Sova OP ?

I never use a Sova without a lot of support, the squads just get trashed otherwise. It needs a couple of extra squads to operate on its own.

The ability at issue is not the platforms, but rather Embargo which steals credit income from a planet.  Early on in the game even having the Level 1 ability cast on you is painful (you lose credits, your opponent gains them).  It becomes very damaging with the Level 2 Embargo ability (level 3 cap).  Also, as the casting level increases, the duration of the effect also increases.  Level 3 Embargo steals 100% of the income and lasts for the duration of the cooldown time, which means that it can be cast repeatedly to deny 100% of the income from the affected planet for as long as the Sova is in the gravity well.

As DirtySanchezz said, the problem is Embargo.

Yes. Problem is embargo.

If you buy 2 upgrades and go for lvl 2 embargo and stronger strike craft ability. That and skill of keeping your capitals alive in enemy gravity well will win you game. This strategy only works when your hw is less than 5 PJ away from enemies...

I think solution would be either immobile capitals while upgrading abilities or abilities cost more money. 

right, i see. But surely the amount of money you lose from taxes, your enemy loses more from the near certain death of his cap? the cap can't outrun disciples no matter how hard it tries.

It's not near certain in the hands of a good player. And with homeworlds producing around 20 credits per second, it doesn't take a long time for the Sova to do serious economic damage with embargo.

Honestly I think the only change embargo needs is that it won't affect the credit income of your home world. After all the reason for that is that if you can't get your taxes to your treasury you obviously can't use them to buy things with. But as your home world probably has your treasury then it wouldn't matter whether its under embargo or not. The trade stopping and build time restrictions should still apply.

As GoaFan mentions, it's far from certain death.  People don't use the Sova on its own, they use it in conjunction with the rest of their fleet.  One of the huge advantages a carrier has over a battleship is that it can spend the entire battle running away.  If you want to attack the carrier, your units will be weaving around and spending a lot of time just moving instead of attacking, all while getting savaged by the enemy's fleet.  The carriers can still use most of their firepower (which is in strike-craft form) and their special abilities, while a battleship must constantly face the enemy fleet in order to use its firepower and abilities.  This means that carriers are effectively far tougher in practice, while battleships are incredibly risky.

Embargo should be able to reduce income on a planet, not take it away from the player and give it to another. People have already starting to upgrade there capital ship to Level 3, upgrade embargo to level 2 and take 70% of income away from another planet. This is the problem of carrier capital ships, there too powerful and only thing multiplayer people spam nowadays is carrier capital ships. well majority of people. 

That is what i meant regarding skill to keep your cap alive. Run from enemy fleet and retreat + repair when HP gets low. If HWs are close enough embargo will handicap enemy to a point when you get all your resources that you spend on cap upgrades back and then some more. Also while he focuses to try to kill your cap which has to be priority unless he is feed from ally you whittle down fleet he build. 

Soon there comes a point when whatever he builds gets destroyed by your own fleet and you control his gravity well. 

Even stronger option is to have 2 sovas bot manually using embargo to keep him on 30% income permanently. 

Did someone say SOVE RUSH? KEKEKEKEKEKEKE

Sova rush is viable if you buy the levels and stall enemy Homeworld economy.

You have small window to do so, but if you bring some Allah akbar scours with bombs with all the money you jew, you can kill all structures, too and stall his game to halt. Then win.

Can be done if enemy is not scouting, and not seeing it coming or reacting.

Siddy!  You antisemitic son-of-a-bitch, it's good to see ya!

What you mean, antisemitic? I love jews!

I've been seeing more and more early game Level 2 Embargo Sova rushes and I'm ready to agree that it's overpowered.  These sorts of things seem to be fads, and this one has now caught on and become standard operating procedure.  The Sova rush is really nothing new, but it seems to have become increasingly popular over the past couple weeks. It's almost a death sentence if you start out within 2 or 3 jumps of your opponent and it's very difficult to counter in the first 4 minutes of the game.  The amount of damage it does is totally devastating so early in the game.  If it happened 30 minutes in after you have some planets and fleet it wouldn't be so horrible, but it's just a killer when it happens in the first 4 minutes.  The best way to counter it seems to be to hit your opponent with your own Level 2 Embargo rush if you're TEC or to spam out lots of LRMs.

The problem is that if you're not Level 2 Embargoing your opponent yourself, you won't have the money to spam out as many LRMs as your opponent and will eventually go down.  Also, if your start is inferior relative to his (he has an extra or safe asteroid or whatever) you're probably just done for.  If you're Vasari you could put up an expensive starbase at your home if you can afford it (while being Level 2 Embargoed) but the Sova would just kite around the well with impunity and the money raised by the Level 2 Embargo would just be used to fund Orgrovs or Bombers to kill the starbase.

So what should be done to nerf it?  What if the Embargo ability were nerfed to 20-40-60% income theft (and not 30-70-100), perhaps with the duration being reduced to 25-50-75% of cooldown?

It's reached the point where I think TEC is now the most powerful race.  They have a devastating early-game Embargo, the best economic capability, cheap spammable disposable ships, the best repair bays, and by far the best starbase counters.  Until the Sova gets nerfed I'm probably done with Vasari unless the opposing team has only one TEC (and then hope I don't end up starting within a few jumps of it).  I'm not sure I can justify playing Vasari at all at this point.  Sins is about to become a TEC and Sovas only game.

The only problem with this is that it makes this ability even worse late game. As you said this ability is only overpowered early game against your homeworld. The ideal solution is thus to either reduce or eliminate the income stealing just against homeworlds. As IC/Stardock has been surprisingly open to completely reworking abilities when necessarily, hopefully they will once again change the game engine to solve this problem.

Eqq compleetly rapes other caps early games, wtf are you smoking?

Seriously, if enemy starter cap is sova and you have scouted that, you should take measures to protect yourself against that. Sova is flimsy enough to be taken down by few assilants, eggs gravity torp + nanites in very short time. 

If you do let enemy sova on your HW while you are unprepared, you have no one else to blame but yourself.

Deal with it.

I agree that embargo if you (buy 2 lvls and go for LVL 2) is OP but only in first 5 minutes of the game. Later on sova becomes really flimsy.

I never tried egg nanities gravity bomb + assailants to defend against it but I do know 2 vasari carriers with fighter bomber combination and some assailants deal with it quite decently. At best he will use embargo 2 times before he will have to retreat or loose his cap. 2 embargos it is not enough to get ROI back.

@ Whip 

Last game we played and I did sova rush you you made IMO few of big mistakes.

You had only bombers on your carrier, you never fought for neutrals which were 3 pj away from your hw, Yes i took roid from you but you had string of them 2 PJ away which you let hiro to colonize. Also you build 2 mil labs and researched assailants and sentinels with phase missile upgrade I think. You were building sentinels which are worst option for killing cap ship. But the worst mistake you made was that you sold your factories before I even attacked with any fleet other than single sova. 

If you build 15 assailants and had fighters on your carrier with scramble bomber I would have to retreat after 2-3 embargoes. With your fleet composition you let me run around your HW grav well and then safely retreat (BTW you never chased my cap when It jumped out to go for repairs) repair and do same thing again. When I saw your composition and fact that you couldn't build reinforcements You gave me free reign on your HW gravity well and even more chances to embargo you.  

The neutrals weren't really close by and you had a safe asteroid and mine was between our homes, and my factories were on the opposite end of the gravity well from the roid (it takes a while for your cap or colony frig to get out to the roid).

Sentinels are anti-LRM, so it makes sense to build them against a TEC, especially one that has fighters on his carrier.  I made Assailants too.

Also, it's hard to pump out sufficient Assailants when getting embargoed.  2-3 early Level 2 Embargos in close quarters is enough to give a TEC a very significant advantage over a Vasari (who, remember, has expensive ships).  That also makes it difficult to spend the money/build time on scouts for fighting for neutrals.  An expensive starbase won't work because the TEC can just kite the Sova around the well and then us the Embargo proceeds to fund bomber spam or orgrovs.

I pretty much knew the outcome as soon as you did your first Level 2 Embargo in light of how close we were positioned.  In fact, before the game started, the only reason I went Vasari and not TEC myself is that you were the only TEC and I decided to gamble that we wouldn't start next to one another.  I knew the risks and lost that gamble.

I don't think any of this means that you're the second coming of JJ or that I'm the second coming of ELVIS WORSHIPPERS or Lepar, just that Embargo is very overpowered early in the game, especially in the first 3 minutes of it if you're 2 jumps away from your opponent's home.  In the game right before that one, I did Level 2 and Level 3 embargos on Tyr (who was Vasari and was focusing on Auqia but tried to defend with a starbase) with similarly devastating results to him although that was a little later in the game.  Unlike an actual noob (or even an overconfident pro), I can recognize when things are heading south and prepare to migrate with minimal losses, which I did.  If I made one mistake, it might be not getting a civic lab going earlier so that I could research the improved scuttle ability, although under the circumstances that probably wasn't possible.

Hopefully the overpowered Embargo ability will get addressed in the next patch.  I know that the Sova rush has been around for a long time, but I don't remember its becoming a big issue until the past several weeks.

the sova rush is only a big deal because more then the really good players use it now because its a pretty easy strat to use.  on a side note more and more people know how to effectively stop it now.  its all about knowing that its coming even if you can only tell from 1 pj away.  quite recently jbaum "stopped" my sova rush fairly well and my sova escaped with >100 hp.  It is very important to make sure fighters on the sova do not have free reign in picking off your units (free lrm are even worse then the planet income becuase they are wasted money +xp towards level 3 embargo)

With regards to Vasari, the nerfing of bomber damage against capital ships might be one factor leading to the increased prevalence of the Sova rush.  Were there any other changes in recent patches that buffed the Sova or would otherwise make it more practicable to do the rush?

(Good to see that you got your power back, I assume.)

The problem with sova is generaly problem with Tec. Since all nerfs vasari got, tec become so oped almost like advent when lums  had extra damage. They have best units in any class, if u consider cost and fleet supply cost.

Best lrm, best support cruser by far , best hc , second best flac , best economy ,  best  cap (sova and its  not only embargo, but misille platforms too , best colo cap (akan) , best anti-structure weepon.

Tec has also best SB AOE ability, red button. Other starbases needs antimater to use their cool stuff, but tec, no, so there is no counter, and u cant even see if sb has red button or not.

Tec has also best counter for bomber spamm , few kols will kill every bomber in range no matter haw much there is.

I understand Devs want to balance advent by nerfing other races. If so, its time for tec. Switch hosikos the wey they were 2 patches before, so 40 of them could not  mute whole fleet , reduce a bit sova embargo and misille platform strength , especialy lv 2 and 3 , increse cooldown ,  reduce ogrovos firepower, or increase price and fleet  supply cost or reduce range   make them slower,   so they wont be a  100% death sentence to every starbase.

Also red button needs to be visible on starbase and it would be nice, if it require antimatter as other abilities do.

Tec has 1 more advantage over other race, one u cannot change. Tec are sins for dummies, u dont have to micro, u just spamm, whith is extrimly important in late game when lag makes micro impossible. Make tec swet a bit, right now they dont have to, they just spamm spamm spamm.

You think so? I think I'd prefer to have 5 Enforcers than 6 Kodiaks, due to Reintegration.

I wouldn't say nerf Hoshikos.  Well maybe tone demobots a bit.  But the buffs to other support have not hit the mark.  I still don't see use of other healing cruisers to be even substantially as simple as using hoshikos, and that is a huge problem. The Vasari variant is too  easily picked off, while the Advent variant simply doesn't work as well.

The Vasari Overseer will keep capital ships alive in some crazy firefights, and that alone is well worth the effort of using them.  Dominas... well, they're the only way to even get hull repair in neutral or enemy gravity wells, and that's pretty much the only reason to use them.

Anything that has to face the target to use ability is shit.

Sentinels can be forgiven in this because instant heal + armor buff. But sentinels fail as a fleet support, they are good to keep important toys alive. Lucky for vasari, they have AoE heal on carriers so this is non issue.

If hoshikos had to face target to heal, man would they suck. This is one main reasons why dominas suck, and hoshikos dont.

Oh so much tec lovers. But im not talking about healing,  Only demobots had to be used while facing enymy and thats haw it should be again.