an observation gathered from reading the forums is definately an opinion.  but yeah, advent are kinda OP

Yeah currently most believe the current balance favors advent, forcing people playing other races to adopt specific startegies to combat the difficult to beat illum+repulse spam. Namely spamming flak frigates (taking advantage of the weak advent discple vessels) and attempting to trash the illums before a sufficient number of guardians with repulse can be produced.

I, for one, do not think Advent is OP. Advent is JUST FINE.

Advent is not some sort of ungodly imbalol haxxor faction. Maybe repulse should become counterable. Other than that, Advent is just about as polished as it should, with ships and caps working nicely together, abilities that support each other and so on.

It is the other two races that are crapped, left with weak ships or little to zero synergy between their caps and units. Mny abilities may be good, but the nail in coffin is that they don't cooperate with each other. Examples:

• Marza has MB. Does a lot of damage to many ships. Good ability, but doesn't synergize with anything.
• Volatile Nanites. Makes ships take more damage and harm each other when they blow up, but there is nothing in Vasari arsenal that will actually start the chain reaction, other than just a lot of ships doing a lot of damage (PMS my ass, it sucks and is thrown on a ship that shouldn't take it until lvl 7 anyway, period).
• Advent have CB that is worse than MB, Malice that is worse than VN, but together they kill 24 heavy cruisers in 8 seconds. SYNERGY.
  
  
• TEC has hohos.
• Vasari have (a little messed up) Overseers.
• Advent has Guardians AND shield regeneration on Mothership - neither is truly superb, but together they own ass. Why? Cause they WORK TOGETHER. 
  60-something shield regeneration is not OP. Removing 30% of damage from one target and moving it to another is not OP (it's just more ships taking the same amount of damage). But when you trigger both, you have shield regeneration working on BOTH the guardian and the target, meaning that it is up to 120-something shields per second being put up against the attacker's damage. The bubble doubles the effectiveness of shield regeneration. SYNERGY.

Summing it all up:

It is OK that Advent ships/abilities are good and work well together. 
It is NOT OK that TEC/Vasari counterparts don't.

Not the other way around. I believe nerfing Advent to that stupid state of every ship for itself like tec/vasari has is a wrong way to go. Giving synergies to tec/vasari ships so they can also pull out strong combos, that's the way to go.

The Advent are vastly more powerful than the other races, but there is no way clear way to balance them. If illums are nerfed then the advent have no strong direct combat units until HCs, it already takes longer to get illums than any other lrf. Their greatest weakness is an early game rush, before they can get enough illums and guardians out.

The idea of a race with many synergies between abilities is great, but when you put it up against two other races with very few ways to counter it you get advent ownage.

Advent ships in general have more shields than they do hull, so you would expect PMs to lay on the hurt, but the vasari ships are so much weaker than advent ones (in general) that it makes little different.

The TEC have a great eco so they should be able to outproduce the Advent and overwhelm them with sheer numbers, but a well balanced advetn fleet can take on a fleet three times larger, with a little micro, without losing a single ship.

They arent overpowered because of one great thing about them, they are just able to nullify the other race's greatest advantages.

Then I,ll let the fact that currently in all games I saw 50% if not more of the players chose advent as their prime race. kinda like what was happening in in 1.04 were IC came out and said they would do somehting about it so their game doesn't turn into a 1 race game. Well they did it again. I normaly like to bitch EA but here for once I have to give them credit for command and counquer generals, they had managed to balance that game so well that the online multyplayer communaty was perfectly distributed between the 3 races. The faction game stats were always at 33.3333% each.

If people are vocal about a race being better in some way, then its a lot more likely that a person will pick that race because of this perceived advantage.  Whether this is true or not does not matter, it is the perception that makes the difference.  If you hear one thing is better than the other whether it is true or not, you are going to pick what you believe to be better.  Going by race choices is not a good criteria to see if something is balanced or not unless it is overwhelmingly significant difference(something like 90% advent, 9 percent vasari, 1 percent tec might tell you something is very wrong).

[_]-Greyfox

i agree to a point grey.

Illums are counterable. But repulse is not. Unless you are a master of micro and can use vasari ships to disable them, repulse is just way to much for most to handle. By the time that that you try to counter them, its usually too late. Recently ive played with people that are going straight for repulse, its beocming wide known that it is very hard to counter if at all.

I do exactly what Uber said when it comes to a good advent player.

 -MS

Illums and flack is counterable you just need to use the right things, TEC can uses scouts flack lrms and ho hos to take down the fleet.

As vasari it is a bit harder but it still just as possible but it requires the capturing of alot of the nutrals. There is different ways to do it as vasari im not gonna say them because it would give away some secrets

Theres currently only 1 unti that can stand up to illums and its flak. It just really sucks that if Im next to an advent player Ill get screwed unless I get a bunch of flak. But when guards come out with repulse its game over. I mean, yeah, illums are counterable, but by only 1 thing that isnt really supposed to counter it. Illums are OP simply by the overwhelming destruction they deal to their TEC and Vasari counterparts. Yeah theyre supposed to be the strongest of the LRFs, but they are SO much more powerful than the other two that using them to fight of illums is out of the question at this point. Sure there are occasions and scenarios everyone can name where theyve beat an illum spam with X unit, but most of the time you cant stop illums without flak, while the things that are supposed to counter illums cant due to other imbalances (namely flak and repulse) Which IMO is dumb.

Being too strong and everyone else being too weak is the same thing.  I certainly agree that TEC and Vasari need their fair share of buffs (as well as a couple nerfs), and an ideal patch would be a combination of buffs and nerfs for all factions.  However, as it is right now Advent overall is simply the strongest faction. 

You can argue by what margin they are overpowered.  I myself have wavered somewhat on the issue.  At one time I thought the guardian/progen combo was the only problem, and that the issue with illums had more to do with being the strongest LRF in a version of the game where LRF in general were hard to counter by any means except attrition.  However, after some of the tests of raw power performed by JJ and RA, I've come to agree that the stats on these units are simply too high.

In any case, they're not so powerful as to be game-breaking, but they're pretty close to the tipping point.

Shhh I heard he's in KoK his clan. That explains allot...

lol i was waiting to see how long it would take to get someone replying like that. As Emp said yes there is counters but they require much more fleet points than the fleet you are countering which is why it makes them OP. against a pro illum spammer you need to get SBs because it is too hard to counter thir fleet.

_|~Uber