Some help for new TEC player.

The TEC are an economic giant.

Getting trade ports early can be very helpful.

Anyway, a good starting capship is the Akkan or the Sova, and a good secondary is the Dunov or the Marza.

Their longrange ships are better than the Advent, in my opinion. The Javelis Missile Frigate is a great mainstay of your fleet. Get a lot of those. If you wish to keep your Javelis alive, invest in Hoshiko Robotics Cruisers and Percheron Light Carriers. Having a good balance of these is a great fleet.

I do not know what you mean by long range carriers... The Percheron works great...

Sorry-  I meant carriers - you get so many strike craft with Advent.

Again, the percheron works great...

Percherons are cheaper to build than Aeria Drone Hosts and require fewer supply points.  Combine that with large amounts of credits and resources and you should be able to field a lot of strikecraft if that's your style.

 

The akkan's a good way to quickly expand your empire to get a good trade route going.

While they have no particular advantage in the carrier department, TEC is actually rock solid for long range frigates.  The Javelis LRM actually gives the best damage output by cost of any unit in the game.

The TEC Akkan is the king of colony capital ships, and you can get a roaring economy going with this thing.  The 2-lab trade port availability works quite well on fastest speed and you can often be running a scary economic powerhouse before the first shots are fired.



Javelis LRM, Hoshiko Robotics Cruisers, Garda Flak Frigates, Percheron Carriers, and Kodiaks.

5 labs for Kodiaks is a bit of a jump early on, so use Javelis to begin with.  Definitely get the hoshiko online asap.  Playing as TEC without using hoshikos is downright masochistic; it's your best unit, if not the best unit in the game.  From there, pick based on your needs.  Often times just a massive chunk of LRF is the best way to go.

As mentioned, Sova, Akkan, and Marza are your top picks for capital ships.  Later on your might consider Dunov or Kol, but they're more niche selections.


TEC's biggest weakness is a lack of scaling abilities and late-game combos.  They're really at their strongest the moment they get the hoshiko out on the field, and the rest of the game is basically the other two factions catching up and ultimately surpassing TEC.  TEC is seriously out of its element if the game goes super-late, so try to make your move early, before the enemy unlocks the high-end stuff in their tech tree.

what's so great about hoshikos? do they heal better than other repair cruisers?

They are cheap, you can get them out early, use low fleet supply, and per antimatter restore more HP than any other frigate ability. The only bad thing is that they can't stack their healing bonuses with each other like the Vasari overseer can, but other wise they are easily the best repair cruiser.

The hardest thing about going from advent to TEC is that the TEC rely a lot more on sheer DPS and numbers. The Advent requires a lot of ships using their abilities to get going, but once they do you can defeat larger sized fleets without taking casualties. The TEC can't do this, so they need to use their superior economy to get the advantage in numbers and then keep it by rebuilding their fleet while the battle is taking place (learn to use the empire tree to issue build orders while macroing a battle if you haven't already).

Hoshikos can also be used to disable weapons on enemy ships (need tier 5 upgrade). And if enemy goes HC just get 40 hoshikos with some other fleet and see mayhem they do. They are much cheaper and they render HC ineffective since most of the time they won't fire.

You do need to kill enemy fleet quickly and have AM regeneration upgrade with some culture boost or turn repair ability off. Otherwise they will run out of AM and they will start dropping like flies.

In addition to the points mentioned, the main advantage of Hoshikos is the 360 degree use of repair.  Vasari Overseers have to face their target because their repair is front facing, and Advent Subjugators are front facing and Channeled so the effect can be interrupted if they move or are blown up.  Hoshikos are very straightforward to use -- they just work much better than the other race's repair ships.

My most overwhelming success so far with the TEC has been building three civics, then researching Arctic Exploitation. I made a Marza and a Protev before simply sauntering over to the nearest Arctic planet and taking it, then repeating the process with any convenient targets- i.e. asteroids. This helped me avoid the crystal shortage I usually have around this stage.

 

I researched the 'more income' techs and took over the best planets I could find- I crushed a pirate base in minutes after building a mid-sized fleet- with a little help from the Novalith Cannon I had recently built.

 

I then took over the contested territories and built up my forces before moving in and destroying most of the rest.

 

The final phase was already a given, but I built up my fleet to maximum caps and fleet for the lulz, before destroying a fully-armored Orkulus in a minute and crushing everything.

 

Well, it worked for me, certainly. Might work for you too.

 

My fleet was mostly Kodiaks and Hoshikos, with two Marzas, one Akkan and one Kol before the build-up.

A few Percherons as well.

You only need two civic labs to do this.

On larger maps, it goes without saying that you should research both volcanic exploitation and arctic exploitation and capture these planets as quickly as possible.

Generally you don't go with the Marza unless you intend to attack someone else's colonies early.  Go with the Akkan for superior colonization speed and its lovely economic bonuses.



This will work against the AI, since it's neither very aggressive nor very strong at building its economy.  So you can survive with a very modest fleet and build an unstoppable economy.

Generally if you do this, the best fleet to build is massed bomber with a bit of flak, hoshiko, and LRM support.  Throw in a few capital ships (Marza for bombard, Kol for anti-strike craft, and Akkan for armistice) as desired.  You can easily knock out any AI with variants of this strategy, and the only real difficulty is surviving its rush.


Fair warning; do this against a human player and prepare to die.  He will launch an offensive and kill you before your gets rolling, or at very least destroy your trade ports and knock it down.  In reality, most people will build a combat fleet and never actually reach novaliths because it makes more sense to pour extra money into units to win a conventional battle rather than going for such an expensive weapon.