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Analysis of late-game Entrenchment Advent defenses

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Analysis of late-game Entrenchment Advent defenses

from Sins Forums

Okay, so I've been playing a large game since Entrenchment's release and been attacked by pretty much everything (sometimes by 2 AIs at the same time, same planet) to arrive at the conclusion that the Advent defenses with all the Entrenchment changes are a bit *too* powerful.

There's little bits and pieces that, on their own, don't pose much of a problem. But when you add all of them together, it becomes incredibly difficult to knock out fully built up Advent defenses.

The little bits and pieces:

- Hangars grant 750 shields and 4 hp/sec shield restore.
- Beam turrets grant shields per nearby turrets to another +1000 total.
- Beam turrets now have increasing shield mitigation (hangars keep at 15% base)
- Shield tech research and culture research increase max mitigation by 10%.
- Transcendia's Mass Disorient/Meteor Storm combo.
- Research for +10 tactical slots per planet.
- Reduction of all ships' damage against MODULE armor.

When you combine all of this, you basically have 20-30 (depending on how many hangars you want) beam turrets, each with mitigation reaching upwards of 70% and 1750 shields (not to mention ~3k or so hull and fairly high armor) and shield restore of 4/sec and hp restore of 30/sec from repair bays. You then have Transcendia's Meteor Storm which outranges even the Ogrovs.

That means the new designed counter is not very feasible. An Ogrov does 900 damage per shot. At 70% mitigation, a turret will take 270 damage. The more Ogrovs you bring, the more damage they do but those guys all die after 3 meteors (or 2, when rank 2 is fixed to deal 750 damage instead of 500). The hangars' shield bestow range is large enough that they can be kept out of reach of Ogrovs/Adjudicators and still provide 750 shields and the shield regen. The Adjudicators do much worse, because they're designed as a constant rather than burst DPS and even though they can attack 5 structures at once they will take much longer to destroy them. Both the Ogrovs and the Adjudicators become nullified by Meteor Storm since they can't attack outside its range.

And with the turrets being as sturdy as they are now, a fully build up defenses cluster can survive an incredible amount of punishment. I've only lost 2 Transcendias in my current game. One was at a wormhole and I noticed too late that the enemy fleet had 11 Ogrovs, and the Meteor Storm was auto-casting on heavy cruisers up front instead of them. I noticed when it was down to 5k hp and no shields, and if I noticed earlier it probably would've survived because they all needed one more meteor toss to all die. The second was when I was attacked from two sides at the same time by two AIs and could only throw meteors at one side. The starbase was eventually overwhelmed by bombers, but the beam turrets were holding everything off until I built a new cruiser, flew it 3 jumps, rebuilt the starbase, and upgraded it with meteor again (first upgrade). At that point, there wasn't enough of either enemy left to put up much of a fight.

Thus, the *only* feasible late-game counter to decked out Advent defenses is a mass of bombers covered by fighters. Their hangars take a lot of tactical slots and starbases need their meteor upgrade to beat back defense busters, so fighter cover is their weakest point. But with bombers alone it takes an incredibly long time to kill everything, which just means more time for the defense to get there.

So, solutions. I'm not going to propose anything too drastic, because it's no one thing that gives the Advent this huge advantage, and so I'd rather make a few adjustments in a few places:

- Drop the max mitigation on the beam turrets so it caps out at about 40-50% with research (so, 30-40% base).
- Decrease the range of hangar shield bestow, so they have to be built closer to the front turret line and thus be in more danger from defense busters.
- Possibly drop shields gained by beam turrets to a max attainable +500, for a total of 1250 with hangar, down from 1750.
- Increase the cooldown on Transcendia's Meteor Storm to allow for more balanced fleets keep up their ships longer. Longer cooldown means more time for Hoshikos to throw repairs on Ogrovs. Vasari Repair Cloud for their ships and Advent's AE shield restore will also have a bit more time to patch up their ships.

I'm not suggesting increasing or decreasing the damage of anything, especially bombers/defense busters vs MODULE armor, because shield mitigation and high shields are what gives the Advent this rather unique but huge advantage. TEC and Vasari defenses go down much, much easier so I don't want that thrown out of whack and made even faster to die.

Thoughts?

185,571 views 104 replies
Reply #101 from Sins Forums Top

Annatar your funny. Everybody elses opinion or comment is irrelevent

I didn't call his opinion irrelevant, but the comment was. He wrote it out as needing a whole mess of techs, when in actuality you just need one tech with no prereqs to give mitigation. So yes, that analysis he made was not correct. But don't make the sweeping generalization of 'everybody elses'.

It may take a long time to kill one turret but the player must invest much more in building such a wall and put everything in one basket so to speak which is really better for you...less fleet to deal with.

Never understood why everyone keeps saying it. Two turrets is enough to get mitigation with Synergy. Four turrets costs less than a carrier cruiser. Twenty turrets is like 5-6 carriers, roughly. Sure, it takes a lot of money to max the potential of the mass defenses clump, but as I said that's icing on the cake. It's less effective with fewer numbers, but then there are also fewer ships in play at those game stages. It's actually the late game that (relatively) trivializes the defenses because they don't scale with fleet size and eventually you can reach a critical point where you can still roll them.

So your point is that their new defense technologies shouldn't allow them to hold off such raids with "much fewer" turrets?  So what would you advocate?  "Slightly fewer?"

Well, as I said before - take a look at the TEC's upgrades, they got great damage upgrades to make them more dangerous, but you can still kill them the same as before. The Advent get a bit of a damage boost, but they are made dangerous not by the 50% damage boost but just because it takes much longer to kill one so it has the time to dish out more damage.

Certainly, shields on buildings plays well to the Advent race, but to me it's an awkward way of making them dangerous. Mostly, again, because mitigation is a very powerful mechanic that also does not scale well. The fewer the ships you have attacking, the worse it becomes. You can still max mitigation, so the few ships are much less effective. And, since you only need 2 turrets to gain the benefit of mitigation (though obviously less shield hp) with 5 labs or any number of turrets + hangar (which also sounds like it will get maxed mitigation in the next patch) and 3 labs, it's very possible to run into this situation.

So back to your question: yes, lower max mitigation on the turrets will mean they die faster and do less damage over their lifetime so for a set raid of x ships you would need more of them on the safe margin. Right now it's pretty uneven. You can still knock out TEC/Vasari turrets with only a handful of Ogrovs easily, but even though they outrange the Advent ones, they do so much less damage that it would still take an eternity.

On the other hand, faster mitigation decay would allow for fewer ships to have an easier time because they would not be able to max it, but that's a change that affects the entire race so that's why I'm not proposing it.

Reply #102 from Sins Forums Top

So back to your question: yes, lower max mitigation on the turrets will mean they die faster and do less damage over their lifetime...

I'm not sure you answered my question.  I will pose it again.  You said that the Advent's new defense technologies allow them to hold off raids with "much fewer" turrets than they could with vanilla Sins.  You said this should not be the case.  So what would you advocate?  The ability to hold off such raids with "slightly fewer" turrets than they could with vanilla Sins?  Do you think that such a nerf would still result in a good bang for the buck for the Advent player?  Something worth pursuing?  Or would it simply result in useless techs for Advent, and a rip-off for the person buying Entrenchment who wanted good useable content but instead got stuff that was essentially useless?

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Reply #103 from Stardock Forums Top

My view on this is that wile the synergy ablilty is cool and is decently effective, it is still not as effective as the tec gauss upgrades, (the ablilty to temporaily take away armor is a big "oh shit" for any of its targets).  Even with a 50% boost to its damage output, the beam weapons can still be ingnored by the cap ships, even with a good setup.  spaming the turrets with strikecraft and long rang ships duing the outset of the battle can still only be defeted by eather haveing a fleet in system, or a very large amount of strike craft.  Even Tec got a anti-strikecraft ability with its hangers to help with this problem.  The advent need somthing else as well. i was thinking that in addition to the syergy bonus, when 2 or more turrets attack the same target they could get another bonus to damage, like a x1.5 per turret damage muilplyer.  Also a "anti-strikecraft force field" ablilty on the beam weapons themselfs or the hangers, like the one that is avalible to the advent fleets.

As a tec player (mostly tec, i have played advent a little) when there are no starbases or fleets in a advent system (even on unfair with a full load out of tactical slots) or as soon as the biggest threat is distroyed, I usaly just scroll out of the system and attend to other buissness wile my fleet has its way with that system.   I aways thought that it was too easy to defeat the advent defence.

And you can always use mines, but with the advent, its such a chore to lay them out, not like the tec, where i can always plan out a mine field then leave the system alone to do the job.

Reply #104 from Sins Forums Top

Ok I see the 1.02 changelog.  Well all structures having maximum mitigation of 60% is actually a bonus to the other structures that did not gain additional mitigation beyond their minimum.