AAR : Advent vs. TEC

The sneaky bird gets the worm...

from Sins Forums

First of all, I apologize if there are any typos. I'm writing this at a hospital's e-cafe, and these "sanitary keyboards" are the most godawful thing ever invented. I have to slam every freaking key down.

Ok, so yesterday my friend and I played a LAN on a medium map with one solar system, 20 or so planets, and pirates. I played Advent, he played TEC. The game went pretty well... lots of bidding wars with the pirates as we teched up and expanded. Towards the end we both had pretty good sized fleets, 7 caps at least and lots of lesser ships. Mainly it was a matter of one of us breaking the others' fleet, and then rolling up planets. (We had a gentleman's agreement to pretend that you had to break a planet before jumping past it.)

So, I had a small battle group of Drone Hosts, fully upgraded. With it I was harassing his frontier worlds, jumping in and sending bombers after a mine or other structure, then jumping out and hitting somewhere else. I had a clever plan for victory that involved him being enraged by my raids. I had researched the upgrade to allow me to see fleets jumping up to 2 wells away, which made a big difference.

Here is a laughably crude layout of the planets involved in the final battle.

1 - A well defended core TEC system
2 - A frontier TEC world I had recently bombed into oblivion
3 - A dead asteroid I had colonized very sneakily and placed a PJI in
4 - Space Junk
5 - One of my frontier worlds... prety well defended.

So here's how it went down. After taking out 2, I moved half my fleet to 3 and colonized, building a PJI. The other half went to 4. I had seen with my psychic upgrades that his fleet was in 1. I moved my Drone raiders from 5 through 2 and into 1, where he became very excited, thinking he had caught me at last. He had a PJI in 1, so my jump out was slow and he took out a couple of my drones. When my raiders reached 2, I swung them to jump to 3. He thought he was going to catch them in a dead end, and gave chase with his whole fleet, even taking the time to do a group jump. My caps with radial damage were all waiting on the other end,  and I began jumping the rest of my fleet from 4 to 2 at the same time he jumped to 3. After taking severe damage in 3, he took a slow jump (PJI) back to 2, where he met my 2nd fleet blocking his retreat. While this happened, the pirates were at the end of their countdown and I bribed them with around 14000 credits (more credits = bigger raid) so they sent an enormous attack at one of his core worlds.

His crippled fleet managed to escape with one cap (I had focused all my fire on those) and lots of lesser ships. Trusting his defenses to hold me, he had to scramble to reinforce and fight off the pirates. In the meantime, I brought up a small group of Purge vessels and started wasting his planets. The game took another hour, and at one point he almost pushed me out of his empire, but once I cut his trade route in half and started pushing out some culture, it was game over.

I truly, truly love this game.

Except for the auto focus when I zoom in. I hate getting stuck on stupid fighters. :P

-zenchronus

strategy
6,640 views 13 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
As an addition, my friend Jeff just saw this post and told me that I had not actually trapped his whole fleet in my little sneaky attack, but I had in fact only caught about 2/3 of it. The other 1/3 was at that moment circling around to the other side of the empire to perform a diversionary attack on one of my core worlds, drawing away my fleet for his own attack in the neighborhood where I laid my trap. All of his flak was with the small fleet because he knew that my worlds were defended with Hangars. That played a big role in allowing me to shred his cap ships, since I was very bomber-heavy.

-zenchronus
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
you can disable the zoom to mouse feature.
Siege of Centauri
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
Very nicely done! I have yet to play online, but I convinced a friend of mine to buy this, so we'll be doing a LAN soon. I just started playing as Advent recently (I bought the game on Friday, so I'm still quite new), so strategies like this are helpful.

Well done.
Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top
That's a pretty impressive trap What's a PJI?



Phase Jump Inhibitor,

Well done
Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top
:)

I love pulling off stunts like these, but the only thing that struck me as odd was that this requires you severely outpowering him. My assumption is that if you forced him to retreat twice then you probably could have taken his fleet on defenses and all. (and thus his split might have been quite effective against you :P)

but all in all an impressive scheme to prevent severe losses while inflicting many on him, I'm impressed :LOL:
Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top
Phase jump inhibitors increase the time it takes for an enemy fleet to jump out of that system. I.E. enemy raids a planet with a small force, the PJI will make sure any attempted retreat will become a rout as their ships sit their, being ripped to shreds.
Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top
It's called strategic zoom. I love it. I don't want to disable the zoom to mouse feature. It's lifted from SupCom, which came up with it, and it's brilliant. The problem is that when you're zooming in, your focus will shift to a unit near your cursor. Which means that if you're watching a battle and you zoom in on a unit that's about to jump out, suddenly your viewpoint is being whisked away to another well. It's irritating.

As for the strategy, thanks for the praise. I definitely went out on a limb. But it didn't require overwhelming force. It just took into account the fact that after 2 quick jumps his antimatter reserves were basically depleted while mine were full. I had all my bombers deployed and waiting for him, and my cap ships were in the middle of his to activate their AoE abilities. My Illuminators (not that many, they kinda suck) were within striking distance and my heavy cruisers were right in the thick of it. His units came out of jump in disarray, with fighters not deployed and no antimatter. It was a slaughter. Then when he jumped again he did it piecemeal since he didn't want to wait for the group jump, and my waiting fleet took those pieces as they came out. The last cap I killed, I used Reverie to freeze it while the rest of the fleet took off, then once it came out my bomber swarm hit it. It went down pretty fast.

But, as I said, this strat was a gamble. If he didn't chase my drones into the well, or if I had been wrong about where his fleet was, then I would have my entire fleet waiting on a frontier world while he could have hit me on the other side of my empire. But, sometimes only risky gambles can really pay off. :)

I look forward to many more games like this, and my friend Jeff has already vowed that next time... I'm a dead man.

-zenchronus
Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top
Note that these guys developed strat zoom independently.
Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top
Apple also has strategic zoom. Sit at any Mac - hold the control button down and spin the scroll wheel, it will zoom to the pointer.

Reply #12 from Sins Forums Top
Oh come on, give credit where credit is due. They may not have stolen it, but they got beaten to the punch by at least 2 years. Strategic Zoom was one of the best features of SupCom. The first time I used it, I immediately thought "Any RTS from now on that doesn't have this will be crippled." It's like when RTS games started using selection boxes and allowing queuing of multiple units at buildings. (I could be way off base, but I think Red Alert for the former, and Age of Empires for the latter.)

But Strategic Zoom as it stands in SoaSE is a little broken. Not alot broken, but until they let you disable the auto focus, it will remain an irritant. I hate getting stuck on fighters. It's hard to click on a ship when your screen is whipping around following a tiny fighter.

-zenchronus
Reply #13 from Sins Forums Top
actually if what my friend told me was true the guys here started developing strategic zoom in the very beginning's of the game before supcom did.

and nice story