JamesP81

Does anyone know which files I need to modify in order to change how many capital ship levels can be purchased through training?

The Advent's real strength is in its capital ships special abilities. If the enemy goes for LRMs, I simply match my Illuminators with his LRMs. I tip the balance with my capital ships highly potent special abilities.

[quote]In fact, I really don't understand this whole AI thing to constantly send scouts all over the place. Simply group a monster of a fleet (keep a few ships behind for defense) and roam to the next planet. It's empty? good, keep moving. It's a small enemy colony? Wipe it out. It's a fortress of fleets and defenses? good, you have a fight on your hands, fight it out already! You are beaten? Sucks, but retreat your surviving ships and have your factories beef up the numbers again, and go at it.

TEC is kind of on the short end of the stick with the 1.04 patch. Their tough as nails early game, but their late game techs and support cruisers just don't stack up well against Vasari and Advent late game techs and cruisers. Most of an Advent fleet's real strength is in its capital ships, so focus firing and destroying them first are top priority. In particular, you cannot let an Advent opponent get a Radiance battleship to level 6. The best strategy for TEC against the other two f

I think the connecting green lines is the charged missiles ability of the Assailant. It allows their phase missiles to do some degree of splash damage. Vasari are tough because of their support cruisers: Overseers and Subverters. Subverters are especially bad because they have an area effect stunning ability that can only be described as stupidly powerful. To defeat Vasari, you have to take the support cruisers out of the equation. Cobalts have an ability disabling attack called Sab

Progenitor Mothership and Radiance Battleship. Malice + Cleansing Brilliance = lots of blown up badguys.

[quote]Yeah, and those two extra cobalts will cost you an arm in the logistics research and a leg in taxes lost.[/quote] That's highly situational. It depends on how much fleet cap you have remaining at your current upkeep level, how many of a certain class you've built, and how many different classes a weapons upgrade will affect. If you're early in the game and have only researched one or two levels of fleet capacity and you're not wanting to go up to the next fleet cap leve

Tried this afternoon, and it just didn't work that well. Better stick with Malice + Brilliance.

[quote]*I will say a Vasari is the hardest race to to this to. If you see your opponent is Vasari, forget this strategy. This is really designed to hurt those who need the labs to get up to that unit of choice[/quote] Your scout rush is interesting, but not totally useless against Vasari, IMO. If you get there and your opponent is Vasari, I'd reccommend bombing his imperial labs. That way it'll stop him from getting RA.

Early game its not a good idea to expend a lot of money on upgrades. For example, the Cobalt has a base damage of 9.5 dps. Early game, you might get eight of them before you max out the first level of fleet capacity. That's 76 dps altogether. The first two laser upgrades gives your Cobalts a 10% boost and together cost 900 credits and 75 crystal. You go from 76 dps to 83.6 dps. The same amount of resources, however, will be 2 more non-upgraded cobalts with a little bit left over. Adding t

[quote]Very expensive, might work fine the first couple times you tried it but after a while dumping a thousand credits into creating 5 seekers at a time and then just ramming them into something does not seem to be work the damage output.[/quote] If it's anything like the damage output of Brilliance + Malice, it's well worth a thousand credits, since Brilliance + Malice can sometimes destroy an entire fleet. That's definitely worth a thousand credits to me.

TEC strengths: economy and they have good frigates (especially LRM). All their ships generally have more armor and hit points than those of other races. Their capital ships especially are difficult to destroy. TEC weaknesses: capital ship special abilities are significantly inferior (with a few exceptions), crappy strikecraft (especially bombers), and late game their support cruisers are significantly inferior to those of other races. Advent strenghts: culture, Illuminator ve

[quote]Make sure you have all 16 capital ships possible, I would reccoment 3 Kol, 2 Sova, 2 Marza, 1 Akkan, 8 of your personal preference, For me, thats Sovas.[/quote] Dunovs. One of the few ways I've been able to counter large numbers of subverters and overseers is EMP charge from the Dunov.

[quote]I'm playing a 5 star map vs 9 AI opponents right now (diplomacy is off). It looks like it's going to be pretty tough going as the game progresses, but we'll see how it works out. So far, I've wiped out 3 factions and have 2 more to deal within my star system. 4 stars to go...[/quote] Are they all allied against you, or FFA? Just curious...

[quote]TheRedMaw, I'm fairly sure that if you did some tests, you would find that the economic benefit of going with a colony cap more than makes up for your Radiants lack of levels and allows you to buy the levels needed to bring your Radiance to level parity with your Progenitor.[/quote] When I play Advent, I find that even on small random maps that I can still get my Radiance up to level 6 even if I get the Progenitor first. Unless it's a tiny map (like Point Blank) I don't think th

It's not the Vasari heavy cruisers that are so awful; it's their support cruisers. The Overseer and especially the Subverter are *significantly* better at what they do than the equivalent TEC cruisers. The Subverter has an area effect stun ability that is just stupidly powerful. You need ships that have abilities which can disrupt other ship's special abilities. Cobalt light frigates have an ability that you can research called Sabotage reactor which works against Subverters and Over

[quote]And if you find your cap ship tied down defending from an adjacent player or aggressive AI early on ?[/quote] Then you build a colony frigate. By this point in the game the colony frigate will be easier to afford anyway.

[quote]The TEC colony cap ship has a few useful ability to boot. It increases dps and range of all nearby ships, it has Armistice and it has Ion bolt.[/quote] I think Armistice is an under appreciated ability. If you're in a jam and need to retreat, it's just incredible. I know that a lot of people complain that "I don't know why you'd need an ability that's only good if you're losing!" On the other hand, if you're never having to retreat from a battle, ever, then the opponents your

[quote]If you have planets with several LRMs, HCs, Flaks, and light figs as well as the standard Korov per planet, then an akkan and 10-15 frigs will not allow you to expand quickly because you will lose most of the meat shield to the local defenses before colonizing 1 planet.[/quote] The solution here is to send in the capital ship first then send in the frigates after it's already finished its phase jump. The militia ships won't retarget the frigates (with the exception of militia LR

Welcome to the game. Jumping in and starting off small and slow is probably a good idea. Also, when I started I found this chart to be a good resource in deciding which kinds of ships to build: [link="https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/177682"]Ship Information Chart[/link]

[quote]I'm starting to feel like the overall DPS of capital ships and their spread deserves some more attention from Ironclad.[/quote] Well, I dunno. See, the battleships are more for tanking purposes. Especially the Kol. It's there to absorb fire that would've gone against your fleet and survive it. The Marza is more about burning down whatever target it goes after as quick as possible, but it doesn't have quite the staying power of a battleship. [quote]As far as sieing go

[quote]There really should be something to counter HC[/quote] Actually, bombers get good damage numbers against them, but the carriers they fly from are too costly to be worth it, and the bombers themselves are just a bit too weak.

I usually let the Hoshikos manage themselves, but I manage the Cielos so I can control which enemy I use designate target on. This ability is really only useful against capitals, though. Other than that, Embolden works as well being auto managed as the Hoshiko's repair abilities.

[quote]I haven't seen any really effective counters for TEC other than the aforementioned "more Heavy Cruisers" but with their economy it is possible.[/quote] Exactly. The TEC solution to this problem is strategic, not tactical. Bigger economy means bigger fleet.

[quote]I play TEC and got carriers with fighters.[/quote] TEC fighters actually aren't particularly good (unless operating from a Sova with heavy strikecraft passive ability, then they're quite effective). Cost per cost, Illuminators are about the same effectiveness as LRMs. I would use a larger number of LRMs against his Illums (and if he doesn't have much strikecraft, I'd release my flaks to attack his illuminators). Of course, the Kodiak will tear through them like tissue