Reduce the cost of Guardians

Guardians are not that difficult to acquire. If anything needs help its the Domina.

Yes

Domina needs help as well, to make advent more viable late game.  Reducing the cost of guardians would allow advent better keep pace fleeting and help their tier zero spam have more resilience when the mid game comes around.  This would also help them be able to take out a vasari starbase without unacceptable losses earlier and without bombers.

advent need more then a small change to one ship to be effective.  The advent have plenty of things that cost far more then their effectiveness and aren't very effective because they cost a lot. 

Yes, that is true, but i'm not talking about difficulty to acquire.  Heavy cruisers are "difficult to acquire" but that doesn't stop KoK from building up 5 labs on his homeworld every game and building them.

What i'm talking about is military value to cost, and in that guardians are very expensive units.  They are difficult to value on paper, since they have piss poor attack and are almost completely defensive in nature.  Also, they already have so many balancing negatives: they are slow, they suck up their antimatter quickly, they are built with auto attack on when they shouldn't have it on at all, their best ability is tech 5, their primary ability is only mediocre and therefore makes them irrelevant for much use in multiplayer.  They are countered by the vasari by building kanraks, and the TEC with an akkan, both of which are very easy to come by for both races.

Guardians are more expensive then heavy cruisers and yet they are the first fleet support unit advent can acquire.  Their starting ability sucks up antimatter and doesn't even last the full duration.  They require a lot of micromanagement and you have to frequently switch between stacking your fleet and unstacking it constantly to be even able to use guardians effectively and fight with your fleet.

Except that a fix to the Domina would mean that Advent players would actually build it.  25 h/s is great, except for the other problems associated with Perseverance.  If it gets fixed, Advent fleets will be able to heal at massive rates that will make the TEC cry unless they are right beside a repair facility.  If they could heal to hull, that lightens the load on SR and the Guardian significantly.

I'm not saying that what you're saying is a terrible idea, I just see it as not that important and I think they should fix the Domina before going after the Guardian as proper use of it can be immensely helpful.  Not only that, but once the Domina gets fixed, the Guardian issue you are trying to fix here might go away.

The Advent were the most powerful military faction in the game for quite a while, largely because of the support provided by Guardians. The only reason that changed was because of the Illum nerf and the increase of the number of Vasari players, and thus phase missiles. Many things are holding the Advent back, but the guardians are not one of them.

If the battleball was a mobile tactic what weakness would the thing have? True the autocasting could use a bit of work (as with almost everything), but at least with small numbers of guardians shield projection works quite well. If you chose to use larger numbers well obviously its going to require more micro.

except that the domina is a healer ONLY at tech level 6 and the advent are already the most racially inefficient with logistics slots, so you won't be seeing any early game healing, and if you do it will be at such a cost as to be completely NOT viable.

Sure for endgame it would be nice, but you have to get there first.

A game might have been unbalanced in the past, but who cares? it got fixed and now it showed how broken the rest of the race was.

There needs to be more fixes not a "sit idly by" approach to this.  Repulse has effective counters now, and my its easy to come by them for all the races.  You need to be tech 5 to even get it!!!!  so therefore it is balanced due to the time it takes.

Illuminators were overpowered, guardians were the tools the let these overpowered illuminators wreak havoc on fleets unopposed.

People didn't magically start playing vasari.  Vasari were tweaked and you would find players REFUSING to play if they couldn't be vasari.   Why? because in the end the vasari stay strong throughout the game.  The only time they might be at a disadvantage is at the start(when there aren't many neutrals on the maps), but they can easily use their strong starbase to keep them from being wiped out.  The point is, they can last until they get fed all by themselves quite easily, unlike the other races.  this comes in very handy when you are all alone in the suicide spot.

easy, speed and antimatter.  Endgame is all about speed, so vasari already have the advantage over the battle ball.  TEC can emp it down and my my it won't work anymore.  You can retreat to kill the antimatter reserves of the fleet like you do with lvl 6 marzas...lemmie think.

Oh, you can spam LRF!  and have the counter and my word you will kill those guardians fast because they aren't that good at defending themselves against LRF.  You can spam bombers, you can build subverters. You can mine the fleet with your vasari minelayers.  The battle ball takes a LOT of resources and yes, it is strong.  It SHOULD be strong.  Because if it isn't, then the advent will always suck ass.

The battle ball is slow, the vasari in the endgame still have a great advantage in speed and raw power.  The TEC have EMP which will kick the entire advent fleets ass.

IDK if Vas are weak in the early game... sure the Skirantra is nerfed but the Kanraks still come out the door at T1.

No debate here however that TEC completely owns everybody early on tho.

Vasari are weak early game in attack, but in defense the are the strongest.  If there are neutrals around them they will quickly become stronger then any of the races quite easily and you will find them very strong in attack.

I'm all for increasing the antimatter cost of their ability to colonize neutrals, as it would make them unable to effectively grab all the neutrals up quickly and make them have to spend a lot on their cost inefficient scouts.

I would say a full antimatter bar for the unupgraded scouts would be a viable way to keep vasari balanced.  In this they would have to play defensive all the time, but then over time they would become superior to the other races in the game.  Vasari are a great turtling race, and eventually they would come out ahead by being able to attack where you are weak and defend their home with stabilizer nodes.

Agreed and certified.

The guardian is already very cost-effective; its primary issues are that:

A. It requires either a Progenitor or Repulsion research to be effective.

B. It has a lengthy list of prerequisites that make it expensive to access.

C. It's not really that effective for small fleets, and is better suited to larger fleets with at least 60 frigates.

All of these conspire to make fast guardians a foolish approach, even with a cost reduction.  If you want to improve Advent's early-game prospects, this is not the unit to be looking at.  I've long argued that the 1.18 scout damage nerf needs to be reverted and the Seeker should take a durability nerf in its place.  The Arcova and Navigator were about right in 1.18, and the Seeker was only overpowered for its excessive durability, something that never has been addressed.

Depends on your range.  At super-close range, this works lovely.  At mid-ranges that are typical in 1v1's you're in for pain.  TEC will have time to diversify and make T0 spam a horrible approach.

I'd love to see some reasoning behind this, especially after you just said that it has:

I agree that it is extremely expensive to field the guardian effectively, and effectiveness is what i'm talking about throughout this post.  It looks like you agree with me on this point, but you wouldn't want to change the guardian's balance at all, without any sound reasoning behind WHY.  I am stating a persuasive reason to do just that, because the guardian is always something that i think about how nice it would be to have, but in the end its just not worth it until the End End game.   its like a KOL for the TEC, its quite nice to have but the expense for the worth isn't justified until you have a large economy.

Why would the developers have the advent go so long without any effective fleet support unit when the other races can field effective support ships cheaply and relatively quickly? this alone puts the entire race at a disadvantage and limits advent heavily in the early AND middle game.  You could say that the advent capitals are the fleet support, which is why you see the halcyon and the progenitor as the keystones to the advent early game and endgame BECAUSE they provide fleet support.  Until the endgame, advent have no other really effective fleet support.   This is why people snipe advent caps early and fast, because you take out the advent capital, you take out the threat of the fleet(also, advent capitals are the easiest to snipe with their low armor and low hitpoints).  Vasari AND tec both have the advantage here, TEC have strong caps that are even more critical to their racial success, and with the vasari, killing the stacks of kanraks and bombers is the priority, since anything that uses phase missiles will be spammed until their fingers bleed.

It is the most expensive cornerstone fleet unit to get bar none. 

It requires so much for repulse, which USED to be worth it.  Repulse has lost effectiveness.  Kanraks had their range increased so that vasari didn't even need a counter to repulse.  TEC can get a counter to repulse with the Akkan now.

I'm using reason, which doesn't allow for sheep mentalities/democracy to gain justification for your position.  I will greet your reasoning with proper respect when I see something that is actually responding to the posts.

The Vasari support cruisers are even higher tier than the Guardian, only the Hoshiko is easier to deploy. The whole point of Darvin's post is that the Guardian is not supposed to be an early game unit, which is pretty much what everyone else has said. If you want to help the Advent early game, it will be far more effective to buff their capitalships or scouts so they can better deal with LRF spams.

So your response is to attack a well respected member of the community simply for agreeing with something you already admitted to yourself? 

It's cost-effective once unlocked.  You have to invest heavily in tech and other units before it becomes effective, but once you've sunk those costs the unit is inexpensive.  Changing the base cost of the guardian would have no effect on these other factors.

You only need about 4 guardians for a fleet of under 100 frigates.  That's not a huge cost.  The Progenitor you need to keep them topped up is going to be more expensive.

Just throwing this out there but if the Iconus is supposed to be more of a late-game unit, what would happen if the Iconus and Domina were flipped in the tech tree.  This way by the time you need to research it, you've probably researched the necessary shield techs anyway.

If you could shut down enemy fleets early on with the cheaper Dominas and get the healing ability earlier (4 or 5 labs?), would that make it more viable without fixing?

120 crystal does seem a bit steep for T3 but Advent is thirsty for crystal in general.  They should probably have gotten the Crystal tech at T1 but that's a different thread.

Who is he to certify anything? We both have said that guardians are difficult to effectively acquire.  I'm curbing both of you here for the reason that popularity contests are irrelevant to this thread, nothing personal.  Its often difficult to keep the focus in these threads and having the generic bandwagon high fives that go on around these forums only serve to dilute any quality contributions.

Also, how do i know this isn't darvin using another user name?  He is a self admitted forum guru and therefore making him self admittedly motivated to possibly use underhanded forum tactics.  Perhaps you are darvin3 goafan(you will undoubtedly laugh at this, but the reasoning is still solid, if you aren't darvin, realize that he could easily make another account and support himself).  Its not hard to write in different styles for different people as well, anyone with intelligence can do so.  This is another reason why I shun the forum popularity contests, because anyone could be responding to themselves to seemingly justify their position.  I notice that you are on at relatively the same time, at 12:00+ am.  This supports my theory that you are either darvin3, or a good friend who'll support your forum buddy at times past midnight.

lol only 4 guardians... I would relish facing your endgame fleet if it only had 4 guardians, you must be joking! Fight any battle for a long time as advent and see where the advent fleets staying power is with the guardians. they eat up their antimatter like crazy and you have to micro them individually to get the desired effects, and you will be having to rotate them manually so that when they gobble up their antimatter they will have a replacement ship in the same position to maintain that aspect of fleet defense/offense.  Guardians are often primary targets for enemy focus fire and therefore their cost is comparable to a heavy cruiser which is quite an expensive attrition unit.  Lowering their cost would go far in lessening advent attrition costs in the late game which are quite high. Also, recognizing you are balancing for endgame, as you assume you will have a decent economy.  Advent are quite good if you have the loads of cash to get to a strong fleet.  Case and point, look at how strong Auqia is when hes in 5v5 in the eco spot and doesn't feed his allies so he can fleet up a massive advent endgame fleet.  He even gets the archeology research..lol.  But then, what if you don't have a big economy?  advent as a race should have some DIVERSITY of play that is still EFFECTIVE.  Tec have cheap units, vasari have cheap effective tricks.  advent have little to none of these and are in essence a straight spam race. 

Front lines military advent players that don't get feed won't be that viable, in fact long term their fleets are weaker when their evenly matched enemy gets the feed they need to spam.  At that point the advent spam is actually weakest by a large margin, since any substantial fleet loss for the advent fleet in any of its many parts can spell doom for the whole fleet. So, in essence, replacing the advent fleet needs to be easier since maintaining its fighting effectiveness requires a very high cost in the end game, largely due to the cost of guardians.  This is why of all the possible changes I thought would help the guardian, I picked to fix its cost.

I only present a reduction in cost to the guardian as one possible outcome.  Creativity and developer design decisions can lead you to another fix, the important thing to remember is that the possible fix is not fully relevant to this conversation.  What is relevant? Guardians do need a decent tweak to justify their cost.

Well the advent would become the rush race of choice with durable cheap tier 0 units and the staying power for their fleet in an enemy grav well.  They could take on starbases earlier and more effectively, but you won't ever see this because I believe it would be a bit overpowered in multiplayer.  I know if this change was implimented people would magically start playing advent in droves!!! lol.

Use the ship, have say only 10 of these dominas in a fully fledged advent fleet.  fight against a large enemy fleet.  try to heal and manage all the units correctly and see how you do.  Then you will clearly recognize how broken it is.

Well, think of it this way. You could be completely right that guardians are bad for the cost. But if you are the only one who holds that belief, what good does that do you? Like it or not, your whole point of this post is to persuade us. And in that case opinions and popularity contests do matter, because your ultimate goal is to persuade the devs to do something about this issue. And your chances of doing that are a heck of a lot better if you can get community agreement on it.

Second, since you are clearly a person of reason, surely you understand the value of scientific skepticism. At this point we have mostly been debating with generalizations, and even then you have not responded to all your criticisms. That you are losing the "popularity contests" is probably because you have not provided sufficient evidence to allow us to overcome our skepticism, not because there is a forum conspiracy to disprove you. You are the one attempting to change the status quo, thus you bear the responsibility for providing evidence. With scramble bombers people made charts showing just how few resources it took to get a swarm of say 39 bombers out. The guys who proved there was a engine damage bug with the illuminator ran probably dozens of tests comparing the expected results with the actual.

For a fleet of under 100 frigates, you only really need 4 guardians (though I will admit, as you're approaching 100 that's stretching it).  Late-game you certainly need more, and once you have repulsion online you'll need more for that purpose as well, but earlier on there's more focus on firepower.  For smaller fleets, four is all you need.  That gives you two guardians active at any time, plus two available to cycle out.  You've already sacrificed 50 command worth of units for the Progenitor, and cutting your firepower much more is a serious risk.

The TEC Hoshiko is a very effective defensive mechanism against smaller fleets, and will easily outperform an immature battleball in a long-term shootout.  If this comes down to a battle of antimatter and reinforcements, my money is on the TEC player at this early stage.  However, in a quick "shock" battle with lots of focus fire, that 33% damage reduction is a huge boost.  You want the battle to be over quickly, and that means a very small investment in defensive power with a focus on blasting enemy frigates.  If the battle drags on, that 20 hit points per second from the hoshiko is going to add up big time and there's no realistic number of guardians that will compete with only a single Progenitor to fuel them.  This is why I tend to err low on the number of guardians early on, and prefer to use them in smaller numbers to supplement my frigates. 

I find that upping the number of guardians starts getting practical above 60 frigates, but as low as 4 remains totally viable up to 100 frigates (or repulsion, whichever comes first) for the simple reason that it gets the job done for very little expenditure of command cost, and the primary expense is the capital ship required to complete the combo.

Oh I'll do an analysis of all of your and darvins postings just for the hell of it at a later date, and see for myself if I can root out the same person.  Its quite easy to make another account, people do such things all the time.  I know with great experience the lengths people will go to attack you.  Its not a conspiracy, as there is no organization truly.  Its just a bunch of forum accounts that are buddy buddy with each other over years of patting each other on the back.  So naturally someone comes along and says something different, and you all attack because you have your own relationship based agendas.  Its great for survival in the wild, especially when hunting mastodons, but this online team has no real basis and is easily shattered by reason.  So in essence, people being people. 

Also, you seem like a person who would enjoy a good forum conspiracy to spice things up.  Conspiracies occur whenever there is competition since bending the rules usually nets to ones advantage, and in this case the competition is for developer attention.  The attention grabber I have is in the title, and whether they want to read this at all is up to them, long walls of text are tough to read when you aren't looking to delve into a thread. The developers respond to easy things like DPS of a illuminator, but really that is small fry to the aspect of the entire advent fleet issue.

As for saying "its only one man with one opinion", well It only takes one man to change how people think about things, which then in turn changes the governments, religions, and all other ideologies in the world. 

One of my favorite quotes, and a great plan of operation, is:
"first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win!".

But first, you have to have the balls to be that one guy.

The beautiful thing about scientific skepticism is that you can get paid to not do all that much of anything.  You can be skeptical about a great many things, and it may help you.  But then science is a self admittedly limited entity that has several severe limitations.  So, by limiting yourself to scientific skepticism you hole yourself up in a box and feel impregnable, but the reality is that this conversation lies beyond that box.  The sort of balance that makes sins such a great game to play is because developers had the balls to say "to hell with the number crunching bitches" and implement such "OP" abilities as repulse, and Lvl 6 marza lovin and mobile mine deployment and subverter lockdowns.  That the number crunchers can perform tests on their dps and mitigation and completely miss the mark on the strategic assets of the game.  The numbers are but a small part of the whole, and I am talking about the whole picture, whereas you are talking about a part of the picture.

I refuse to truncate this discussion, I instead want you to match me with good sound reasoning as to WHY the guardian shouldn't get a look and take a stand and contribute something of your own, maybe a possible OTHER solution that perhaps I haven't thought of.  Instead I see forum games.

It would be amazing to have a contributive post!

Also, darvin, pretty much you stated things that are true about the game currently and didn't add much in the way of actual discussion pertaining to the thread topic.  What you said is true and I agree, but please stay on topic.

This looks like Goafan is the bad cop, while darvin is the good cop.  I'll analyze this further as well.  Its an easy gig to write after all.

Or you could be the guy making outlandish statements and thinly-veiled insults.

Reducing the cost of the Guardian... well, by definition it will help Advent. But it will by no means fix them.

Vs. TEC, their economy is just too out-classed. Vs. Vas, phase missiles butcher them. A couple extra ships aren't going to make the difference, and the Guardian's not a terrible ship to begin with.

I think this has gone a little off-topic...

I think the best course of action is the one being discussed in another thread about a fix to the Domina and the Revelation's Guidance. The Advent have always been designed as a late game race and currently perform that duty in a slightly sub-par fashion (but only due to the lack of reliable mobile healing and a weakness the Phase missiles) against mature Vasari or TEC players who have held control of the field for the entire game. A working Domina and a fixed Guidance on the Revelation helps with both of those.  

Advent were never designed to be an early game race. I think that is pretty plain. They won't ever compare to TEC in the first 30 mins so why focus on that? The Devs will never go outside what they planned for their factions anyway. As long as Advent can shine when the tipping point is reached then there is no need to go further than that. And certainly no reason to start an argument on a forum where generally only logic and reason preside (in most circumstances ). 

By all means, change how I think about things. I want you to. But you are not going to do that if all you do is attempt to victimize yourself. In my opinion, your generalizations and "reasoning" are inadequate to support the case of the guardian needing a price decrease. Give me some evidence to the contrary and I will gladly change it.

Plenty of other solutions have been suggested...

Yeah..  For a while now I've been pondering the idea of putting PM resistance on Shield Projection as a way to keep the Advent from getting quite as slaughtered by them.

But Sareth, you are seeming, idk..  Paranoid about all this?  Seriously, stop victimizing yourself here.  The fact is, Darvin and Goa are both really respected people here because they treat people with respect.  When they disregard the idea that lessening the cost of Guardians will help, it's probably because at some point along the line they too thought of the idea or heard about it.  If not, you have to understand that the Advent have absolutely no trouble late-game and the Guardian isn't an early-game unit.  Therefore, causing it to be cheaper won't help anything.

Now, if you want to fix broken stuff about the Advent, come help with the Domina and Revelation fixes I'm working on as mentioned by Rowanlad or start working on Resource Focus yourself to come up with a decent mechanism for it.  Or try buffing the damage of Advent caps to deal with LRF spam.  Or try buffing scouts, or what have you.  Pick something that will actually help the Advent.  So far as I can tell, these are the problems with the Advent now:

• weak early-game
• sucky economy
• no mobile healing (Dominas suck)
• PM weakness

Now, weakness early on isn't so much a problem if you can survive it.  A better economy early on would be best and I'd say the best way to pull that one off would be through researchables.  Later on, I'd vote for nerfing Resource Focus and making it passive if data showed that it helped enough.

PM resistance on shield projection was my first choice until the devs allowed PM blocking to be added to technologies...considering that Advent have 4 levels of shield tech, Vasari have 3, and TEC have 2, this would be a pretty good system as the factions with the most hull points and armor would have the least PM blocking...

I think having some level of PM Block with the Projected Shield makes total sense, if Vasari are supposed to have the most advanced shields. I would suggest a level 6 re-searchable with 3 levels that adds 5-10-15% PM Block to Shield Projection ability. I don't think it should have more than that because only the Kol has more PM Block and it makes sense that a Cap Ship ability should be stronger than a support Cruiser especially when it is being applied fleet wide. Its enough to be useful and increase survivability vs Vasari late game drastically without being way OP IMHO. PM would still be highly effective but Advent would become a viable playable race vs Vasari once again.

Conversely, I would say that you could make the case for a level 8 re-searchable that would grant all shields some level of PM Blocking for Advent but with lower percentages than the Shield Projection, say 4-6-8% PM Block.

Perhaps you could just have a seventh tier researchable that passively increases the Advent's resistance to PM's by 1.5%/3%/4.5% and increases the resistance given by SP by 2%/4%/6%.  Sure, it doesn't make the Advent immune and only negates 1/3 of the PM's, but it's still going to dramatically reduce the pounding they'll take.

There we go, good responses!  Adding PM blocking to the guardian's shield projection would make guardians additionally useful in the early game against a vasari cap ship snipe fleet, as well as provide more use for them in the late game due to increased capability against a phase missile unit spam.  TEC players rejoice knowing that the advent wouldn't be getting buffed vs their tactics.

Reducing the unit cost a small amount would still allow them to come into play faster(my data is based upon COMMON SENSE and long term experience! OMG!).  As for numbers, its immaterial to some degree, because the quality of the game is based upon the quality of the HUMAN (not numerical) experience.  Last time I checked I wasn't a number.

Oh and Kitkun, i'm not using another account in this converstation, you have my word.  I don't waste my time with little bullshit like that.

Tedious response to Goafan, target audience need not read unless you feel you will get enjoyment out of it:

Also to be fair goafan, you chose to oppose me immediately on this thread, in essence to say that the thread is irrelevant, that the domina needs a buff(its a horse that has almost been beaten to death on these forums, its a no brainer that it needs an improvement) and implying with your unconditional manner that's all the advent need.  I can say that when someone is so casually rude to another person I wouldn't expect to be able to persuade them of anything, since their mind is already locked into a competitive struggle. You have actively been trying to shut this conversation down, and wow, I won't let you.

I'm enforcing a breeding ground of ideas as to "what if guardian buff" to assist developers.  More heads are better, and there is a lot of sins experience in the community. Free discussion is a great thing, and not surprisingly there is usually someone out there to oppose a discussion for whatever personal reason.  Also, Goafan I don't do any work without pay(LOL at the illuminator bug guy), so if you want to pay me to provide the data you so desire, lets make a contract.  I don't come cheaply either.