothing to sniff at if they have phase missile upgrades.  If you had Nano bombed the Progen and all the Assailants had targetted it, you should have killed it while taking heavy losses.  Maybe your cap would escape...maybe not, since it seems like there were more Illuminators to begin with.

As it stands, you kill some Illuminators...probably hampered by shield regen from the Progen, and when it was clear your capital had escaped, he cycled malice a couple times on the remaining 14 Assailants (the others were picked off by fighters by now) ... those remaining 14 probably did "evaporate" under the combined influence of the Illuminators, fighters, and Malice.

Watch the replay...see what upgrades are on the Progen...was Malice fully upgraded?  Was he keeping his forces alive with shield restore?  Did he have hull and beam upgrades on his Illums?  Did you have upgrades on your Assailants?  

Vasari does just fine fighting Advent, but this just sounds like a case where you were fighting against a counter unit, a superior force, and you didn't bring your capship to bear for fear of losing it while he made full use of his capship.

I think we all have WTF just happened moments with this game. And I mean WTF as in NO WAY THAT JUST HAPPENED. I was just playing single player against Advent and I had the fleet cornered in an astroid and I had destroyed all structures in the connected homeworld. The fleet was at the roid and I sent everything I had at them. They wiped me out. I reload my save, upped my fleet and sent them in again. They wiped me out again. I was fuming mad!!! HA HA I have to laugh at it. I was so mad I deleted all saved games, replays, everything.

You're doing the right thing. You're reviewing your replays. Hang in there!

This story reminds me of a multiplayer game I played once in Homeworld.  Some guy decided it would be a good idea to attack my fleet with fighters.  Unfortunatly for him, 1/3 of my fleet consisted of anti-fighter frigates. 

He quit on me after he wondered why all his fighters were gone within 10 seconds and accused me of cheating

Sounds like you are Porkins... and you fought Grand Admiral Thrawn.

Sure, I've always known that carriers and fighters were OP.  But we aren't talking about 10 or 15 carriers evaporating 28 assailants in seconds, we are talking 3 or 4 carriers (the fouth one showed up later - it wasn't even there most of the time).  If you say "that's still enough to pull off that kind of slaughter," then carriers and fighters are 10 times more OP than even I ever thought they were.  Basically, they are uber-OP.  What other "hard counter" in the game can evaporate the thing it is countering in seconds, when outnumbered by it 7 times over?  If I had brought in 28 skirmishers, and if those 4 drone hosts were illums instead (the hard counter), would the skirmishers have evaporated as fast?  Answer:  NO.

Sure, it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.  You see, I actually try to learn lessons in this game, to no avail.  I thought I had learned the lesson that when there is enough lrm present to focus and take down your cap, to just go ahead and pull it instead of losing it.  So that's what I did.  Yet somehow, that was wrong.

Level 5 mothership, and the only thing he did was chain malice - no shield restore (who doesn't use shield restore on the mothership???).  He wasn't micro'ing anything, you see (which adds insult to injury).  The malice was autocasting.  I mean, the full extent of the dude's micro was grabbing all his illums and right-clicking my cap.  That's it.  Other than that, he just sat there and picked his nose, watching the fireworks.  Yet I lost.  I had most of the map (double his planets), and I was number one in everything in the game, including econ.  He was essentially playing like a newb.  But I lost.

As previously stated, I had all tier 1 hull and phase missle upgrades possible (2 of each).

It happens to me all of the time with this game (NO OTHER GAME).  Even worse, it will happen when playing against an utter newb who by all measures should be utterly crushed (and in fact IS being crushed), but one slip on a bannana peel and it's YOU who are crushed.

I've been playing strategy games since before Starcraft.  I've always played at "pro" or "skilled" level with all the others I've played.  Not this one, no matter how many games I play, no matter how many lessons I try to learn and apply.  This game was weirdly balanced for me even from the outset (with the super siege frig, etc), and to this day I have yet to wrap my mind around it's odd play dynamics, weird non/counter-intuitive balances, underlying game philosophy, etc.  Oddly enough, while billing itself with an emphasis on grand strategy, it seems to rely even more on tactical play than other strategy games I've played.

Bottom line is, I can get damn good at other strategy games with reasonable amounts of time and energy put into them.  Furthermore, things are "explicable" in the other strategy games, and "make sense," even when I lose.  But I think I could play this game from now until doomsday and never be good at it.  So I'm guessing I should go off and play an old Total War while waiting for SCII, and see if I do any better at that one.

Before I do that, my parting shot:  NERF THE HELL OUT OF FIGHTERS.

I personnaly would not be against a slight nerf to fighters.

They are "free" to a certain degree.

They are the fastest ships in the game (2700 if my memory serves me correctly).

They can easily SWARM any target, anywhere in the gravity well.

They are only countered by Anti-Strikeraft Frigates, other Fighters & some Capital Ship abilities.

They are immune to all other types of damage.

They have no collision detection.

They are the most versalite units in the game; dealing 100% damage vs Fighters & 200% vs:

Long Range Frigates, Siege Frigates, Scout Frigates, Colony Frigates, Bomber Squadrons and Anti-Structure Cruisers.

No other type of ships can be has versatile as fighters.

When they are spammed in large numbers, their power becomes exponential, making them the most dangerous unit in the entire game.

If I had to recommend a nerf, I would go with a drop from 200% damage vs. light armor to 175%.

First of all carriers were nerfed, this includes fighters, as they can't rebuild their fighters fast.  Secondly flak frigates were buffed, if you don't use flak frigates to combat fighters, then that is your problem.  With flak, carriers become giant bricks that cost money, use up fleet supply, and feed a steady stream of XP to your opponent capital ship.  How can you even consider nerfing this?

I didn't dispute that.  I merely questioned the bizzarity of balancing a game such that 3 or 4 carriers can evaporate 28 assailants in seconds.  3 or 4 lrm won't evaporate 28 lf in seconds.  3 or 4 flak won't evaporate 28 fighter squadrons in seconds.  Apparently, only carriers have that power.

I've played Cykur many times.  His carriers will annihilate my assailants for sure.  But at least he has 12, 15, or 20 carriers doing the annihilating, so I don't complain, I just lose.  But 3 or 4???

In any normal strategy game, if your units are countered, there is some "grace time" you have to get out of the situation before you lose everything.  Let's take a game everyone is familiar with - Starcraft.  Say you do a mutalisk spam, and you fly them over the protoss base and realize "oh shit, he has tons of photon cannons up!"  Do all of your mutalisks evaporate in seconds?  Answer:  NO.  You simply grab all your mutalisks, and pull them.  Did you lose a couple?  Sure, perhaps.  But the whole force, EVEN THOUGH IT WAS FULLY COUNTERED, did not evaporate before you could pull it.

Boy, you act as if this was somehow by choice, as if I had a choice to do anything else but "spam" assailants in the opening rounds of this game.  But we all have hard choices to make, now don't we (at least I do)?  If I could have waved a magic wand, I would have had 100 enforcers, 100 transporters, 100 subverters, a starbase building in his grav well, and 1 of every kind of capship.  But there was no magic wand.  I chose to take as many planets as I could take as quickly as possible, which is what I did.  Those assailants allowed me to do that.  I also chose to eco.  Something had to give somewhere, and the thing that "gave" was I had only 1 kind of unit available at that juncture.  If you say this was some kind of blasphemy, then sue me, and you must be right - I have no idea about the strategy of this game.

Really!  I didn't know!

1) He didn't scout me beforehand.  He didn't know what I had.  He just cookie-cutter spammed carriers and illums, just like you say I spammed assailants, but at least I spammed assailants for a reason: they are easily available tier 1 units that allowed me to clear multiple desert and terran worlds and take them quickly.

2) I had no expectations of killing him.  My expectation was to be able to turn around and get most of my fleet out before it was evaporated in seconds.

And by the way, yes I scouted his homeworld before I jumped there.  His fleet wasn't there.  It came after I arrived.  My goal was simply to jump in and stir up a little trouble.

You apparently didn't get the point of my post.  I'm not asking that mass assailant spam win the game for anyone.  But is it too much to ask that 3 or 4 carriers not annihilate 28 assailants before you can even turn them around and get them out of the grav well?  If it is too much to ask, then I again plead guilty.

And no, my opponent was neither competent, nor did he see me mass anything.  He was doing his own thing, irrespective of what I did.  He was essentially a newb.

Fine!  I want them to annihilate assailants!  BUT IN SECONDS?!?!!?

Charging into the enemy?  My God man, do you even read what I write?  I had taken the planet 1 jump away from his home planet.  He didn't have anything at his home planet because I looked.  I jumped in, and then he jumped in from another phase lane.  Then I simply tried to get out.  Now, does that sound like I mindlessly "charged into the enemy?"

I haven't attacked anyone!  I asked one simple question, which still hasn't been answered.  Should that few carriers, massively outnumbered, be able to annihilate the thing they counter that quickly?  If your answer is "yes," then fine!  No attack from me, I'll just move on!

I'll say it again:  You didn't read a thing I wrote.  I DID TRY TO RETREAT RIGHT AWAY.  THAT'S THE POINT!

I dobut you retreated right away.  Present the replay, if it is in 1.02, but it is probably 1.01.  You claim you died in seconds, but that is certailny not true. I am as sure of it as I can be without replay.  It would take few mintues to kill your force. Even with Malice I don't see it taking less than 3 minutes, he was not microing the fighters.

Okay, then I will present the replay, and you will see it wasn't "minutes" (certainly not 3 minutes).  But since my credibiity is being called into question, I will not present the replay without a bet from you first, and a way to secure such a bet.