How can TEC beat this Advent strategy?

1. Be aggressive early on with LRM to not allow mass Illums.
2. Strike craft hit'n'run (you didn't mention Defense Vessels anywhere). Fighters will tear through the Illuminators.
3. A well-balanced fleet with Kodiacs, Flak Frigates and Javalin LRM with splash upgrade. LRM can stay back, Kodiaks take the beating while the Mothership eats the missiles. After it is down, Kodiacs and LRM will make spacedust out of massed Illuminators.

But it is true, Malice is an incredibly powerful spell.

You can't decide which ship the other player will be targeting, an advent player will normally kill your frigates first and leave the kodiaks alone.

What can tec do against that, simply bring in 20 lrms while you are colonizing/researching and your malice level is still low. Kill everything and win. I have seen some advent going to illums in early game, building 3 temples, upgrading.. they usually die when they have 3-5 illuminators.

in adition to the lrms, send in some groups of about 7 or 8 krosov seige frigates, this, as it stands now, can normally kill a planet with lower defenses or wil only a small defending fleet
an early attack by seige frigates, if sent to areas far apart in their empire will keep you and your fleet occupied and split up so you dont lose planets, by the way, this is a strategy the AI seems to like... and it works quite well seige frigates are fast and in numbers do tons of dmg to planets


for countering your fleet, i would suggest the strategy i have adopted for most game, which is build almost 100% capitol ship fleets
by the time you have the above mentioned fleet, they could easily have 8 capship which if firepower was concentrated on one of yours, would be devastating
the key to winning battles against most fleets ive found is to concentrate ALL firepower on the enemy capships, cus noone likes having their frigs w/o capship support as they just get chewed up by enemy capships, and thus AI and even players usually flee... players often flee even earlier than AI to avoid what will obviously be a capship loss

This i agree with - LRM rush would crush disciple vessels and progenitor with ease before you managed to get a serious number of illuminator out. If it did proceed to late game then definately carriers, a fleet of fighters with the carriers micro'd properly will tear down illuminators incredibly quickly.

Javelin LRM range is a lot bigger then the Illuminators If he wants to fly to the LRM to kill these he will stand right next to the Kodiacs with his Illuminators. Kodiaks deal wonderful damage to Illums so they die fast. In addition to that, the side beams will fire at the Kodiacs and only the front beam will kill Javelins - so the Kodiacs can tank reasonably well. And either the Kodiacs or the Javelins can have Malice on them since they are positioned so far apart - not the whole fleet will take damage.

You cant kill a 3 Cap advent combo without support cruisers dude! Or A LOT of bombers.

Generally bombers are the way to go because in that strat, he has no anti strikecraft abilities! Of course designate target will help a bunch. But overall without malice, his fleet will collapse. He may still be packing tons of guardians, which don't make the job easier thou. Designate target is pretty much a must :/

And of course EMP will be great too. Although I never use it, have to get into the habit. It's hard to come across good advent players. Most just spam disciples because the Advent tech tree makes it hard for them to navigate.

The Dunovs abilities are perfect for anti-Advent. EMP Burst brings down enemy shields and antimatter to an extent and Magnetize temporarily makes the target ship attract strikecraft and collide with it - great for a 1-2 punch against the 3 things Advent focuses on: antimatter, shields, and paper-plane strikecraft.

LOL

Sorry, I had to.

Lrms, Flaks and Hoshinkos would rip that appart. All of which is tier 3 or lower same as Illuminators. If they are not using Flaks and Hoshinkoes, they need to rework their TEC game.

Illuminators are a funny unit. You see just as many "illums suck" as "illums are OP!" posts. Depends if the person knows how to use them, and if the other player knows how to counter.

Also if they know you are going to do this, why are they leaving you alone long enough to tech and build illums? Illums are not cheap. Pirate raids and constant early pressure not happening?

TEC players can mimic your early strategy as well, and get a Kol as the 2nd capital, which pretty much destroys things easily.

Then TEC players can really pump out a great economy and pretty much bury you with some of the larger fleets they can get in late game. A fleet early on consisting of frigates, LRM and a Kol can mount a formidable offense/defense while they have a 2nd fleet of the Akkan and some frigates/LRMs colonze planets rapidly.

The only problem is early in the game TEC has slow fleet building until you get trade ports up and running. But once trade ports are up TEC can build very very rapidly.

Mass LRMs? funny thing is, that usually doesn't work. if its a small map, mass disciples, hit their tech buildings (military tech first). build carrier cruisers with fighters. when you get illums, don't mass build as illums don't do a lot of damage vs other LRMs. defense frigs are better vs LRMs. not the best counter, but they work. if you see someone massing LRMs, build lots of scouts and defense vessels. ya, scouts do pretty good against LRMs. a lot of people don't know that. hell, i didn't know that. you should be able to hold them off until you get destras. once you get destras, well, destras+disciples+guardians....i don't know what to tell ya. cheers.

Flaks pwn Illuminators.
Capital ships? Quite frankly I never go past one. The prevalence of LRM, Bomber and Heavy Crusier is so strong in this game that they really aren't worth building

Flaks don't "pwn" illuminators. They very slowly kill them while even slowerly die.
LRM/LRL's on the other hand kill what they kill very quickly which is why people like them.

By the time you kill illums with flaks they've already taken out a bunch of buildings surrounding multiple planets.

Whoever focuses on killing the flaks with illums or lrms is an idiot.

Yeah that personally makes me kinda annoyed. It is so easy to just focus fire capital ships with massed heavy cruisers and watch them dissapear, its not even worth the cash. Grab an Akkan for the limited time it'll give you the targeting link and a dunov to do that initial EMP burst and wave goodbye...

Yes, Flaks don't own Long-Range Frigates(LRFs), they engage them in a long brawl of attrition and eventually kill them all off(if both sides are equal in fleet supply). The only thing that kills LRFs fast(comparatively) is micromanaged fighters, but the carriers they operate from have to be defended in the meantime.

The Advent have the highest degree of dependency on capital ships. While the TEC and Vasari can do without them(or with only the free one), the Advent need them for the abilities, without which they would be significantly weaker.

LRM, Bombers & Heavy Cruisers only deal 75% damage to Capital Ships.
And if you have problems keeping your Cap Ships alive, then you need to invest a little bit more into support cruisers.

But yeah, otherwise, Illuminators are quite trash, definitely not worth it without the Illusion upgrade.
Why would a ship with Anti-Capital weapons place their weapon so they must spread their damage over 3 different targets?
Crazy.

The Twin Dunov Strategy could crush your Advent Strategy.

That strategy is exactly why they failed to beat you.

First, they focused their fire on the capital ship. A capital ship is quite tough, and focus fire has diminished returns. In other words, they wasted a lot of firepower just to attack a capital ship. Capital ships aren't threatening enough to waste an entire fleet of firepower.

Your strategy is easily beaten as well... it's just that your opponents don't know it. Fighters (carriers have 'em) and the flak frigate will do some heavy damage to your fleet. My strategy would be a mixed fleet consisting of some repair ships, a lot of carriers, some a bunch of flak frigates, and a bunch of LRM ships.
Basically the combat strategy looks like this:
Carrier w/ fighter > Illuminator
Carrier w/ bomber > capital ship
Flak frigate > Illuminator
LRM > standard frigate
The capital ship doesn't matter to me... they can use whatever they want to use. I'd go with the carrier cap ship or the combat cap ship.