Novalith Cannon Spamming by the AI

Auxiliary government SB upgrade..

That is a lame option. and its not very viable.  Also you fail to understand that the Novalith is being spammed to death. the AI built 15 of them.  that's unacceptable.

It is unacceptable. But funny as hell watching your teammates scurry around the galaxy to avoid the novaliths

Can this balance? Rebel Titan quickly destroy the enemy fleet, Novalith Cannon and Titan loyalists. But loyalists are trying to keep the defense and to build cannons.

So. while the AI was building 15 novas, what did you do?  with that time and money?

The Rebels need only 3 civic centers and then go into an unmitigated mad dash for real estate. Prop up the akkan and just rush expand, building your resource base and then, long before novas come into play you can muster the forces needed to mangle your way through orbits. really, by the time that amount of novas are up you should have had a veritable fckton of ships to simply do a sweep around enemy orbits especially with the titan as a large scale fleet mangle machine.

No need to remain and bomb them ,just clean the orbits and send in a secondary bombardier fleet. 

So far, rebels are about the rush. rush to neutral faction tech, then rush to expand as much as possible, then rush to overrun you opponent by sheer attrition.

 Its basically all the virtues of TEC amplified with the rebels. Rush and force of mass combined with some nasty fleet killers (marza spam remains powerful, is amplified by rebel titan due to both filling the same overall role).

You alone decide to resist AI receiving several times more money \ resources than you ? And while he has to defend planets (TEC Loyalist)! Suicide. By itself, he crushed you. By the fact that in the new game machine gave more opportunities for spending money. It used to be a sign flocked large surplus funds are not used! Now he can spend it all at the end of the game FAST.
In general, the game reminds me now Suprem Commander . There, too, in the late game, everything was very FAST. Or someone will build a super gun. Or  nuclear missile. Or build a super unit. And with this approach the amount of resources plays a key role. In my opinion there is nothing expected - normal player would build as many guns against you, it's only a problem of your choice.

You do know that they nerfed the Novalith cannon...right? Yesterday one of my asteroids got hit by a Novalith Warhead and I didn't lose control of it. I did have a Shield Generator around the planet, so maybe that does actually have influence. I'm not sure though.

Yes, shield gens nullify some damage.

Heres how much:

2450 damage per hit if you have an un-upgraded shield gen. 

700 with upgrade 2 

So, u2 shield gens protect your planets well.

However, still sucks to be non tec ^^ 

I wasn't aware that those did actually prtect your planets.  The only state that they protect against incoming damage from ships.  Ill have to test this, but still the mass spamming the AI did was absolutely ridiculous.

I agree with you that the AI spams way too many Novaliths at the moment. I played with a few random AI behavoirs though, so it may just be the Fortifier AI that does this. Anyway, my game turned into a gigantic Novalith armageddon after an hour or two. I was forced to put up starbases at almost all of my planets so I wouldn't lose them. Pretty annoying for sure.

Advent can get Hardened Cities from the Harmony Tree at a low tech level, and I'm fairly certain Vasari have something in the Empire Tree to help them withstand bombardment as well.

Forced? To build Starbases? 

Starbases are the best thing TEC has! My trade income with starbases (especially now with Twin Fortresses research) is something like 8 times greater than my tax income from planets. And I never build the trade center module / logistics building. 

My income was ~150/sec NET after having full supply researched (60% upkeep with a supply pact), with only 11 planets owned. Imagine how big my income will be when I conquer an entire solar system (there is another system in this map)!!!

With that amount of resources, you can pretty much buy whatever you want. Defending your systems from assault isn't a big issue with 16 capships and a horde of Kodiaks, then two maxed starbases at every gravity well, plus a bunch of other systems such as asteroid belts and wormholes that have two starbases in them just to boost the trade output.

Yes, it takes a very long time to build up a strong starbase trade network, but if you're planning to play a long game on a huge map, having the foresight to invest heavily in starbases is critically important. 

Anyway, I agree that Novaliths are used far too often in the game now and they should be more of a rarely used superweapon (with a loooong cooldown) rather than merely a reason to build starbases with Auxiliary Government. You should be building starbases with auxiliary government because they're part of your strategy (as they are part of mine), NOT because some AI going on a power trip is going to cause you to lose contact with all of your colonies simultaneously if you don't.

But one thing I notice about the Novaliths is that they did give me a very good reason to build Auxiliary Government, whereas I never did before. So the upshot is that they made an ability actually useful (although I guess it'd be useful regardless if you are being overtaken by hostile culture or something, but that never happens to me).

I've done games previously before Rebellion where I spammed Novaliths too.  Just build SB's and deal with them.  Not much else you can do about it right now.

Did  1v1 flagship match on a random ~60 planet system vs hard (I think loyalists).  I had been spending zero on bounty, taking all pirate raids, focused on a cultural head start, used my flagship / colony ship to ninja asteroid belts / gas giants and we had the system split about 40%/40% for ownership when...

I got the warning after a few hours in about the Cannon being set up on what looked like their homeworld or next to it. I paniced lol.  I had no idea how much damage they could do, did a quick wiki to see the defense is essentially planetary shields and Aux Govt.  I had no idea how much time I had, I also made a push for the Cannon to see if taking out their world was viable.

I won easily(ish), but I didn't know how easily until it was over.

I had been saving quite a bit of cash so on the next pirate raid I ramped the bounty.  Another thing I had done, intentionally and accidentally is through the entire game I made sure the outer planets became scout buffers. Nothing made it further than one planet in. 

After the game was over I had seen the effects.

First planet that they targeted was the pirates...and I saw why.  I had forced such a large bounty that the pirates took a nice chunk out of their income, then they had seen my culture spreading and went into culture overdrive to force it back (which I had been slacking on).  So between the pirates and culture defense and not knowing my layout they focused on stopping the pirates, which made sense since that had become their biggest problem.

Now I hadn't scouted too much either and well the cannons cheat, you can 'find' legal planets, but all you know is  if they are dead or not, so I did a 3x shot vs their cannon world...no dice.  Had to assume it was fortified.

I had been building SB and focusing on shielding, this helped but in hindsight the pirate raids helped more...it caused them to be the target else I would have lost a couple planets.

By end game we were pounding each other from across the system, but I was making holes he was just scratching.  I noticed their cannon production went down (the in game economy ranking would switch between him and I for 1st so we were about even income wise)

And despite the fact I wasn't killing any planets the end-game graphs showed I put a big old hole in his income when I first started using 4+ cannons.  By end-game I had 7 and had was sending out a Cap team to hunt down his cannons/culture/ and flagship.

Something I found helpful...let the cannons auto-shoot, just let them go, but try and stagger them.  If I had a specific target I would check to see which was near reset and un-auto it (had a few hot-keyed).  I always had a cannon that was almost ready for me to use manually.  Was also one less thing to think about since they had some damn tough Starbases I had to fence with.

Off-topic rant: Also learned, I hate chasing flagships...and I hate minefields + AI.  To often "stop" means make a wide 180 turn, and I have no idea why...turning off auto-attack, changing to hold position, and loose/tight formation all seemed to have no effect...they weren't bunched there wasn't an enemy that was too close...nothing I could see.  Then other times they just stop and sit (pat on head).

Novaliths really ought to be something you can only build 1 of.

I don't really care about the spamming but there is something seriously wrong with how quick the "unfair" AI can get to this tech. It was like 20 mins into the game and they fired their first one with tech dev set to slow. Fail.

Making loyalists not require prerequisites for it is fine, but having it at tier 6 is a massive mistake.  It needs to be moved to tier 8.

Ok, sp in addition to $ gimmes do they higher AI levels receive free tech aswell from the outset?

This is why many of us are asking that a Remove Super Weapons option be added to the options so those of us that dont want to deal with this kind of spamming can turn off Super Weapons.

the AI spamming of NCs is ridiculous, especially like 15 mins into the game against ONE x EASY ECONOMIST AI

+1 request the option to disable super weapons in single player

seebah, you can do that easily. just go to your sins folder(For me C:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\sins of a solar empire rebellion\GameInfo) , gameinfo, find gameplay.constants and look at the first few lines, max cannons should be superweapons I believe. It might be better to make a mod of it instead of screwing around in the real files tho. 

So just copy the gameplay.constants, make a new map in your sins rebellion mod folder(C:\Users\Brian\Documents\My Games\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire Rebellion\Mods-Rebellion v1.03) and give it a new(Or don't) and put a new map in there called GameInfo, put in that new map the copy of gameplay.constants and change the line to 0, instead of 4, and there will be no more super weapons.(Atleast I hope that line is the superweapon, only line I could find that looked non-ridiculous)

I've fought several 1v1 matches against a Cruel TEC (I do not have rebellion-- use Diplo 1.34).

As TEC, the only thing it takes is 10-20 scouts running around with the timed charges ability. 10 scouts cost 2,000 credits, versus 8,000 (plus additional metal and crystal) for one novalith -- not ideal considering the cost the novalith inflicts on you, but hardly impossible to deal with. Additionally if you can survive long enough you can build your own novas.

As Vasari, its a bit tougher, but still entirely viable to take them out with a lvl 6 marauder or kostura cannon, plus a phase stabilizer. Even a Starbase in the same well is unlikely to be able to stop you, all it takes is a little maneuvering around the base or massing bombers to take it out before his huge fleet arrives.

As Advent, I don't know. They are the worst hands down with superweapons.

I do not feel they should nerf the superweapons at all. In fact the Advent Deliverance needs a buff of some sort. It is supposed to be a superweapon after all, and if it is a problem with spamming 14 of the novaliths, you should already have aux government or you would have been dead already, and the AI is actually wasting resources. Besides, how did he get 14 planets? Do you have 14? Even if you have half that, you should have enough resources to get your own novas and aux gov up. This is all without having the larger fleet.

So if the AI has the larger fleet, and he still cant beat you, and he cant have superweapons, what do you want the AI to do? Roll over and die? He's cruel, he's supposed to be a challenge. There is no shame in losing to a cheating AI lol. Long term all the novalith does is suppress your eco (adding a challenge), not single handily win the war (unless your so poor you cant get aux gov or kill the nova).

Good luck!

thanks ezektje299 - that worked a treat!

i wrote that up here, thanks for your help.

Seebeh, why did you necro this?  This thread was made before the addition of a superweapon cap.  Now they can only build 4 at maximum which is very easy to deal with.

volt, as that may be, I hate superweapons myself, and have them completly disabled.