Teal, I wasn't actually talking about Advent ships. Or their shields. That part you quoted was in regards to Guardians helping reduce the damage of Meteor Storm from the Transcendia, that's all Here's what you do, though. Build one (Transcendia), give it 3 armor upgrades, Mass Disorient, Meteor Storm, and either 2 weapon upgrades or 2 fighter upgrades. Build 3 hangars and 2-3 repair bays behind it, and then as many beam turrets as you have slots for on the sides and a few very slightly in front of the Transcendia. Fill your squad slots with fighters (after mines if you want to deploy mines). When the AI jumps in, select all your fighters and quickly pick off their siege ships and if it's a TEC/Advent, their Ogrovs and Adjudicators after the siege ships.

After that, your defenses will never, ever fall to a single AI attack. Your Transcendia's Meteor Storm will take out all their LRFs and Cobalts after 3-4 casts, and you'll barely lose any beam turrets and not even come close to losing the Transcendia.

Again, though, I wasn't talking about their ships. Shield mitigation can be adjusted for each individual entity. I was only proposing reducing the mitigation on their beam turret and only their beam turret. Not the entire race.

Exactly. It only happens on Advent worlds. Take this for example. You're playing any race, doesn't matter what. You have a TEC, a Vasari, and an Advent AI with the same defense layout. You have your fleet, ready to attack. It will take you ~3 times as long to destroy the Advent defenses than either the TEC or Vasari, or it will take you ~3 times as many ships to do it in the same amount of time. Just because their turrets have shield mitigation now.

Here's some fun math:

Let's take, for ease, an un-upgraded Gauss turret and un-upgraded Beam turret with Synergy.

They both have 3,000 hp, 12 armor. With Synergy, the Beam turret has 60% mitigation and 2.5 shield hp restored per second. Because they have the same armor they'll get the same effective hp bonus so I'll ignore that. They also have the same hull restore/sec so I'll ignore that as well.

Then let's take 20 TEC Javelis frigates, un-upgraded: 71.5 damage per shot with a 6.5 second cooldown = 11 DPS. They have ANTIMEDIUM attack, which does 50% damage against MODULE armor, so 5.5 DPS per ship.

20 ships x 5.5 DPS = 110 DPS against a TEC turret, and 3000/110 = ~27.3 seconds to destroy it.
20 ships x (5.5 DPS x 0.4) = 44 DPS against a Beam turret, and 3000/44 = ~68.2 seconds to destroy it.

That's about 2.5x longer to destroy a Beam turret with the same hp and 60% mitigation. In reality, Synergy adds shields and a hangar adds shields and shield regen, so you'll have the Beam turret with an extra 1,750 shield hp to burn through, and a 6.5/s recharge rate which becomes non-negligible.

Isnt synergy its ONLY upgrade.You cant compare 1on1 like that. One has all upgrades and other has none.Tec eventually gets high hull,high armor,  and high damage(abilities).Noone ever ups advent hull and reaches armor unless your in ancient stage of game. By then fleets are so large it doesnt matter. Advents abilities and support are based off shields and mit too.Not to mention sc in advent well virtually roam free. If you build tons of beam then you dont have hangers with fighters and the hangers them selves have no anti-sc abilities like the others.

I meant no hull upgrades. The Advent turret gets benefits of the entire beam line of weapon upgrades, the TEC turret AFAIK only gets the range increase/ROF upgrades, it gets no bonuses from any weapons research.

But in any case, I specifically was not taking into account damage output first because the amount of damage they do is not directly relevant to how long they take to destroy (the LRFs and Ogrovs/Adjudicators should never be in range of them, for example) and because I have a feeling a fully upgraded TEC turret would do less damage over its lifetime than a fully upgraded Advent turret (beam research line should be something like +30% damage, and another +50% from Synergy, plus 1750 shields and 6.5 shield hp/sec restore).

Hi Annatar,

                  Short question please, i promise, 

If Advent turrets plus the repair bays, plus the hangers up the shielding and regen rate, then what do the Tec or Vasari have if their turrets dont receive a bonus of shielding or regen?

I dont know, because i play the other races so rarely, but do the Tec have hanger guns? Or can i place more Tec hangers in the well to have strikecraft patrol against attacking ships?

Does the Vaaari have phase out hull? Or something else plus that? I think i remember this one, and how long will it take to take out those phased out structures (I believe its more than just the turret, but all the labs and extractors and tradeports and also turrets [ i think] )

Anyway, my thought is that the Advent get the synergy plus the shielding plus regen, and the Tec and Vasari get something different, either more strikecraft in the well, or guns on the hangers or something.

If im incorrect then perhaps the shielding plus regen was never intended to be added on top of the shielding the turrets get for the Advent, and perhaps decreasing the Advent synergy ability, or having synergy only and not that and the shielding plus regen that the hangers are giving them. Sort of a one or the other situation. That might even things out a bit as then the Advent turrets would still have shielding, but not shielding plus more shielding plus regen.

Just a thought,

-Teal

Hey here's an idea, build a starbase of your own next to those defenses as TEC, and explode it!

"Transcendia's Mass Disorient/Meteor Storm combo."

So is this considered the best use of Advent bases?

I've been trying different combinations but I'm wondering what others are doing with Advent starbases.

I don't know, the defenses are strong, but you have to factor in the huge cost of deploying them as well.

TEC turrets get two abilities: one is short-range and shoots missiles at up to 4 targets, and the second is a long range single-target that deals decent damage and reduces armor a little. Their hangar gets flak guns to shoot down fighters.

Vasari turrets get nanites that shut down passive shield/hull regen on the target ship (it's attached to its weapon, AFAIK, not a targetted ability), and their hangar holds strike craft in place, also preventing them from attacking.

Yes, Advent get Synergy + more shields/regen from their hangar, and TEC and Vasari get their own improvements. Here's the problem, though. The TEC and Vasari upgrades still generally keep the old counters against them.

In other words, the TEC turret does more damage, but it's no less vulnerable to long range ships (and the new cruisers) or bombers (the hangar gun doesn't scale well to increasing numbers of strike craft). So it's made more dangerous, but it's still possible to counter their damage increase.

The Advent upgrade has no counter. The only thing it opens up is Vasari phase missile chance. But there's nothing you can do to even out the upgrade. One way or the other, you have to eat the 2-3x extra time it takes to destroy one. If you're a TEC player you can have your Ogrovs attack TEC turrets to counter their extra damage dealing. But when you go attack an Advent's turrets, sure you still out-range them, but you still can't do anything about them taking 3 times longer to die.

And this is what I think the design flaw is for the Advent: they are made more dangerous not because they get some nifty ability [that has some counter], but only because they are given the secondary mechanic of shield mitigation and essentially force the player to take more time to destroy them.

Expensive, and has a very small chance of actually working

Not really. Two turrets is enough to grant them shield mitigation, which is the majority of their strength, even though it's also the least obvious one. Four turrets cost a bit less than a carrier cruiser.

you also cant use the maxed 60% from synergy

im mean you really need like 4-5 hangers to be able to reasonably stand againd enemy SC attacks

an assuming you have one or two repair docks and a phase disrupter you end up with only having 11-17 ish beam turrets

thats still alot but if you cluster them all by hangers and so they get max synergy its hard to get them to sufficantly cover a gravity well

and this is also assuming that people want to take the time to place every structure manually

So?  All you have to do is cover the starbase, which will keep the planet 'colonized' despite bombardment.

is that fixed now?

 well anyways it would still leave your civilain structures vulnerable and unguarded planets that are in the next gravity well will be vulnerable as well

I played an online game. My first real multiplayer experience in Entrenchment last night.  It was a 2v2. I had to fight against my guy and my ally fought against his. It was practically two 1v1s in the same solar system. Anyway I learned that Starbases are good places to hide, because no human player will suicide his fleet to chase your damaged caps.

A human player will ignore a heavily defended planet alltogether and just jump deeper into your empire to attack the soft belly. I have been thinking about hos I can prevent this. The biggest problem was a level 6+ marza was killing my frigates. This left me without a fleet a couple of times. The down time gave him a bit to punch out a few undefended labs and asteroid mines while I rebuilt, but not a major loss and easily rebuilt when he left.  I figured that if I could have avoided the missile barrage, I would have easy won. I didn't think of it at the time, but all I had to do was get that Cap with Ion bolt and the whole game might have turned out different.

But the point of this post is what I could have done to stop his rampage through my inner worlds, he just jumped past my defenses easily. The 30% hull damage was nothing since he had hoshikos with him. And I had about 10 carriers with 100% docked bombers. I tried to use my dual Kols to flak burst away most of the fighter screen before releasing the bombers, and the fighters did stay pretty dilluted since his carriers are all out of antimatter. but I couldn't finish off that Marza, he kept doing unexpected things. I was trying to corral him back to a trap. I had multiple phase inhibitors at a planet guarded by 8 turrets and a upgraded starbase with docking booms, but the phase inhibitor was on the wrong side. It prevented his escape back to his own territory. So the wounded Marza kept looping around my own worlds. I couldn't catch it. This guy was thinking 2 moves ahead of me it seemed.

I did eventually corner it with 20 carriers all with bombers, 2 Kols , level 8 and level 4 full antimatter, ready for guass cannon. Right at that point the game disconnected me from Ironclad online and the CPU took over for everyone. I did kill his fleet then, but I can't help but wonder if its just because the CPU is being stupid.

The biggest lesson I learned is to only use asteroids for chokepoints, that way the phase inhibitors will cover both escape to your inner worlds and escape back to his empire. If thats not possible, I would make sure the phase inhibitor covers the jump back towards your inner worlds so they can't run amok in there.

If its possible to afford, put at least an unupgraded starbase on all of your inner worlds, any enemy fleet looping around running from your fleet will take extra hull damage at every jump and be at zero antimatter.

Some interesting points in this thread.

Still, as far as I can see the only really "unfair" (and I use that word loosely) difference between the races defences is the shield mitigation on the advent turrets. It really does make them a class above TEC / vasari turrets, and at similar cost and the same tactical supply (1 unit), they become overpowered.

It would be good to see some uniformity between the races in this regard. Either all static defenses should recieve *some* shield mitigation bonus (in which case they become very powerful), or they should all recieve none.

Has anyone ever thought of this:

Warp in your own fleet filled with nothing but fighters and flaks assuming equal fleet supply.

You know with all of the screaming for nerf this and buff that all because it owns something or is tough to crack ends us up with three races that have no definitive edge over the other, but have the same underlying gameplay with different looking ships and structures. Unless it is something that can ruin the game let it be. I personally would like to see each race have one specialty, preferably in battle, that can obtain a edge over the other play and requires attention from the other player to break it and extra resources. Advent has amazing planetary defense, TEC has amazing ship range, and Vasari get a moving starbase and a bunch of other things. What is the problem.

:)  I was reading another thread and ran across something, that i consider very likely to this thread here:

                We are assuming the Advent are OP, their turrets are heavy and very hard to break down with their shielding from the synergy ability + shielding + regen from the hangers give shields ability.

The Tec and Vasari dont have this and it puts them at a disadvantage.

But,

The Vasari Starbase is moveable, the Advent and the Tec are not, the Tec have torpedo launchers i believe, and the Advent have the new Ajudicators. The Vasari have no torpedo craft at all. But their Starbase rushes in the grav wells it inhabits and can outclass any module killer frigate in the game. Also, the Vasari can cover and entire grav well, where the Advent and Tec Starbases cannot, and if i need to "move" my Starbase, then i have to hopefully do it early before too much upgrading, so as to lose as little capital as possible when i salvage it and re-build it on the other side of the well. For stars this may not be a problem, as we can field 4 Starbases per race there. But not on planets.

The point im trying to make here, is simply that yes, perhaps the Advent rule in the turrets in their own worlds, but not all of the battles they fight are in their own worlds, and certainly the maxed Starbase, turrets and re-inforcing hangers to produce this little OP, doesnt always happen. How often does it happen, really? In a real game, i dont know, often? once in a while? rarely? Often enough to nerf it down so it can be taken out early because its seen in a small context and seen as OP?

Then what of the Vasari Starbase? Do we nerf it as well?  Or do we balance it with moveable Advent and Tec Starbases, and if we do in fact do that, we take the edge the Vasari have in one area and nullify it, and if we nerf the Advent turret to balance it against the Tec or Vasari attacking frigates then we take away that edge as well and nullify it. And the Tec being able to produce such quantities of ships for lower resource costs than the other two races? Well if we balance that, then we have approximately homogenous ships from approximately homogenous races fighting to see who will win. And perhaps evenly balanced as that may be, even granting that wins might even be a reflection of better skill on the players part if all parts are equal; It still takes away racial identity, in the uniqueness and inherent advantages of one part over another.

Isnt it more fun to get the heck beat out of us trying to invade an Advent homeworld with turrets and hangers and Starbases kicking my back? 

Or as Advent jumping into a Vasari world with a roaming Starbase stalking around the grav well and proceeding to kick me off the planet, either that or stay and die? 

Or as Either Advent or Vasari to jump into a Tec world, our guns blazing and caps roaring and shields revving! 

Only to get handed our heads from a fleet 3 times bigger than the Vasari or me put together?  Haha, i know its not balanced in each section and each part, but i think, this is my own opinion, okie?  But i think the Devs wanted it to be a hectic and riproaring war!!  With each side having definite and visible strengths, but also lacking in other areas where the other races have their own strengths. It makes for a neat game, not a homogenous one. Perhaps not perfectly balanced, but i think that kind of balance it not a good thing.  It takes away the Strengths and the drama and the worry, if it takes me five more minutes to take this guy out, then i might be over run. Sometimes that is fun, all the things that go into it. I think the devs put a lot of this stuff in on purpose. And i rather like it to be honest. 

Just my opinion, but i hope i have made some logical sense for my side of viewing things.

Take care and keep modding!!!

-Teal

Teal makes some good points. and interestingly enough, meteor storm is counterable---yes, it has 15000 range, but the area in which it affects adjacent units is only 4000 i believe. I think its supposed to go up to 6000 for level 2 but if the damage is any indication...

so spread out your torp ships, maybe either manually or loose fleet cohesion might be good.

The only issue here is vasari SB, i don't know how it can take on all those beam platforms + SB throwing meteors. maybe thats what frontal shield was meant for?

Hello everyone.

This is quite a interesting thread.

I must admit, that i only play with with my friends online and so I never met a Advent world with the described defense setup. To reach this massive amount of defense it has to be late game (don't count some bottleneck maps, but I prever random ones). So I can assume there are large fleets at hand. If I attack such a world which is defended with 2 Hangars 3 repair platforms and 27 Turrets (that should be maximum) and a Starbase I would attack the Hangars with all my Bombers and Fighters. With a sufficient fleet, the two Hangars should go boom with the first bombing run. And then ... no shields anymore for turrets.

Nobody has included in his( or her) math that the shields are just a borrowed abilitiy by the Hangars. With no Hangars there are no shields. All the other races have the individual bildings upgraded. So kill a Tec Hangar don't disable the flak of the other Hangars. With other Words a chain is not stronger than the weakest link. But if all insist on atticking the strongest.....

And now correct me please if I'm wrong.

Actually, the turrets' Synergy ability grants shields as well. The hangars grant 750 and 4 hp/s regen, and Synergy grants another 1000 and 2.5 hp/s regen. So with the hangars gone all turrets will lose 750 off the top and most of their regen, but only the last turret alive would become un-mitigated.

That's why I'm not really focusing on the hangars in my analysis, they help but they can be taken out of the picture without a huge hassle since they do not get a full 70% mitigation. They stay at their base 15% (or 25% with culture and shield research).

I haven't had a chance to play with the advent yet on Entrenchment, but would making several tech. levels to get their turrets maximum shield regen. and mitigation solve the problem of them wiping out small numbers of ships, and still allow the advent to keep their higher survivability late in the game? And maybe do the same thing for the hangar shield restore {edit} and shield projection, or whatever it's called{end edit}. Not huge nerfs, but I think that along with maybe knocking down the range of meteor storm to maybe 14000 would do the trick, and still leave a really tough set of defenses to crack.

Well generally that's a good idea. Higher costs to max out the bonuses means it would take longer to get to. But the problem is as a game mechanic, shield mitigation doesn't depend on anything other than having shields. Even if it's just 1 shield point, it can get max mitigation.

So the earliest this can happen is with 3 military labs and the hangar shield bestow upgrade. This leaves turrets dependent on a hangar to provide the shields, but at the 3-lab stage of the game destroying the hangar quickly is not trivial. They do have a lot of hp and a little mitigation of their own and the range for the shield bestow is big enough that you can bury it so even Javelis will not be able to hit it without coming in range of the turrets. And considering TEC and Vasari don't even get their carriers until 2 and 3 labs, respectively, strike craft also won't have a trivial time.

Then, at 5 military labs the turrets get Synergy, which basically gives them shields for each nearby turret. By this point, chances are the hangar will be much easier to destroy, but the turrets no longer depend on it. Even as turrets start getting destroyed and the bonus shield hp from Synergy drops, as long as there are 2 turrets alive they will have mitigation.

So as far as nerfs, I think reducing the max mitigation on the turrets (since it can be changed for each individual unit/structure) will do the trick nicely. Reducing the range on the hangar shield bestow will also make the players put them a little closer to the front line for easier reach of long range frigates.

Meteor is good, but by itself it's not overpowered. It doesn't do enough damage that AE repairs are useless, but when you're able to bury the starbase it becomes suicidal to send your ships in because between the turrets that take 2-3x longer to die and the Starbase's weapons and meteor, the Antimatter for those AE repairs will go fast! That's where my suggestion to increase slightly the cooldown on meteor, to give repair ship antimatter a chance to regen a little more.

I'm not in favor of big sweeping nerfs with an axe. I like the more delicate tweaking approach. Right now, the only way to not lose a lot of ships on assaulting Advent defense (short of having a 2000 fleet point fleet, of course, but that's much more expensive than an upgraded starbase and turrets, especially when you factor in the 75% upkeep!) is to use bombers/Ogrovs/Adjudicators, and lots and lots of them, and it still takes a long time.

Dropping max mitigation on turrets a few 10s% will still keep them really sturdy, just not half invincible (even bombers only do 65% damage to their armor now, before mitigation even kicks in). Having hangars closer to the front will mean they can be reached easier, so there's greater potential to take them out and deny +750 shields and 4hp/s regen across the board. And having meteor take a little longer to recharge will allow for prepared and balanced fleets to function a little longer on AM supplies. All of that combined should decrease reliance on massing Ogrovs or bombers (not really mentioning Adjudicators here since they do little single-target damage and with mitigation it's like a gentle tickle) and allow balanced fleets greater versalitily at being able to go after, excuse the pun, Entrenched planets

While I don't have entrenchment yet, I've been paying attention to beta feedback and alot of entrenchment posts. One thing that has only been briefly mentioned is the advent need a better defense because they have the worst logistics and economy. The Vasari has phase stabalizers and cannon strikes that allows they to move almost anywhere they want on the map. The TEC starbases can become frigate factories, allowing them to replace their units one gravity well away. The advent have no such logistical short cuts, their nearest resupply point is their closet friendly planet. Sure, a lone starbase in a neutral or enemy gravity well can give the existing ships time to recover, but that doesn't replace your loses, and you weren't argueing against just the starbase, only starbase with alot of defenses.

Why is this important? The advents fleets, like its defenses, work best in groups, so the fewer areas you need to split you fleet, the better. While just how many fleets you need depends on the map, ideally it will just be two, one for defense and one for offense. Before, unless its 1v1, you'll want to keep 40-50% of your fleet supply close to home or at least open so you can start building them when an attack comes. A fully upgrade defense should push it back to 20%, as you want those extra ships in your attack force sense as said, you really don't want to fail and have to fall back and then try again.

And one last thought, are all of the sides balanced offensively? If not, and if the advent are weaker, perhaps they should be allowed to be slightly OP in defense to make up.

The Advent have an awesome late game economy. They get a starbase upgrade that increases max allegiance by +30% for its planet and a research that gives you plus 10% across the board. So with the plus 10 from culture, your lowest planets will have 25 base+10culture+10research+30starbase upgrade=75% allegiance minimum. Your homeworld could have 150% allegiance.  You aren't losing as much taxes from your distant colonies and your home worlds are producing more than 100% of their share.

TEC get good trade, which means lots of credits, but the Allegiance bonus means you will gets lots of tax and crystal and metal mine production.

I think one thing that isn't being sufficiently addressed by anyone is the fact that the Advent don't get any anti-strikecraft defenses.  The Vasari get a phasic trap for their hangers, and TEC get flak cannons.  The Advent starbase and associated defenses are thus more vulnerable to strikecraft (the dominant force in the game, IMHO).  The shield/mitigation stuff is what Advent gets for NOT getting anti-strikecraft stuff.  So if they get a nerf, don't they get a raw deal?

Also, you have to look at the overall picture.  The devs have stated that they balance "by race" not "by unit."  Of course, that doesn't mean that they always get the balance right, but I'm still not convinced at this stage that there is an issue.