First, let's start with shield mitigation.  When fully upgraded, this can be anywhere from the high 70's to low 90's depending on the unit.  Either way, it's a big source of damage reduction against weapons that don't have shield bypass property.  Next, you have 33% damage reduction from shield projection.  You may also have many units under the effect of vertigo, which goes up to 50% damage reduction.  If the Advent is far enough along to upgrade their armor, that may be a further 25% damage reduction.  You're looking at overall damage reduction in the high 90's, with capital ships potentially getting a net of over 99% damage reduction.  Furthermore, the Advent will use repulsion to rotate out injured units (particularly capital ships).  He will push your fleet away and move fresh units forward, while the injured units stay back or retreat.  This makes it a great challenge to kill anything, and capital ships in particular are pretty much immortal.  Even if you do pick one off, ressurrection will quickly bring it back.

It's not unbeatable, but you'll need a numerical advantage and lots of strike craft to pick off targets while their mitigation is low.  Generally speaking, if the TEC player wasn't good enough to beat the Advent early (or at very least leave him in his dust economy-wise) he's probably not good enough to beat this combo.

The problem Advent has is that they can't survive to reach this point against a good TEC player.  The powerful TEC early-game can absolutely devastate them, and even if they do survive it's often at such an overwhelming disadvantage that they're still going to lose by sheer attrition in the long-run.  On the flip-side, TEC really has no answer to Advent's late-game fleet except sheer numbers.  If you can't grossly outnumber them, the tables are essentially turned and TEC is going to have an incredibly difficult time just surviving.

Ah, thank you.  So, I suppose what exactly was making TEC so unstoppably spectacular early-game that they can grind the Advent eco to dust before it even takes root?

I was reading a similar thread suggesting this is from the Sova Embargo rush that has been occurring lately to which GoaFan proposed the idea of making home worlds immune to Embargo.

The Advent still certainly need a decent repair unit, as does the Revelation need use.  Come to think of it though, a defensive Clary on a friendly planet might help stop the aforementioned weakness of the Advent.

It really just sounds to me that the Vasari are decent until they finally unlock their entire bag of tricks at which point they start pounding everything in their path, the TEC are awesome early and good late, while the Advent suck early and are awesome later.

So really, what the TEC need would be a late-game buff to help them deal with late-game Advent power.  There's one researchable in particular that I've been eyeing for a while now, looking to see what I could do with it and I think I might know...

Industrial Juggenaut.  As it stands, it speeds up build times.  What if it also took down the upkeep cost of your fleet?  This would give TEC more of a fighting chance against Advent later while justifying the buffs to the Revelation/Domina.  Code as follows:

researchModifier
	modifierType "IncomePercLost"
	baseValue 0.000000
	perLevelValue -0.030000

researchModifier
	modifierType "ShipBuildRateAdjustment"
	baseValue 0.000000
	perLevelValue 0.166667

 That way, the TEC can more easily mass produce those units.  Sure, it's only nine percent, but that nine percent is going to make a huge difference once you but up against the higher fleet capacities (especially once you hit 2k and -75%), though I don't know how often MP games actually go that long lol.  From the sounds of it, not very.

Given the current balance (unbalance?) of relative faction strength, I don't think TEC should be buffed, even in an area they're relatively weak in, such as late-game. If they haven't beaten or sufficiently suppressed their opponent(s) by then, then the TEC player deserves to play at a significant disadvantage in exchange for the advantage they had at the beginning of the game.

Basically raw power.  Between 2-lab trade and the Akkan, they can build a shockingly powerful economy much faster than you.  On the military side they have a superb rushing capital ship in the Sova.  For frigates, the LRM, Garda, and Hoshiko are all top of their class, relatively easy to unlock, and dirt cheap.  The TEC is going to outnumber you with a balanced and potent fleet, have wicked combat capital ships, and be setting up for an overwhelming economic advantage while he's doing it.

Not really; culture doesn't have a military bonus until you've researched the appropriate techs, and in early-game these are just way too expensive.

Probably take a look at their capital ships.  Most TEC capital ships are horrible in the late-game and have little purpose.  Even missile barrage is crap against late-game Advent, and can actually lower your overall damage output because it will max out every enemy unit's mitigation but almost all of the damage it deals will be eaten by shield regeneration.

TEC needs abilities that let it disrupt Advent's elaborate combos.  The change to demo-bots was a great move on the part of the devs to help alleviate the problem by making this late-game ability more useable.  Focus on giving more late-game utility to TEC's capital ships that allow them to be meaningful.

I don't think that's the right direction to go.  TEC already has a superb economic game, and the problem is at a certain point it doesn't count for very much.

I don't so much mind the strong early / weak late dichotomy, but it's much too steep in the case of TEC and Advent.

So it would be perfectly fine to buff Clary and then make Guidance and Dominas synergize.  Great   

Any TEC player worth their salt would have multiple dunovs to EMP down the advent battle ball(if they were facing an advent player the whole game).  1 akkan, 3+ dunovs make a great fleet.  The more dunovs you have, the less effective the ENTIRE advent fleet is. Dunovs also work well in TEC vs vasari and TEC vs TEC.  It also allows you to stand up to the attrition rates of other endgame fleets better with its sheild restore(note, i'm not saying its going to work long term).  Properly micro'd (and it isn't hard) the dunov can really save your ships HP so your hoshi's have time to heal up. 

What about bomber spam, advents strongest assault arm?  Make sure your dunovs get level 3 magnetize asap, and watch how quickly the fighter clouds disperse.  If they are fielding enough bombers to one shot a cap, you will need 3 kols to deal with the "swarm".  Magnetize in conjunction with flak will give you air superiority in the long term.  combined with emp, and you could prevent their strike craft replenishment from occurring by chasing down carriers with a few dunovs + hoshi snare ability. 

Also, another trick is positional alignment, keep a dunov with a few hoshi's in reserve, so if the advent try to repulse one and focus fire it down you will EMP the guardians incoming with the "threatened dunov" and then you will have a support ship coming in.  The more dunovs you have to EMP, the more you can counter this threat and the less effective the entire advent fleet will become.  late game, 3000 creds 400 metal and 250 crystal is a GREAT buy for the level of effectiveness a dunov brings to the field.

Dunovs can be a good opener in a close quarters advent showdown, But I would always recommend an akkan so your endgame fleet can run away effectively.  The weakness of late game dunov spam is that they need to be high level to be effective.  On that note, once they ARE of sufficient level (6+) You will have a serious fleet support ship that you will start winning battles with.

A quote from starplayer

on the first page.  Read it, because it truly is the answer you seek. lol

Oh and the garda flak frigate isn't nearly as good as the advent defense vessel.

Also, darvin you said

If you EMP down the battle ball so the advent don't even have shields, a lvl 6 marza will ice their fleet faster then you can say HOLY SHIT W/BBQSAUCE!!!.  As with all abilities, WHEN you use them is the most important aspect of the ability.  Also, the dunovs can keep the marza alive quite well with shield restore. take away the shields and the advent will be all but destroyed.  Then you focus their progenitors/halcyons down and their guardians won't have the AM or shields to do much mitigation or repulsion.  Their sucky engame healer will have to be micro'd like crazy just to heal a few of their ships(which is why advent players don't waste their time building them, since advent fleet already takes a lot of micro).  The advent player, if they are smart will attempt a retreat and use repulsion when it comes up to cover their retreat.  If you have already closed range on the advent fleet you use your demo bots to full effect and bleed his fleet and possibly take out that progen you've been focusing down.  Then you follow closely because your fleet hasn't used much AM thanks to Dunov lvl 6 ability rotation and then the advent fleet is truly screwed because they will be close to zero antimatter. 

Truly, advent need an endgame buff against the awesome TEC fleet. Good Shield mitigation doesn't mean you "win".

The problem I have with the Dunov is that it's fragile and its abilities require it to get in close to the enemy weapons.  Still, it's your best approach against Advent.  Combining it with demo-bots to cut enemy firepower and a numerical advantage to clean things up quickly, they work very well.  As I've said, this isn't unbeatable, but you're still looking at an uphill battle with very few options.  A skilled Advent with repulsion is going to make your life a living hell.

The bottom line is that TEC wants to finish an Advent player early.  The longer it drags out, the greater the advantage will be for Advent.  I find that at a certain point it's not that TEC can't win, but any TEC player that hasn't already won probably never will.

This is true, but that's more the power of EMP than the Marza.  If I'm looking at several Dunovs and a level 6+ Marza I'll be bringing out the Radiance and certainly won't be relying on my shield projection combo alone for defense.

I was more speaking from the perspective of a naive player who expects missile barrage to defeat a fully-functional battleball.  If you can disable that battleball, it's another story, but that's easier said than done.

I believe I specifically said it's "not unbeatable"

Just ran through a game with this and tried to use the Guided Dominas as much as possible.  It seemed to help, but then, it was only against the AI.

Indeed, although you could run some metrics using dev.exe.  Set up the same scenario with and without your mod and see the difference in performance.  Although it doesn't account for micro, it can give a good indication of the magnitude of the change.

What do you mean exactly?  I was running the test in Dev though in case I ran into any errors, but I do know that's not what you mean...

Use dev.exe to spawn a specific number of units for both forces.  For the sake of arguement, let's say 60 LRM's and 16 hoshikos versus 40 illuminators and 16 dominas.  Do not interfere, simply watch the battle unfold and record the results (who wins, and how many units survived).  Run the exact same test with and without your mod, and then compare the results.  The basic premise is creating two otherwise identical battles and varying one factor (be it a mod, a unit type, an upgrade, or anything else) and then compare the outcomes.  This can give you a fairly good snapshot of the actual difference.

What do I do about the Revelation's synergy with Guidance?  Give the Javelis's a Dunov or something?

Also, if I spawn them in the same place, it will give the Illuminators a significant advantage due to their side beams, whereas if I spawn them across a gravity well, the LRM will have the upper hand as the combat AI won't close the distance properly to make use of the side beams.

Regardless, I think I'm going to do the following tests until I hear from you advice regarding the capital:

• 40 Illums vs 60 LRM Far
• 40 Illums vs 60 LRM Near
• 40 Illums vs 60 LRM Near + 16 Healers
• 40 Illums vs 60 LRM Far +16 Healers
• 40 Illums vs 60 LRM Near + 16 Rebalanced Healers
• 40... Far + rebalanced healers

Results:

• Basic Far: 34 Surviving LRM
• Basic Near: 12 Surviving Illums
• Default Healing Far: didn't bother to do this one because the Advent would get killed (and I'm lazy)
• Default Healing Near: 16 Hoshis, 22 LRM
• Buffed Dominas Far: 15 Hoshis, 40 LRM
• Buffed Dominas Near: 16, 16 LRM

As you can see by the near test comparison, It's obvious that Hoshis are superior to even the buffed Dominas, though now not as much.

The cooldown of Perserverence is still 60, but I dropped the AM cost to 30 and made it omnidirectional and non-channeling.

You don't necessarily need to make it an even fight.  Because we aren't accounting for micro and are leaving out many diverse unit types, this isn't an accurate test of a realistic TEC vs Advent battle.  Rather, we're trying to isolate the performance difference between changed and unchanged dominas. 

Compensating with a Dunov for TEC is fine.  We're really just looking for an arbitrary benchmark.

The numbers you've produced look good.  You may want to experiment with the cooldown of those abilities, since 60 is a bit much, but this really looks like the right direction.

When dealing with the capitals, I'll only set their abilities to autocast, not their actual weapons.  Ideally, I suppose you'd want Hoshis to allow the Javelis to come out slightly on top (5-10 remaining) but with Guidance, level 1 should make it even, level 2 should make the Illuminators win, and at level 3, sinners are purged (overstating of course, but you get the idea).  Right now, I've slightly decreased the AM for Guidance (90/100/110 to 90/95/100) and reduced the cooldown for Perseverance to 50.  Guidance also now decreases cooldown more (25%/25%/25% to 25%/30%/35%).  For the first tests listed here, I will run the test with varying levels of Guidance and the CD of Pers reset to 60 and then if necessary repeat the tests with the default CD of it set to 50.

• Guide lvl1: 32 LRM
• Guide lvl2: 29 LRM
• Guide lvl3: 27 LRM

Note: When I ran the Buffed healing Near test again, I ended up with all hoshis remaining and 28 Javelis's remaining.  I think I know why this is.  When I ran the tests earlier, I accidentally enabled the Advent early in all cases which I'm assuming gave the Dominas and Illuminators more time to orient themselves to get a few kills in before the fight actually started.  All numbers above should be compared against the 28 remaining number.

In short, because of the stupidity of the AI, reducing cooldowns has no significant impact on the act of healing.  I also noticed that Pers has a built in "charge timer" of four seconds.  In other words, once you use the ability, you must wait for the ship to turn, and then another four seconds before it finally buffs the damaged ship.  No wonder it sucks so much by default.  The above numbers were without this four second timer.

The following tests are with Pers's CD reduced to 50:

• lvl1: 32 LRM
• lvl2: 31 LRM
• lvl3: 22 LRM

Why there was such a dramatic jump on the last one, I have no idea.  I've seen such jumps previously and it seems to be how the side beams line up.  A lot of times the Hoshis simply are able prevent something from dying unless it has something like four beams on it.  When the computer randomly aligns them, you end up with higher kills.  It is this randomness that has made it difficult to gauge this properly.  I've thrown out about nine or ten results because they were completely off the map as far as the norm and just went with things that seemed to go with the general trend.  The 22 remaining was left simply because I have to leave now and I'm tired of running tests that vary widely based on RNG's.  In each case however, you can clearly tell that a difference is made.

Beyond all this, it does seem that this synergy helps out, but of course when used by an intelligent human, this is going to be more pronounced.  If I could just FF, I would have easily wiped out the LRM, but I had to restrain myself (I hate the TEC and love the Vasari and Advent lol).

End result shows a definite trend, but nothing that is statistically reliable and should be referenced with numbers.  Only the trend should be noted for future reference due to the wide variation of the results.

I would recommend using Destras against TEC HCs to remove that random element of the side beams. You will get more reliable numbers the more you remove variables from the equation. 

Good tests though, and interesting results. I wish I had the modding skills to test stuff like this.  

That's a great suggestion lol I'll do that.

EDIT: actually that doesn't really work either since the HC take down the Dominas and Hoshis before each other, thus it doesn't do much.

Ok, well as Darvin said, the battle doesn't need to be even.

Put Destras and Dominas on one side backed up by their Guiding Revelation. And then on the TEC side, give them a dunov and a ton of LRMs (no hoshi's). The idea is not to see who wins, but just how much the winner wins by.

EDIT: might want to go light on the Destras cos those things are gunna chew up the LRMs pretty fast... 

I went back to using LRF and I just realized something I hadn't changed..  The Dominas still had NeedsToFaceTarget set to true..

Without Revelation help, there were 30 LRM left.  In a following test with level 3 Guidance, there were 24 left.  Regardless, now that I've actually got them as omnidirectional casters, they seem to be doing better.

I heartily support the work to make the Domina an effective healer. If it can be made so, I would love to see it in DS MOD. Hint Hint to DS Team

I'm dropping the cooldown to 40 this time to see what happens.

Once again, it isn't having much of an impact due to the stupid autocast.  It really needs human testers...

We will see.

And good news, I got my ICO Account reset, so now I'll be able to actually play online, so if someone is up for a test with actually decentish micro.  I'm not going to say I have the best micro, but still.  I know I'm better than autocast...  Honestly, the testing of this would be the first online game I've ever done, so you can expect my anti-AI micro to be sub-sub-sub par for ICO..

Regardless, now that they have an AM requirement of 30, a CD of 40, are not channeling, are omnidirectional, and have a unique form of stacking, they are certainly a viable unit.  Sure, they are outweighed by Hoshis due to their CD of 3 freaking seconds, making them able to respond at a moment's notice, but they are able to constantly keep other ships healing at at least 25 hull/second because their AM regenerated during that time is higher and the healing buff duration is 40 seconds.  This means that they will be using Suppression primarily with healing interspersed.  Even so, I think I'm going to adjust Suppr some.  This means that they will finally be able to function as Subjugators.  Yes, they heal, but their main function will lockdown which they will spend the majority of their time doing.

At this rate, the Domina might be a useful unit yet 

I thought of something that would make the Domina in it's current form a cap saver.  Right now, it's called DisableImmune for a reason, but what if you could call it DeathImmune?  What if while under the influence of Pers, a ship can't die?  You'd have to make some sort of failsafe, but if you could literally stop a ship from dying, screw healing, just keeping something alive for an additional 20 seconds or what have you would be immensely helpful.

Think of the pain a Radiance could inflict like that?  EAA fed by Animosity and feeding DAM without the ability to die with Vengeance on it.  That's what you call a synergy.

Still just another idea...

EDIT: after actually remotely considering the idea of it, how about it makes a frigate invulnerable but only cuts damage to caps by a third?  To actually have something make a capital temporarily invincible, I'd have that as the final ability on a capital (or just one on a titan).  Now let's see.. what final on an Advent cap is weak...  CB? No..  AT? No..  R? Not really.. PH? No.. D? No..   New capital in Rebellion?  Maybe