Getting Ponded by Advent as Vasari

If he's going to pour his money into fighters, there are a couple options with Vasari.

#1: Look for Neutrals

I realize this may seem besides the point, but this is actually key with Vasari. Most Vasari Units suck compared to Advent or TEC counterparts. The community seems to be in agreement that there needs to be some balances made, but one thing the Vasari are good at is getting a super eco early because their scouts can get neutrals. Get 'em. If it's a 1v1, any neutral more than 3 jumps from ur enemies homeworld should be yours.

#2: Kortul Devastator

This is the closest thing I can give to you that's a direct counter to an enemy fighter spam. Vasari don't get a capital ship that does great amounts of damage to enemy fighters unfortunately, but they DO get the Devastator. It's second ability disables the guns on all enemy fighters in a certain radius. The cooldown time of the ability is about as long as it lasts, and the area of effect is large. If you have flak or your own fighters, you can easily destroy an enemy fighter ball during the time this ability gives you

#3: Fleet

Flak. Get 'em. Somewhere in the range of 1-2 flak per every 2 enemy strikecraft squads. After that, it depends. You could go carriers, though I can tell you from experience, Vasari loses the battle of fighter vs. fighter. You could get the carrier cap for the vasari. It has a healing ability that will heal strikecraft mid battle.

If all your opponent is going to do is make a fighter ball early, you can try using light frigs (do anti-carrier damage) mixed with flak, but the problem you'll run into here is that the second your opponent gets long range frigates, those light frigs are going to die damn quick.

There's also the option of the enforcer (Tier 5 ship). It's the heavy cruiser and fighters don't do jack to it. Only drawback here is since he has fighters, he can just switch to bombers. Bombers take out HC's.

You could try a mix of carriers with fighters and HC's if you can afford it. Say like 15 enforcers + 6 carriers with 12 fighter squads. The fighters kill off enemy strikecraft. The enforcer kicks ass up close and personal.

If you don't have the time, then I recommend using flak...a lot of it....early. One of the meanest things you can do in this game is destroy enemy fighters, but leave the carrier to live. You give your opponent a ship that's out of the fight and takes up a lot of his ship slots so he can't build more of something else.

#4: Starbase

If you're playing entrenchment, try dropping a starbase on his ass. Seriously. The Vasari don't have too much going for them right now, but they definitely got this. Buy some flak or fighters to protect ur starbase from enemy strikecraft, buy it a couple upgrades in health (on the actual starbase mind you, you want this sucker to have 12+ armor), and at the least you'll keep the grav well you're fighting over. Only prob is starbases are expensive as hell and you gain control of 1 grav well.

Getting dischargin missiles on yer flak frigs helps a bit.
Its assailant version sucks ass, but sentinel's really works.

Question: I've always assumed the ability affects flak, but are we 100% sure it does? Obviously it affects Assailants. But you can't activate it for flak, so how do we know it's working?

you can, I've seen the ability icon on the Sentinal, and its active.

Here's another tip,

Use the ship suggestions Amish said above, Kortul, carriers w/ fighters, Skirantra carrier, flak to fill out your fleet, then select all of YOUR fighters and put them in a control group (ctrl+ a number). Then set them to attack 'local area only'. This way the enemy fighters will come to you to fight, where you can use your Cap ships abilities to either heal your fighters or disable the enemies weapons and your flak can support your fighters. Better if your fighters battle near your supporting fleet. Once your fighters have established their dominance of the skies, you can take the fight to your enemy, but bring your whole fleet along.

If you're using the Vasari light frigate or Heavy cruiser to take down enemy carriers, be sure and research reintegration. It will make it exceptionally difficult for your opponent to kill them with fighters.

True.  Keeping your fleet together in a tight formation plus using level 3 Jam Weapons makes enemy SC worthless.  Combine that with fighter blink and repair cloud and your SC just won't die.  Combine all of that with HC's that have reintegration, and your ships are close to invincible.

Oh, and the Disruptive Strikes on the Kortul is bugged...  It only works with the wave cannons rather than the pulse beams...  Even so, PS is the best 1st ability of any battleship.  It doubles damage and helps with shield regen.  It is awesome.

1:I aggressively scout and take neutrals at all times. I have gotten very adept at microing them moving around a grav well around defenders to grab them and roll out. I always have most of them.

2: I always use the Kortul. I go for Jam, get it as high as possible before our first encounter, and use it during the fights. He usually has an assload of carriers, so its not entirely possible to get every SC with each cast. It helps, but it is not a hard counter, it does run out, and my cap ship usually goes down fast.

3:Ive tried just getting a million flak. It just plain does not work. What usually happens is that he destroys all my DPS with his fighters as I am approaching, then gets out. I always set my Sents to Local Area, as they seem useless otherwise. Most of the time I try balling up, hitting Jam, and trying to thin out the Fighters with the flak, then moving in. By the time I actually reach him, about 60% of my dps is dead and he either goes for my cap ships and kills at least the Kortul, or leaves.

4: I use them. I use them both defensively and offensively. The problem is he scouts so much he instantly sends out his carriers and just kites a base and kills it taking no loss. Its very expensive to set up mines with every base, or squads, or he usually kills an SB as fast as possible. If I send my fleet to engage he takes out starbase,then a cap, then runs. Fighters are just so effective against my main DPS source that I usually cannot do damage once I get to him.

I went LF a few times against him. Basically he would FF on a cap, take it out and run. Then, late game, push all LF away and his Illums would rape me. Push renders the counter to carriers completely useless.

I really think that repulse is game breaking. =(

The Advent seem to be game breaking almost!!

Moral of the story is dont use lrms for your dps. If you can't keep them alive against his mass of carriers, dont use against him. If your opponent is carrier spamming you've got to be on the offensive and stay on the offensive. Carriers have a ton of hp so their tough to kill making them excellent at hit and run and offensive strategies. Their draw back is that they aren't too great at defending areas and their really expensive, so hit em were it hurts. If you KNOW hes going to carrier spam you, spam your own carriers flak and lf, and eventually HC and attack and stay on the offense. If the Kortul isn;t working out for you try the evacuator, nano bombs will help bring down Carrier health fast, Grav warhead will prevent them from escaping your lfs by jumping out and when you get drain planet you can nab up enemy planets quickly and move on. Stay ontop of those Carriers, follow em where they go. One of their biggest weaknesses is their SC rebuild rate gets cut down a lot when theyre in a well that has enemy units in it. Plus they need AM to rebuild SC (jumping out of a well with one of your SBs in it will rob them of all their AM) so stay with them with your light frigates until he sends lums after your lfs (then pull them back to your main fleet). If you stay on the offensive you'll be keeping his economy down while yours continues to rise (via taking his planets and making them yours). Don't wait for him to be ready to attack you, hit him first and keep pushing. Plus you definitely do not want him to get repulse (which, yes, is currently quite the game breaker). Remember it takes time for him to get his econ up and running efficiently, while yours will flourish early game with neutrals, use that to your advantage and get him before he can support massing carriers.

If you have to have lrfs, don't send them in with our fleet. Send in your anti-SC units first to thin out his air power. He'll either fall back, at which point you can send in your lrfs to clear out buildings and defenses (if he wants to jump back in he's just wasting the precious AM he needs to rebuild his fighters), or he'll stay in trying to take out your flak, which will spell trouble when those squads drop below 50% and you send in your lrfs.

If you have fighters and need them to defend a fleet of lrfs from other fighters or other lrfs, try setting them to 'hold position', they'll kill enemy SC and lrfs much quicker that way (as long as theyre in a good position)

What size games are you playing man? I know for a fact that 1 flak per every strikecraft squadron will do the trick. Flak being too good against fighters is one of the biggest complaints the online community has.

Repulse is currently broken. There is no hard counter for any race sadly. I don't want to sound like a jerk, but countering fighters shouldn't be that hard. As long as your flak are staying near your fleet (when they run off they do you no good), you should be taking them out. The only thing fighters are good against is Assailants, Scouts, colony frigs, and bombers.

The fighter ball is more difficult with Vasari, yes, because they don't have an anti-strikecraft damage dealing ability, but flak vs. fighters is a pretty lopsided fight in any given situation.

The best answer I can think of now is to give an example.

If he jumps into the system with say 15 advent carriers with 45 fighter squadrons (which is a lot...if ur seeing more than this ur playing some pretty big games where the two of you didn't start close to each other), I'd have:

1. Space Egg w/ nanite disassembler and gravity bomb (probably level 4 or 5 by this point)

2. Kortul Devastator, probably lvl 1,2, or 3. Depends on how recently I made it, jam weapons of course

3. I'd have probably 40 ish flak. I don't want to make too much flak, but if he's abusing fighters, then you abuse flak.

4. Accompanying them I'll have something in the order of either: a starbase prepped to be made, 10-15 assailants for bait, HC's, Light Frigs....mind you only one of these things. Can't afford all of that so early.

5. The trick would be to jump in all together (you can right click on the jump function of a fleet to make it do a group jump). Once you jump in together, have the fleet set to close  proximity so the flak won't go wandering. Wait for teh fighters to get close, then micro hit jam weapons. Boom. He'll lose at least 10% of his fighter strength (I think 25% might be more accurate) on his first pass and not do a bit of damage thanks to jam weapons.

6. If he's smart enough to stay away (which it sounds like he probably wouldn't, but he may, who knows), then build a starbase to take the contested system. He'll either fail to take out the starbase cause fighters are awful against buildings, or fail because he'll try to send bombers meaning he'll scrap his fighters and send bombers in piecemeal to be chewed up by ur flak.

Again, that's just a guess as to what situations ur seeing.

ONE MORE THING

This is a slim possibility. I haven't used jam weapons since the beta was released for entrenchment. This is because once upon a time, Jam weapons wasn't programmed right and didn't work....at all. It's possible this was never fixed so jam weapons isn't doing anything.

The other day I was running away my Kortul; it had 500 hull points left and about 20 bomber squads chasing after it.  Hit jam weapons at the perfect moment and warped out of the system without taking further damage.  It's very hard to actually pay attention and confirm that the little strike craft are indeed disabled, but this was one clear-cut case where I could plainly see those bombers couldn't complete their final attack run.

So yes, it does work.

Jam weapons works...  Its disruptive strikes that is bugged...

Good points, however, I think my problem is that flaks just arent countering anything enough. I know the hard counter to mass fighters is mass flak, I know about the group jump.

For some reason its just not working. I just get my ass handed to me over and over, he isnt even changing anything up. Its incredibly annoying.

I was also thinking that Jam Weapons might also have a max target limit. It seems that some are still attacking when he has enough, even though they were all in the target cirlce for JW.

And Sentinels are actually pretty good... I'd say you just need a tight formation and a few more flak...

No...  Its just that it only affects those that are within its radius upon activation...

Also note-

The SC icons represent only 1 craft in each squadron (which is why the icons jump around when the sc are being destroyed). The best time to use abilities against them is on their first pass when you KNOW theyre all together.

That being said, craft in a squadron exhibit similar attack behavior (linear pass or circle and fire). If you see alot of enemy squadrons exhibiting linear pass behavior, it safe to assume they're all over the place and even though their icon may be in range, many of the sc in that squadron may not be. However, if you see the icons exhibiting the circle and fire behavior,  you can assume the rest of the squadron is doing the same thing and staying in range of your abilities. SC will always do a linear pass behavior to moving ships, but will often do the circle and fire behavior to stationary ships and strikecraft, at which point they will get shredded by flak and non-moving fighters. (so often its a good idea to set your fighters to 'hold position' to defend your tightly coheered, stationary fleet.)

It sounds like your friend is raiding you, destroying things, and then pulling his carriers out when they need to rebuild their strikecraft so he essentially is taking almost no losses while he whittles away at you.  You could do the same thing right back at him with Vasari carriers. You also have to take the battle to his carriers after you have killed a lot of the fighters...don't let him rebuild in peace to come raid you again...keep the pressure on so he takes losses.  This might entail using multiple PJI's to keep him from easily getting out of a gravwell when he no longer wants to fight.

Vasari are most dangerous early game, but you aren't going to get any of these advantages on a 2 star map...it is an optimal set-up to allow the Advent player to be ready.  From midgame out Vasari are disadvantaged with their expensive ships until they can unlock the late game techs.  You have to fight defensively near your repair bays -- try and get RA up, get Subverters to crack his late game battleball, and use the Kostura cannon on offense to paralyze his defenses.

It is also possible your friend is just better and faster...skilled Advent players are really hard to fight when they have a large, diverse fleet assembled.  You should probably just upload your most recent replay to filefront or some other free download site and link it so some kind soul can analyze just what is going on.  There might be a lot of small things you are doing that can be improved on that have nothing to do with overall fleet composition.

Thanks for everyone's advice, I will download the next replay we have, most likely tonight, and you guys can analize what Im sucking at.

I can use the help, or more accurately, my monitor is close to being punched to death if I keep losing in such one sided fashion

Hi!

Since this set-up gives him as an Advent quite an advantage, simply stop playing this map, and request something smaller. 

BTW what game version you play?

BR,  Iztok

The two star set up negates the Vasari's main advantage: the ability to quickly build a fleet of assailants and such and quickly go on the offensive. The Advent require a considerably amount of teching to become a truely powerful force (e.g. to get guardians with repulse). Having two stars buys the time the advent need as jumping between systems is not a starting ability for any race (it has to be researched).

Don't Vasari get star travel at a lower tier than the other races?

Yes they do but it still does slow down the pace of the initial game measureably, and it tends to be more difficult to aggresively persue neutrals early on or to cut off the enemy expand. And its a guaranteed 2 jump minimum for reinforcments for the attacking team (or 3 minimum if taking the fight directly to an enemy planet).

2 labs instead of 3.  In practice, this doesn't amount to very much.  If you do have an enemy in your local star system, you don't need this technology to reach them.  If you don't have an enemy in your local star system, you should probably trade port spam... those lovely 4-lab trade ports.  The only major advantage Vasari get out of this is that they can send their scouts to other star systems to grab neutrals earlier.  As a combat tool, Vasari are either going to be at the 4-lab level for trade or they're going to attack an enemy in their own solar system anyways.