he used mass disorient once and repulse once then i EMP bombed him he didnt have the AM to do it again. he may have lost only 10 or less illums, thats how pathetic it is.

He had no weapon upgrades on his SB, only defence, he also had culture upgrades. so he didnt have many slots left.

Ya.  It is sounding like things were left out.  Did he have meteor too along with disorient?  Disorient really screws with kodiaks and such anyways.  I have said before if you are fighting illums and repulse with kodiaks(especially 60+) then you deserve to lose them.  The advent player will wipe the floor with you if he is halfway decent because your kodiaks wont really be able to fire a shot.  Doubly so if they were mass disoriented.  The advent player would have had more of a chance but with an SB in the picture too then it is definitely possible that he could hold off both of you. 

Illusion is not OP at all.  It is easy to tell the difference between a fake illum and a real one if you know what to look for(and you really shouldn't be able to tell a difference IMO).  In that manner you can just micro to kill the real ones.  Sure it will soak up some side shooting or indirect damage but that is only situationally useful.  If you are against someone that doesn't know how to tell the difference or doesn't micro, then yes it will make a difference there too.  It is far from a game winner.

[_]-Greyfox

Yeah, Mindseye and Grey pretty much hit it on the nose. Your TEC fleet as you described it was 1380+ ship slots. Sunny's was 700 ish. Your fleet alone was twice his size. Illums are imbalanced yes, but unless he was abusing repulse, mass disorient, or meteor strikes, you should have won that. Especially considering you had a second fleet there.

Me the free SC arent a problem. The SC are the carriers weapon, like the weapons of any otehr combat ships. The main problem is that you couldn'T much of anything in 1.01 to suprese them because the AM was not ajusted. You couldn'T kill off the AM in carriers. I know I tried it with 2 dunovs with lvl 2 emp bomb and he still had plenty AM to spare.

Thing is if SC cost money to build then if somethign happens to your ECON you wont be able to rebuilt them so you'll ahve units youve spent good money on that is not useless since your can'T afford to replace it weapon system. Might as well junk you carriers right now while your at it.

They were tools to contral SC just they were never properly used or ajusted. Not only does the carrier AM regeneration amount need to be lowered. But the LFs AM distortion abilaties need to be upped. They need to steal more AM and cause more DMG for those that do.

The tool was there just never used properly and then we went and created these "NEW" tools that had CASTASTROPHIC results on the game. You wanna go and create a new DISASTER TOOL? Personalay I think we all need a good dose of "KISS" KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID!

Im not debating the fact that with all the stuff he had, and hes superior micro we would have lost, I am debating the fact that he only lost 20-30 real ships in the whole battle.

MY fleet consisted of 100 illuminators, 7 guardians, 13 carriers (with fighters) a Prog and a revelation. lvl3 health & shields lvl2 weapons.

And if illusion doesnt take AM, why couldnt my fleet of 100 lums double in size? any thoughts on that?

He did have a fully upped SB with (im guessing) 3 hp/1 culture/1 weapons/2 Meteor/1 disorient.

Uber fought along the edge of it, but Im sure the repulse pushed his ships out of range of the SBS weapons (probably not meteor storm though). I chose to fight no where near it, though at one point he managed to line up his guardians and repulse about a quarter of my fleet all the way from halfway across the gravwell to within range of the meteors. Yow!

Uber and I weren't attacking to win, we were just(the three of us) in a stalemate for about an hour (this was an ffa game) and Uber decided to do a balls out attack on Blackhawk (which I was watching with Clairvoyance the whole time 2 jumps away) and I decided to join in for a little spice, and to get the game over with. I wasn't expecting to win, but I really thought blackhawk would have taken a lot more losses. The main reason was his instantly doubled fleet size, and repulse. Was pretty funny though seeing so many illums being tossed around like rag dolls for a good 15 minutes.

Dude not the same at all. You have to build the carrier at a very subtancial cost and if you can just defeat the carrier without defeating the carrier them selves then thier is no point to them. It's all wasted supply. Yes if you econ gets hurt then you will not be able to build as many frigates to replace them true, you wont be able to build replacement carriers. If your lokkign to defeat carrier without having to killt hem then just take carriers and SC out of the game all together. With your logic this woudl mena if you figting a dude that is spaming LRFs the best way to beat him is not to try and kill his LRFs but kill his frigate factory to stop production.

Making SC cost money is the same as asking your frigates to pay 5$ for each shot they fire. So I ask you how would you fell if you ships couldnt fight back because you didnt have enougth money to pay for the freaking ammo. And don't compare them to mines. Mines recived a cost and a limit because they were a problem were you could fill every system with them and cause major lag.

AM was place in this game for a reason. That reason is it's a player controled control tool. To stop you enemy from using abilaties you need to fuck up his AM. With carriers you need to fix their AM rate so it is possible to fuck up their AM. Me that si the solution a PLAYER CONTROLED CONTROL SYSTEM. NOT A FREAKING ARBITARY PENALTY. No strategy in arbitary penalty, each time you add one your window of constraints grow smaller and smaller till even their is no strategy left just prescripted combat. The more arbitari penalties they are the more this game will suck and the more we will ahte it.

So are you saying that in a battle with over 140 illuminators flying around, you can easily tell which ones are real and which ones arent? The empire tree is useful to an extent in deciphering this, but you're given 2 options. option 1: unstack the empire tree and shift attack all 70 of the real illuminators, or 2. let your ships auto target on all 140 enemy illuminators.

Problem with option 1) 70 ships is A LOT to shift click on to begin with. Secondly, the ships aren't represented with 'proximity' to your fleet on the empire tree, so theres a good chance you could accidentally send your ships to attack an illuminator thats a good distance away from your fleet, leaving the entire fleet open to attack from the rest of them, or forcing you to stop your fleet, and re-shift target the illuminators again.

Problem with option 2) Theres a 50/50 chance your ships will be attacking a fake target, that can be healed and whose shields can be restored just like a normal illuminator. So they can live just as long as the real thing, making it take twice as long to kill them all. If you think about the length of time it would take to kill all those ships, it effectively halves the total damage your entire fleet is doing to his 'real fleet', while at the same time extending the life of the real fleet allowing it to do more damage to yours than would otherwise be possible over that period of time.

A lot of this abilities brokeness has to do with the overwhelming power of illuminators, and a good nerf to them would probably cut down on the abuse, still, without a good Visual clue as to which ones are real or not, the ability doubles the health/shields of the illuminator. allows it to heal twice as fast and allows it to live twice as long to do damage.

Deciever, there are two ways to tell which ones are fake and which ones aren't. The first is what I mentioned with the left side bar.

The second is when you're building up a que of units to target, if the Illum has in red letters at the bottom of the description card "Abilities Disabled", this is a fake. You can target ones that are real. I think some of your Illums may have been fake and you didn't realize it. It's a possiblity, because the ability fires automatically when in combat.

Not trying to insult your intelligence, but maybe your fleet wasn't as strong as you thought it was.

Thats what i keep SAY it needs to be tweaked the system is there is is just not setup to work properly. Fix it to work properly and you will have solved your problem.

EadTaes: Please stop using hyporebolies. Everyone can see you are opposed to the idea, no need to make stuff up.  I never used any exact cost numbers, because I feel they would have to be tweaked many times before you arive at a good number.  Regradless the cost Amish chose is per squadron.

really i think what deceiver and i are trying to say, is by itself the illusion ability is fine it helps the illum scale to late game. (Even though it is better than HCs late game without the ability). The real problem is the lack of usefullness of the other lrf abilites. the aoe attaks do next to no dmg to anything within its range. if you had 100 assilents focusfiering a SB with charged missiles illums nearby the SB probably wouldnt even have lost all of their sheilds when the SB dies.

Really amish by saying that i just sacrifice my caps to his fleet so i have a chance to beat his fleet that is just stupid(not the suggestion but how powerful the ability becomes), think about it if you get illusion you would then get automatic kills to caps because they have to micro the rest of their fleet so hard that they cant keep their caps alive.really i had 2 lvl 6 kols a lvl 5 marza lvl 4 akkan 2 lvl 5 donovs i didnt want to just let them die without even trying to save them.

really you have the best lrf combined with a lrf ability that just blows away the other ones. IMO illusion should just make a fake illum that isnt on the empire tree. its fine if it is in the overall count of units but not on the empire tree. Illusion should just be an ability that is intimidating and that is it, because that is all the other lrf abilties are they have no real purpose other than intimidation.

another problem is fighters on hold position will not only target real illums they will target the fake as well as the real so illums bascically get 2X the hp against fighters because not on hold position it takes far too long to take out a group of illums.

Well SC replacement I have not discussed at length BECAUSE there is some creative thinking that needs to be done around that.  Most likely what I would like to see is squadron continue to do full damage even if it is missing craft. Just like a frigate at 10% hp still does full damage.

Right now I'm thinking only damaged craft will be repaired free. How to replace missing SC I have not give that much thought because one would have to see how it would play out in practice.  Simply put your squadrons will deal damage and kill opposing frigates while not losing a whole squadron yourself.  If you could continuely replaced the SC that died for free, you would probably not notice any economic cost from using carriers(fighters should be much sturdier if cost is implemented).  While your opponent would notice quite a cost, since he would be losing frigates left and right. Though ocne again I state these are just my projections. It may be that in parctice free SC replacement is necessary at soem sort of interval.  But I feel strongly that in the end some squadrons would need to die off in order to maitnain some balance between strikecraft and frigates.  There just needs to be some sort of attrition factor.

In fight of fighter vs fighter, you might also not be losing a lot of craft with HP boosts. I am not sure how the combat is resloved now, if you tell all your squads to attack an opposing squad do they go after the same craft in that squad? Do they just pick one craft at random? 

I think fighter vs fighter damage would be reduced, and given repair abilities by carriers, they would be able to fight quite a while. So if you want a decisive victory vs fighters you would need to employ fighter+flak, or fighter+flakburst/telepush (Jam weapons would however become more of an ability to protect your fleet vs strikecraft or protect your bombers vs fighters), or fighter + LF to disable repair abilities of the carriers. Simply going fighter vs fighter would be ineffective and boring.

Fighter vs Bomber would be fairly strong though. But flak vs Bomber would be fairly useless once again given that the carrier has enough AM to keep repairing the craft, and that bomber can damage flak fairly well.  Using Flak + LF though should be enough to counter equal supply of bombers.

It doesnt make sense to me that fighters cant kill fighters.This would mean in battle that fighters are fear free of other fighters.So without flak you are totally boned.I mean it would force flak use in game but then there is only 1 way to kill fighters which I dont like much.You should be partially effective in a rock vs rock battle.