What's So Good about Cielo Command Cruisers?

sounds like made up numbers to me. regardless, you never need 80 Cielos. 3 or 4 Cielos is about as many as a fleet ever needs. the main thing they do is Designate Target, which is an awesomely powerful ability that gives your whole fleet an effective 40% damage increase. it doesnt stack though so there's really no point to having more than on target designated at a time. 

They are good for focusing fire on caps....

As transitive said, use designated target on enemy cap, order your fleet to attack it and it will be gone rather quick.

they also can give you in increase in fire power (about 10%) and shield restore

Embolden is a nice little boost that costs little AM, lasts quite long and has a very short cooldown. A good chunk of your fleet can profit from it. It's no dynamite, but it'll help you out. And designate target is an awesome firepower buff.

That said, you'll never need many Cielos. Anymore than 4-6 in a decent sized fleet is pure overkill.

Their shield restore can be helpful if the enemy is focus-firing on a ship, and you can withdraw it quickly (requires a bit of micro.) As for 80 of them, and 100 Hoshikos, that sounds a little bit stupid. It is possible, however, that the capital ships were something like the Marza, Kol and another, in which case the crusiers would have repaired the capitals, and then missile barrage spree would have removed most of the opposition, with designate target being used on the larger ships to up the pain. That's all I can guess at. But anyway, 180 support ships to rescue 3 capitals doesn't make much strategic sense; it would have been wiser to send in LRMs or Kodiaks to deal with the threat, or just turn tail and hope that the capitals survive

They will quickly run out of antimatter. I usually have about ~15-20 in a maxed out (by fleet points) fleet. It also helps if the enemy has a swarm of light frigates, as those love to eat support cruisers for breakfast.

Ok, in a maxed out fleet 15-20ish sounds right. With "decent sized fleet" I didn't mean a big, maxed out endgame fleet. I'd say that if you get about 1 Cielo for every 2-3 Hoshis you have, you're good. Unless you get your number of Hoshis wrong, of course. Cielos need a less AM for their supporting role than Hoshis and for offensive purposes you only use them on the big, juicy targets. Not on every heavy cruiser, like demobots.

Ceilo are VERY good vs Starbases

Pretty much the best for any kind of focus fire.

Prety much everything was said. As for the opening tread the only thing his support cruisers would ahve done is help his caps survive longer under frie in that situation. 4-6 cielos isnt gonna cut it not in a 30-50 ships fleet. If you want to use emboldment properly you will need atleast 10. Then add in 3-4 more with abilaties turned off to use designate target manualy. If you want to leave designate target on auto cast you will need 10 more cielos in addition to the 10 you ahve that is empowering you fleet. Having 10 Cielos on auto cast designate target will mean they will be using their abilaty on nearby enemy ships that are taking damage. IT realy help thin out the enemies fleet faster.

How does the Cielo work against guardians? The guardian works by absorbing some of the damage from nearby ships. If the covered ship loses mitigation, and ends up taking extra damage, does the guardian end up absorbing more damage?

What if the guardian is debuffed? Does the guardian end up suffering extra damage from the loss in mitigation?

I'm curious of Cielo's are worth it when attacking an Advent battleball. One or the other would be pretty nice, but both would be potentially devastating.

They are. So here is a senario your focus firering on and advent cap with a total of 100 dps and their is a gardian absorbing 33% of that dps into it's own sheild.

Cap: say 3000 HP
Gardian: say 1300 HP

100 dps.

Not gardiand no regeneration calculation.

3000 / 100 = 30 seconds to kill the cap.

With gardian:

3000 / (100 - 100 x 0.33) = 38.96 so 39 seconds to kill the cap. But willt he 33 dps the gardian is absorbign kill it before the cap dies?

1300 / 33 = 39.39 so 39 second but a bit more. The gardian will barely survive this Assuming it was absobing damage the whole time.

Now lets add in 40% more damage on the cap via the designate target abilaty.

100 + 40% = 100 x 0.4 + 100 = 140

3000 / (140 - 140 x 0.33) = 31.98 so 32 seconds to kill the cap now. But the gardian was now taking 46.2 dps

so

1300 / 46.2 = 28.13 seconds so now the gardian dies before the cap so to find out how logn the cap will live we need to calculate how much hp it will have left when the gardian dies after 28 seconds

so

3000 - ((140 - 46.2) x 28) = 373.6 the cap will ahve 373.6 hp after the gardian dies fromt hsi point the cap is sufferign the 100% dmg formt he 140 dps so:

373.6 / 140 = 2.3 seconds add both times

28 + 2.6 = 30.6 so 31 seconds to kill the cap.

So To kill enemi cap without gardian and designate takes 30 seconds

With gardiand and no designate takes 39

with gardian and designate takes 31

So desigante target has indded given yout he frepower needed to punch throut the bonus that teh agrdian was giving him. How ever desigante target does no mean you will get to kill the cap or win the battle since many many MANY more factors come into play durring a real battle. How ever it will indeed help you get an edge back over your enemy.

Personally I'll throw in a few cielo, it will definetly help with the attack boost either when the caps are attacking or when the Kodiak comes in, those will now throw, at least 30% bonus damage that will make it what from 18 to 24 assuming that you didn't upgrade those Ferro-Uranite Rounds and Advanced Ballistics and Refined Propellants

In all the time I've played I've build so many ceilo's that I don't even know what their start of ability is. ¨

[_]-Flipkik

I think celios are useless in any fleet thats not over 20 ships. It will just get killed and be a waste of money

Normaly by teh time your get Cielos researched you should ahve a 40-50 ship fleet kicking.