TEC KOL - The FatKid who keeps running out of cake...

I love the Kol, its normally my first cap built (I know I know what a noob mistake but I play AI normally so there is not much worry) so I feel the pain of the AM usage and feel its a little overboard in the early stages so abilities should start out at low levels of AM usage for early levels but at full should go to what is current (except Flak Brust, cut that to at least 75) but the Adaptive Force Field should remain the way it is

There's another discussion on this topic in general.  I totally agree, the Kol is an antimatter hog that simply doesn't work until it's a high level and you've purchased your antimatter upgrades.

low am :

 

works for progen, works for rapture, works for halcyon, works for skirantra, works for kortul, works for marauder, works for ...

 

i'm not gona type all caps down

 

but the thing is ALL caps suck am very fast, kol isnt an exeption

 

you have to micro your abilitys, if you're using auto cast then let me laugh at your face

 

i don't even use it for colonise or when i have 10 caps

 

so for 1 cap you suck am that fast? seriously get out of that auto cast and using abilitys everytime you have the am for it

 

keep in mind that a phase jump is 100 am

The problem though, is that most capitals have either passives, an abilities outside of combat (Colonize), or don't need to use their abilities all the time to be useful. The Sova is a prime example; Heavy SC is a passive, Missile Batteries is cheap, and Embargo is situational to not be used all the time. It's not an antimatter-intensive ship.

The Kol, however, has only weak, expensive abilities. GRG costs 75 antimatter for barely any damage, Flak Burst is 100 and not worthwhile untl level 2, and Adaptive Forcefield still needs 40 antimatter constantly for damage reduction. None of its abilities are actually useful until very high levels, and once the antimatter is exhausted, you have a brick with terrible DPS. It's abilities don't give enough for their cost.

Not really.  The Kortul's abilities, for instance, cost significantly less antimatter and need to be used much less often.  Both jam weapons and power surge cost 60 antimatter and last about 30 seconds.  Even if you're using both it's going to take you a minute and a half to blow through all your antimatter.  So yes, caps that use less antimatter do exist.  On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have ships like the Progenitor or Jerrasul with downright godly abilities like shield restore or nano disassemblers.  Adaptive shields and gauss cannon simply don't compare to those abilities.

I don't think drawing an analogy between the Halcyon's TK push and the Kol's flak burst will turn out favourably for the Kol, and most people tend to agree that the Rapture and Antorak need buffing as well (I occasionally see a rapture online, but I never see Antoraks).

 

Couldn't agree more.

 

 

The kol is the most powership capital in the game. Every cap has a weakness, and the kol has antimatter. But TEC has many tools availble to rememdy this problem, first is culture, maxed out, 1.5 antimatter a second, that is nothing to scoff at. Second, docking boons, 4.2 antimatter a second i believe. Combined, thats 5.7 antimatter in second in culture and docking boons before passive antimatter regen. Throw in the Dunov Flux Field, where antimatter costs plunge and the Kol is a ship that  is unstoppable. No other cap can claim this. Don't even get me started on what 15 kols can do to a fleet. Discount the power of the kol at your own peril.

I've actually seen more of the opposite; more Antoraks and virtually no Raptures. While both are mediocre caps, the Antorak I see at a regularly fairly basis because of its SB-rush potential. The Antorak is extremely bizarre, while Rapture and Kol just suck.

...Which costs an obscene amount of funds, waiting for high level Kols and a Dunov, and is still very situational. There's no reason to use the Kol currently, since its abilities aren't good until at a high level, in comparison to just about every other TEC cap (Even the Dunov can at least disable abilities from level 1).

dont forget antimatter regen in a sun's gravwell

Yeah so i guess if we want to use a kol we have to lure or beg our enemy to fight us in a solar grav well

Which also benefits them and could actually cause them to have an advantage.

The kol is the most powership capital in the game. Every cap has a weakness, and the kol has antimatter. But TEC has many tools availble to rememdy this problem, first is culture, maxed out, 1.5 antimatter a second, that is nothing to scoff at. Second, docking boons, 4.2 antimatter a second i believe. Combined, thats 5.7 antimatter in second in culture and docking boons before passive antimatter regen. Throw in the Dunov Flux Field, where antimatter costs plunge and the Kol is a ship that  is unstoppable. No other cap can claim this. Don't even get me started on what 15 kols can do to a fleet. Discount the power of the kol at your own peril.

 

As opposed to what? 15 Sovas? 15 Marzas? 15 Radiances? 15 Kortuls? 15 Eggs? How bout 5 Trinities?  I could go on, but 15 capital ships is something you will never see as they aren't used for DPS, but rather for their abilities and the Kol just doesn't support its fleet in any way shape or form.  It is invulnerable until it runs out of AM and then it is a very expensive brick.

A TEC  kol is a powerful ship LATE GAME, but as an early game capital ship, it is very weak. Maybe most of the single player people don't think its a problem, but most mulitplayer people do. I am the only guy online for the past 5 days, that inlcudes about 13 games that only I use the kol as a first capital ship.

 

To use a guass cannon costs 75 antimatter points, one shot only causes 350 points of damage, if you include the armour and and shiled migatrtion of the other cpaital ship or unit, it is much less, MUCH LESS!

 

Flak burst is an excellent ability and should be kept to where it is.

 

The Adpative shield ability should be a permenent feature to the TEC KOL and not use antimatter, but it should be lessend to a degree to only provide a level 3 ability of (24% reduction to attacks, 24% extra againest vasair phase missles). At the moment, using a kol, is like using a capital ship without antimatter. 

And people, yes you can gain antimatter from starbases, tec culture etc, but i am talking about at start of the game. Online is not as easy as single player people think, and by building culture or starbases with docking booms, you might as well just quit the game. sorry, thats my opioion.

and sorry i cant use quote in google chrome, but TEC KOL i beleive has an azmaing level 6 ability, and I do beleive it can be better then a marza in some cases, becuase most people can counter marzas easy, but when they face a level 6 kol, the cant be bothered to stop it using its level 6 ability.

GRG needs a buff badly.  We all agree there.  Its just how that is the issue...

I don't know.. AF as a passive might be good, but it might not..  I'd say that someone needs to make a mod to test it.

Docking booms regen health and AM.  If you are on the defensive, I don't call that worthless.  I call that incredibly powerful.

Well, of course FH is good.  It gives you splash damage, thus making a high level Kol blast all around it all while making the Kol all but immortal.

And I use Safari, so I can't quote either.

That's all late game stuff; you'll never lay hands on it in the early game.  While it's lovely to mention the Dunov/Kol combo, I have never seen this anywhere but late game.

Moreover, the Kol is hardly unstoppable.  By the time you can throw together the kind of support you're talking about, the Kol could reasonably expect to see 20 heavies attacking it.  Heck, one level 1 Radiance with detonate antimatter and it's practically worthless.

That's the real point: many capital ships shine from level 1, and don't need excessive comboes to be useful.  A radiance is useful from level 1, a Halcyon is useful from level 1, a Progenitor is useful from level 1.  A Kol is not useful until at least level 3 and even then it needs unit comboes to pull it off.


Progen with Halcyon and lots of guardians and illums.  If anything can claim to be unstoppable, it's that.


Are you joking?  Even if you could build that many Kols, you'd have so many that they'd never level up to any reasonable level.  They'd get MAULED by a big fleet of LRF or heavies.


Because jumping costs 100 antimatter, this isn't actually as useful as it sounds.  You have to be fighting either in the solar gravity well, or in a gravity well adjacent to the sun.  Maybe if you're playing on a premade like "Escalation" this would be the case, but most of the time the sun is too far out of the way to be useful.

 

By the way, if you want to quote, just type "quote" brackets around

[ quote ]like so, but without the spaces in the brackets[ /quote ]

Darvin, your post clearly shows that you do not know much about the kol and TEC is general. You claim the progen and carrier caps are useful at level 1. Yes, at the very start of the game because they are inadequate late game. You think all those strike craft from those halycon are useful once someone had enough carriers and flak? You claim the kol is useless once the antimatter runs out, but you forget the kols deals a large amount of damage to fleets as well, thanks to be able to target FOUR different units at once.

In Addition, you claim the kol gets destroyed by focus fire, and I claim whoever focus's on the kol is a idiot. They are trying to take down the hardest cap to kill in the game, while the other fleet is pounding on them. As for the unstoppable claim, without bombers, killing the said kol is very hard even with heavy cruisers and lrf. When you get multiple kols together, the problem justs snowballs, as strikecraft become useless, and its unlikely you will be able to focus down a kol before it retreats and repairs.

As for your statement that late game combo's don't matter, guess what, late game happens, when it does, you will be the one hurting for dismissing it.

Keep dismissing the Kol, I will be the one laughing at the end.

Elrosh, you clearly never fought an online match with anyone with his wits about him

15 Kols, lul.

I agree though that GRG may be a little too AM-heavy. Kortul, while not packing the punch of a Kol, can chain PS/weapon jam for minutes before running out of AM even at level 3+.

N3Rull, you clearly don't play mutliplayer that much, because you would know that I have 500ish games played and can hang with and beat many of the best players on ICO.

Kol is a godsend against Advent SC, and great against other SC. For the first few passes, at least. Other than that, it's highly ignoreable for a cap.

 

Sova maybe, but Halcyon, Skirantra, and Progen?  No way, they're some of the most awesome late game capital ships, definitely outclassing the Kol.  The Progenitor and Skirantra offer area of effect healing.  That just gets better and better late game.  The Halcyon's telekinetic push is much more effective than the Kol's flak burst (larger area and disable), plus it passively increases the damage of your entire fleet.

These capital ships are awesome from the early game till the late game.  The Kol is only good late game, and even then it needs to be relatively high-leveled and to have several unit comboes on standby. 


Four words:  energy amplification, telekinetic push.

Or I could spend that same fleet command on five heavies and be able to attack five targets at once for greater damage, plus they're harder to kill and don't need to level up to be effective.


Agreed; why bother throwing my DPS against that brick when I can kill everything else?  I was more making a comparison to the kinds of units you can reasonably see that late in the game.  The only Kol ability that scales well in this environment is flak burst.  That's all it is right now, a glorified super-flak frigate.


This is pure fantasy.  This never happens in real games.  By the time you can reasonably bring out enough Kols to even conceive of doing this, the DPS being fielded against them is insane, and those Kols will go down.  Moreover, if someone critically damaged a Kol then let it retreat, they're an idiot.  I often pursue caps multiple gravity wells searching for a kill. I can't believe how many people think they just need to jump out of the gravity well and they're safe; they're NOT.  You're not out until you reach a repair bay, and even then sometimes the enemy can still get their kill. 


I'm not saying late game comboes don't matter, not in the slightest.  My point is that this unit only becomes useable with those late game comboes.  Other late game comboes, like the Progen/Halcyon/Guardian battleball are positively insane, destroying fleets many times their size.  The Kol needs comboes like that just to become effective.

Other capital ships are strong from the word "go".  The new and improved Kortul is hard to kill and effective at disrupting strike craft from level 1.  The Radiance can disrupt capital ships many levels higher than it from level 1.  The Halcyon and Progen are fricken early-game titans that mature into late-game titans.  I want to see a Kol that competes with these awesome capital ships.



Yes, I know that Elrosh plays multiplayer, though I agree talking about 15 capital ships really doesn't make him sound like one.  Given how little we see of the Kol there, I'm struggling how he holds this opinion when all empirical evidence is to the contrary.

 

Okay, first off you apparently never play as or against Advent.  Those two caps are freaking awesome!  Throw in a Radiance and their capital abilities are null!  Who cares about SC numbers on the Halcyon when you have Tele Push or AEA!?!  Repair Cloud only gets better with larger fleets.  The same goes for Shield Restore.  

And if you want to talk about a single capital spam, you would be better off throwing in 15 Kortuls.  The Kol does one thing: kill SC around it.  Other than that, it is just a really freaking big and expensive brick.  And all you have to do is spread out your SC until the Kols run out of AM.  Then just focus on one and wipe the floor with its captain's face.  And so what if it retreats and repairs.  You just spent a third of your max FC on capital ship spam.  I would just bring in 75 Kodiaks for the same value and shred you.  I don't care if you think you can survive that.  You won't.  I would like to point out that that would be around 1600-1700 DPS, which is far more than your Kols could dish out and also, since it is backloaded damage, a single burst would deal somewhere between 10000 and 12000.  Either way, you Kol evaporates.

I wish I had cake to run out of.

Ill admit, Progen and Haly combo is awsome, but not at early game, thiss is becuase i diciple spam or illumator spam will wipe the floor with those. If your talking late game, then I always have those two mid - late game as they are awsome caps.

But We aint tlaking about that, we are talking about the kol guys, VOLT_CRUELERZ, is that all you use the kol for? to kill sc? thats a waste of a good capital ship. A KOL reminds me of the flim transformers, it just keeps taking the punishment, and throws out a lot more in return. problem is those, it never really hits a good point until level 4, as having 2 gauss cannon, 1 Flak Burst, and 1 adaptive force field, it acutally becomes decent, but until then, it is a really weak starting cap.

If you compare the weaponary of for example a radinance vs kol:

Radiance anti-matter removal ability - Kol Gauss Cannon

I would rather have the Radiance.

Randiace Shield (Extra Armour and 15% Antimatter Asorbation at max level) vs Adaptive Force Field (35% Damage reduction + 65% phase missle reduction)

I would rather have the Kol.

Flak Burst vs Animosity

I would rather have the Kol.

Level 6 Abilitys

Questionable?

 

Changes:

Change 1:

Adaptive force field as a passive ability (so no antimatter is needed to use it)

Level 1-3: 10% -> 20% -. 30%    Damage Reduction

Level 1-3: 15% -> 25% -> 35% Phase Missle Block

 

I think this change would result in the KOL having a better chance early game.

 

Change 2:

Level 1 Gauss Cannon reduced from 75 to 65

Level 2 Gauss Cannon reduced from 75 to 60

Level 3 Gauss Cannon reduced from 75 to 55

 

Gauss Cannon is still bad. At level four, it gets four shots before the Kol completely runs out of antimatter, and that's not counting flak burst (Which also costs a ton more) or forcefield. And it's mitigated, single target damage.

 

Obviously I will use GRG if I have extra AM and my enemy doesn't have SC, but other than that...  The Kol has three good qualities.  I will rank them in order of value.

1. Slaughters nearby SC.

2. Hard to kill.

3. Finest Hour.

 

Unfortunately, few Kols make it to level 6, so that is out.  And 2 is only relevant if 1 is true as no one cares about a giant worthless brick with no AM.  So you'll lose some SC sure.  But after that, the Kol doesn't really do anything unless its level 6+.

 

 

And GRG needs either a damage buff or an ability.  With AF passive, I think you would be fine with AM amounts, but it would still be bad as only a fraction gets through.  For this reason, I've suggested having it act as a shield breaker where it knocks down mitigation for a while.  Other ideas have been straight damage increases.  The problem is that when you use this at the beginning of the battle, their mitigation is nill.  As such, you deal 900 damage.  Upping the damage to 2000+ while permissible mid battle would make the Kol a great lancer that could quickly knock down shields in the first shot that would be incredibly OP.

Other suggestions have been straight damage to hull, but that might be OP too.  Though it certainly would help make it an early game choice and thus increase its likelihood of reaching a higher level where it is better.  If you ever got a Kol with this type of a buff and Flux Field together, anything in its path would die.  Of course, outside of SP, that would be very very rare, so it might be okay.

Other people have suggested that it penetrates the target or that it deals AOE damage.  I am against an AOE, but penetration does make sense and if I was a dev (or had complete access to code and not just mod tools) I could easily make it deal damage based on how far it went through the ship.  Basically, on collision, you start a timer and you end it when you exit it (and reset the timer so you could deal damage to the next target).  Then just divide because you know the velocity of the round and you have the duration, so you know the distance it traveled through the target and then have damage based on that.  This would make it more powerful against larger ships and weaker against frigates.  For instance, if used against a scout, damage would be small.  Used against an Akkan from the front, and you just did a ton of damage to the target.

I don't know..  It needs a buff, I just don't know what it is.  Maybe in the next patch which has been estimated at around 5 weeks from now, the devs will have put some awesome idea we haven't even thought of.

Don't know if this was the most recent patch, but I noticed that Gauss Rail Gun cripples the target's propulsion now. I think at level 3 it completely stops the target ship for a short amount of time. This definitely has utility particularly on fleeing capital ships. If people are aware of this and still feel its not enough, here's my idea then:

Level 1: Affects 3 targets in a line, each additional target suffers 50% of the previous (so 100/50/25)

Level 2: Affects 5 targets, each target suffers 66% the effect of the previous

Level 3: Affects an unlimited number of targets in a line, each target suffers 75% the effect of the previous (ie at some point it will be doing 0 dmg to anything)

With this arragement, you have a simple AOE attack that also slows down enemies, offering some utility particularly against bunched up targets or fleets trying to escape from your clutches.

It does reduce the target's speed, but I wouldn't use the term "cripple".  The speed reduction is quite tame, to be honest, and I don't consider this a very useful effect at all.

Unlike most disablers, gauss cannon is a forward shooting ability and it is very difficult to actually hit a fleeing enemy with it.  Unlike an Akkan or Jerrasul which only needs to move parallel to its "victim" in order to use its disabling abilities, the Kol must be directly lined up with its target, and doing this while pursuing (with Sins bad pathing in particular) is virtually impossible.

Moreover, the biggest factor in "speed" is actually acceleration.  Ion bolt will reduce an enemy to a complete stop, requiring them to accelerate back to full speed.  That is the real killer there.  The Kol only reduces maximum speed, so the target only needs to do some minor acceleration to get back to full speed once the effect ends.  Moreover, it doesn't come to jarring stop and can keep moving while under this effect.

No, the ship is still capable of moving at a fairly reasonable speed.  Most importantly, it won't have to undergo much acceleration to return to its top speed after the effects ends.

 

Retooling the gauss railgun as an area of effect ability is viable.  At the time of this discussion, there was another thread going on in which we did brainstorm different ways to improve the GRG, along with some other abilities.  Frankly, I don't care what it gets, but the Kol needs an improvement here.