Novaliths are entirely countered by building starbases with axillary government or equivalent upgrades. They prevent the planet from being lost to bombardment, including Novaliths.

Novaliths make up for the fact that (until the Rebal titan came out) a late-game TEC fleet (usually) got steamrolled by either other faction (in my experience). Starbases are the best counter.

In a related note; I thought they could only fire in the same star system, but other day I was playing and the AI was constantly exchanging shots with the other system.

yeah it does really frustrate.

i also bought the game because of the tactical massive fleet space combat part.

just like in command and conquer, going through all the trouble of populating and building infrastructure then in the blink of an eye its gone. it kinda doesnt feel fair. you should have to wear away and earn your victories, not stockpile superweapons and spam accross the galaxy while keeping your fleets for defence.

as i said before the obvious and easy solutions would be:

1. make it so you can only have 1 superwepon and it be at your homeworld.

2. make the cooldown much longer

3. reduce the damage that they do, 1 hitting planets is NOT ok.

4. as Allquixotic said you could have EVERY team with some sort of viable countermeasure not just one team with a partial one. eg some sort of missile defence system that has a CHANCE of shooting down the missiles. it wouldnt negate the point if its just a chance of shooting down and/or you have to build them on every world you want to protect like every other tactical building.

please make the game about space combat/diplomacy. not about who has the most nukes.

Indeed, they do substantial economic damage but if you would have had axillary government present you wouldn't have had to lose the planet and thus your ally wouldn't have taken it. Just preventing you from needing to rebuy the planet upgrades make it more than worth while.

It doesn't ruin the point of having a fleet. It ruins having a fleet sitting in your territory doing nothing to stop the novalith. I find the novaliths are actually a pretty refreshing in that they prevent the your economy from snowballing to the point you don't have to worry about it. Puts you under much more pressure to use your resources wisely.

Is not supposed to do the same job as the Novalith. Its whole point is to buff up your fleet like everything else Advent. Your fleet will get +25% damage (+30% if Advent loyalists), +6% shield mitigation and (not relevant now but will be huge when the Vasari are added) +20% phase missile block, either due to the engine directly or just for being in friendly culture. Still not as good as the novalith over all, and you won't need more than a few, but I suspect everyone will actually start using them now late game.

 I believe its 3500.

yeah so its 3500 damage (i said i was probably wrong.)

it still means it can one hit any territory that isnt a full on planet as they are the only ones that can get the lvl 3 health upgrades.

i played a few more hours on that save and i basically spend more time telling my ships to repopulate planets than i do sending my fleet to attack.

im really hopeful they will fix it because its a bit of a game ruiner.

the one TEC team im not friendly with now has 9 Novalith launchers despite me killing 5 so far. its just a case of trying to save up to put space stations near the smaller planets i know but i have 11 planets that can be 1 hit so it takes a lot of time and money to cover them all.

Yea. Playing against large groups of AI's it seems to just be a race among them to build as many superwepons as they can and fire at eachother and u. The unfortunate result is any AI who are not TEC die off early in the game without any fleet battle hapening. This is problematic to fun

I personally dispise anything thats a superweapon (i dont count titans as them because they cant hurt from absolute safety and dont do anywhere near the same damage) however when you look at the other races who are "more" advanced they dont have superweapons either really. Advent is a buffer that doesnt stack with sequential hits (if it did it would put it on par or above the novalith depending on the fleet size) the Vasari have a warhead that impacts a planet that doesnt do damage to it but somehow manages to hurt anything in orbit (its 1 hell of a weird-shaped shaped charge lol) So really there is only 1 superweapon in the game and the owners have the only defence because the starbase upgrade isnt a defence when it lets millions die when you think about it.

novaliths are problematic when playing other races besides the tec.

when playing as tech, building  axillary gov prevents loss of planets

the shield generator uses minimal tactical slots and when fully researched novaliths only deal 900 dmg 

and with catastrophic recovery (not sure if its called this) increases the rate of which the planets "heal" itself

tech have a good chance against novaliths but other races aren't as lucky 

Not really.  On backwater planets that aren't likely to get invaded, you can sacrifice the weapon upgrades for the trade port upgrade to help beef up your income, which will help mitigate to some degree the cost of building them.

Unfortunately, as far as I have seen, the AI has no idea how to counter novaliths at all, so it's pretty much an insta-win against them if you even build three or so. I suppose you could argue that one could just choose to not use them, but I'm not a fan of limiting my gameplay options because the AI literally doesn't know how to react to it.

That wasn't exactly my point. Putting a starbase on every single planet to block a novalith is pretty dumb. Which is what im saying. No one realistically does that.

*raises hand* Uh I have a solution. Just add a limit to the number of superweapons or add an option to limit the number with a slider that lets you decide the max number (0-10 for example) so you can change the number based on the size of the map if you so choose. Simple solution.

There needs to be a way to defend against Novalith population damage.

Personally I'd like to see planetary shields buffed a bit & Advent hardened cities reworked.

OF course 1 technology shouldn't provide an empire-wide resistance to novaliths(there should be a per-planet investment).

So I'd like to see something like this:

Hardened Cities:  Reduced planetary bombardment suffered by 5/10%.  Additionally any planets with upgraded Emergency Facilities improvements suffers 10/20% less population damage from bombardment/novaliths for each level of emergency Facilities(up to a maximum of 30/60% at level 3 Emergency Facilities).

That way on a terran/desert world the advent fully upgrade the emergency facilities of, the population damage of nvalith could be reduced from 150 per shot to 60 per shot(which is managable).   Additionally with 60 pop damage still going through, several novaliths could still suppress one world pretty well.  Not to mention the trade penalty is still in full effect so the novalith would undoubtedly still eb useful.

The point is, every faction needs some defense against the novalith, just like the culture spread of deliverance engine can be countered with culture buildings and the Kostura Cannon can be made managable with starbases(not disabled like other defenses) and hull/armor upgrades.

Just being able to pay 1800 per world to not technically lose the world simply isn't good enough- you can't have starbases everywhere and even if you do Novaliths can still gut your economy by killing population & reducing trade.