TheRedMaw

Last I tested in 1.03, the gates continue to function even if you destroy the planet, or target the Imperial Labs. The only way to stop it is to destroy those gates. From my experience, the TEC economy is strong enough to combat Returning Armada in it's opening stages, before the Vasari goes all out and maximizes their fleet cap and gets Phasic Transmissions. When they have a limited number of gates you can get to them before they can overwhelm you, but against a full Returning Arma

If you're going to go for a Capital other than the Radiance and the Progenitor, I think the Halcyon is generally a better choice than the Rapture. Amplify Energy Aura effects basically all Advent ships, at it's highest giving a 22% lower weapon cooldown. Concentrated Energy Aura of the Rapture only applies to the fighters and bombers housed in various ships, which although it will ultimately give them 30% higher damage, fighters and bombers still die very fast to even small amounts of

I don't think they should be damage monsters, I do think though they should be harder to kill. I'm overall fine with their damage output, it would be very taxing on balance to make outstanding at killing lighter ships (Homeworld style) because the opening Capitals would simply replace a fleet until at least the first fleet upgrade, and that would be kind of crazy. I do think Caps as a whole though are too vulnerable to focus fire (particularly early game from LRMs, but even lat

I'm pretty sure the biggest hitters are probably the Progenitor Mothership's Malice ability (and the Guardian's Shield Projection ability. I don't usually have any performance problem when it's an Advent fleet versus another faction's fleet (although some of Vasari's abilities can be a bit of a strain). But versus another Advent things can get pretty bad (played a free for all once that everyone slowed down during because two of the Advent's were going at it, kind of crazy you could te

A lot there I like. I could go through all of them on why I like them or ones I think might not be great in some situations, but for emphasis I'll keep it short. I agree completely with the weapons research techs, even would encourage them to be further improved, maybe as much as 10% an increment. They're just too expensive now and give too little gain to justify them over just making more ships. There's few instances where research is better than simply having more ships, un

Like them. They can be interesting in many games, and there's nothing more fun than in a map like Maelstrom seeing one of your enemies move their fleet away to help an ally, and then calling in the Pirates on them and watch their fleet scurry back. They're probably most useful in early games though where a player has to halt their expansion to ward off the attack, which sets them back by several minutes often. One of the most amusing things I've seen about them is how they ca

Yea, I've seen 4 on an Asteroid too (this morning on my first Asteroid I had 4 extractors, two Metal and two Crystal, felt so lucky). I've seen as much as 3 on a Gas Giant but I'm guessing that even the neutrals can go up t 4 from what Brindle said. And I have gotten screwed by an Ice World that only had 2 Crystal (in the same game as my rich Asteroid, too). It's great to see random resources be back, though. They add another interesting factor to the game and can increase or decreas

A Radiance and some Defense Vessels is the best counter I've seen for it. In a straight up fight, the Radiance will wipe the floor with the Sova, but if the Sova is orbiting the gravity well, you can pull out Detonate Antimatter and literally prevent your opponent from using the ability while you pummel the Sova. The Defense Vessels may be needed to sit around your structures just to be safe in case they try to take them down, but a couple strikecraft wings take a nice bit of time to d

Well, Advent can match the others mostly in Heavy Cruisers though, from my experience (with upgrades and the Halycon aura and such Destras can be beastly), so I don't view them so much of a balance issue besides from how boring they can be (although that replay of yours rushing them in like 12 minutes then being called a cheater was a wonderfully fun watch). But really by the time Heavy Cruisers are on the stage in significant numbers most games I've played or seen, there are support

I was thinking before this patch that maybe Ironclad was moving to try to balance things so that TEC and Vasari use LRMs early game, while the Advent rely on Carriers. Afterall, Advent Drone Hosts were always the cheapest, and such a low tier, they were actually more practical units to field than the Illuminators (and they could even choose the Rapture Battlecruiser to further increase the Drone Hosts effectiveness). However Drone Hosts were still fairly ineffective due to the extremely cos

Advent must have run over someone's puppy. Someone very important's puppy.

Wow, that's a lot of Crystal. Advent's only real advantage early game was that they get the carrier earlier than anyone else and for cheaper because of their higher tier, more expensive LRM. I'm really confused of the reasoning behind this. I guess it's to make carriers less viable and encourage Advent to get on the LRM bandwagon?

Cleansing Brilliance is aimed at a single target, however it has a very nice range and will damage all enemies that get between it and it's designated target (the damage from the beam actually seems to extend a bit from the visible beam as well). So to maximize damage, you generally want to aim at a target deep within an enemy fleet (one with at good 1,500 hitpoints though). There's more indepth analysis of how Cleansing Brilliance can be used (with Malice, in particular) [link="https:

I try to do what daynewagner does, but with not so much a fleet. From my experience, most players are slow to go for Interstellar travel so long as there is an enemy in their star system. It's easy just from the start to tell where everyone is, and sending giant fleets to try to save your stranded player is usually out of the question. So the name of the game for them is economy and stomp the lone player (three or four players combined don't need to send full fleets each to neutrali

Double post, sorry. Weird forums.

It's the Guardian's Shield Projection. The severity of it seems to vary with the background and the number of Guardians. I took these pictures a while ago for another thread, but here's the example... [link="http://i262.photobucket.com/albums/ii85/TheRedMaw/SinsOfASolarEmpire/TenGuardiansDeep.jpg"]Ten Guardians with the deep space background.[/link] [link="http://i262.photobucket.com/albums/ii85/TheRedMaw/SinsOfASolarEmpire/TenGuardiansDark.jpg"]Ten Guardians with the

Update - Please disregard, the problem has been solved. First of all, sorry if this is addressed somewhere, I checked the stickied threads and did not see it nor did I spot anything in a search. I have a peculiar problem that just began manifesting itself this morning. When logging on to ICO, Lobby 1 will not properly load (it does not display the lobby name at the top, nor any names that may be in it on the left, appearing like [link="http://i262.photobucket.com/albums/ii85/TheRe

It sounds like it might be a valid point, but isn't it a bit too theoretical? Has anyone actually seen a huge carrier fleet fight multiple Akkans where they used this ability? Has it caused giant swings in many of the games they play that seem imbalanced? I've never seen such a situation, I have seen a very large number of Strikecraft run into a decent number of Flaks in a mixed fleet; the outcome was slaughter, in case anyone cares. The strikecraft got one capital in two attack run

"-Chat string and colors changed." That's good news, without a doubt. I'm worried about the LRM changes though. The biggest problem with LRMs from my experience isn't that they're speedy and strong, but that they're dirt cheap and strong. These changes will make the LRM death blobs slow, but how will that help save your structures and your defending fleets from trying to hold them off, except give you more time to abandon the world to them? They won't be able to chase your C

From my experience Repulsion is a strange, situational ability, but at times can be a life-saver (particularly for your important ships). Guardians out of the box are a very important unit to an Advent fleet. Their ability to absorb damage for a fleet (and the Mothership's ability to easily replenish multiple Guardians shields) allows them to dramatically increase a fleet's survivability. So by default the Advent fleet should have Guardians around, and researching Repulsion isn't th

Scouts come with AutoAttack turned off, it can be toggled by the button in the lower left of the scout's little menu (right below Auto-Explore). Although last I checked HuntingX soundly defeated someone trying to use Scouts to counter LRMs, so it's not a strategy I would hang my hat on. If you can beat him though with Scout spam (or Drone Hosts) that would make for an interesting replay. With that said, LRMs are T2, same with Drone Hosts but Drone Hosts can be countered by one of the

Well, Malice lasts a full 20 seconds, so there is some time to try to disperse during it, or even during a Cleansing Brilliance strike. Although with it's short cool down time it's possible to take multiple hits in fairly rapid succession, but between Shield Restore and Malice, a Mothership can burn through it's Antimatter fairly quickly. A better solution though would be avoid bunching up too heavily to begin with (most people just blob their fleet and move it to attack, Heavy Cruiser

Malice effects all ships struck by it equally, so even though you designate a target (preferably in the center of an enemy fleet) all of those afflicted by Malice are affected in the same way. There doesn't seem to be any core or any single important ship, all of those caught by it will be sharing and taking damage the same with nearby ships also under the spell, regardless of if they were the direct target or where where they may end up after the ability is cast (so long as they're caught in t

In the Research section (icon at the top of the screen in the middle), so long as you have one either Civil or Military Lab, you can go to the Logistics tab on the left (third one down) and research greater fleet capacity. The top row is for Capital Ship crews, the bottom is for overall fleet capacity. Each level of the fleet capacity will significantly increase the number of ships you can build, but also begin to tax your credit, metal and crystal income. Capital Ship Crews allow for

Seeing how this save of mine will be useless in a few days and I have Guardians, I gave the Repulsion a test. Having Vasari though as the enemy turned into a massive pain, the Subverters caught my Guardians several times in their paralyzing ability. From what I can tell, the effect remains regardless of the distance (I hit Repulsion during one of the tests and caught some carriers who were moving parallel to my Guardians and it sent them way out there, was kinda [link="http://i262.phot