New Advent Player

Generally speaking, you have two choices for opening capital ship: the Progenitor and Halcyon.  The Progenitor a long-term option, giving you a stronger economic foundation and better supporting large fleets.  The Halcyon is a military opener and your strongest combat capital ship by a significant margin.  It also remains relevant into the late-game and is very effective against militia, so in general most people err on the side of the Halcyon if they're unsure of which of the two to go with.  On bigger maps, use the Progenitor, smaller maps focus on the Halcyon.

General advice for any faction is to focus on early colonization.  Building a strong foundation for an empire is going to pay off marvellously even in the short-run.  The Progenitor can be used to "skip" past planets whose militia are too time-consuming to deal with, allowing you to beeline for key tactical worlds.  Against the AI, it's actually quite easy to box him in with 3 or 4 planets within the first 20 minutes of the game, then backfill all the worlds you missed.

For colonization, try knocking out the Krosov Siege Frigates in the militia first, then colonizing the planet.  The militia can no longer bombard the planet, and you can build a defensive turret to help clean them up.  From there, you can keep fighting to gain the XP, or keep moving and colonize planets.  A lone colony frigate can actually colonize an asteroid in this manner.  Just move and colonize it and start construction of a turret right next to the planet.  It will complete and destroy the militia siege frigate before it can finish bombarding the world.  Using such minimalist tactics, a small group of frigates can colonize worlds with low militia levels while your capital ship pursue more heavily defended or remote locations.

Avoid unnecessary expenditure.  Keep light on technology, minimalize planet upgrades, and focus on purchasing things that directly increase your income.  Extractors, trade ports, maybe a bit of culture.  Stay away from stuff that says +7% income; this early small numbers like 7% are a drop in the bucket and not worth your time unless you really don't have anything better.  Usually you want to move up to Illuminators or Destras as your primary combat unit.  Disciples are passable, but too easily beaten by the Javelis LRM and Kanrak Assailant.  For defense, get the repair platform operational as early as possible.  This thing is a real life-saver, especially for those fragile Advent capital ships. 

For economy, your best option in the long-run is a big chain of trade ports.  The longer your trade route, the more money each individual trade port makes.  Breaching 100 credits per second income within 30 minutes is totally doable.  Avoid "resource focus" like the plague.  This is ability is downright horrible and you will pretty much always get more money from trade port mode. 

A good fleet combo is the Iconus Guardian with the Progenitor Mothership.  Use the Progenitor to keep shields topped up, while the Guardian absorbs a lot of the damage.  If you add in a Rapture Battlecruiser with Vertigo and max out your shield mitigation bonuses, this can be a crazy defensive combo that brings you to ~99% overall damage reduction, which is all but invulnerable to anything that doesn't bypass shields.

Multiplayer or singleplayer?

Some things to know about the Advent: the other races often rely very heavily on their LRF, but the Advent's LRF is the Illuminator, which has some problems. Firstly, it requires 3 military labs instead of 2, and so takes a little more effort to get, especially in the more cramped games like 5v5 where there aren't many logistics slots available. Secondly, its listed DPS is spread out over 3 beams: one front and two sides. It doesn't do all that much damage to single targets, and so can be ineffective if the enemy has quick repair capabilities or if you don't have a critical mass of Illuminators. So, scout / Disciple / flak spam can be better, at least in the early-game.

The Advent scout is quite nice. Although it doesn't do all that much damage (like all scouts), it is incredibly durable for its cost. If the enemy spams LRF (which is likely), one way to counter that is to spam scouts, which works if you can't build flak for whatever reason.

In the more cramped games, the Advent's carrier cap, the Halcyon, can be very fearsome due to Adept Drone Anima - the capital ship can support 8 strike craft squads by level 5!

Once you have a bit of breathing room and have the logistics capacity, it's a good idea to research and build Guardians, which can help your fleet survive longer due to the damage-sharing. The Guardian is sometimes combined with the Progenitor to help with shield regeneration. The other support cruiser is rarely worth building.

Those are the things I can think of off of the top of my head.

Thank you for all the replies how about a late game strategy whats good then:) and I heard culture spamming enemies to death once;P

You're talking about single-player then... sigh.

Late-game? Carriers with mostly bombers is a pretty easy way to deal damage, along with some flak and Guardians, and a good number of Crusaders is a decent start.

Im talking about both actually aha

The strategy for one is so far removed from the strategy for the other that it's almost noncomparable.

What I mean is I wouldent mind either or aha. I play singleplayer when im not in the mood to tryhard:p

The Transcencia culture bomb is generally used to take out heavily entrenched positions.  It only works against very localized targets, and won't be effective to take down an entire empire.  Essentially you use the culture module on your trancencia combined with culture buildings to produce a veritable tide of culture that completely swamps the enemy.  You need to totally overwhelm their culture production; if capital ships are present as much as 5:1 might be the minimum just to start seeing any effects.  The massive amount of resources required to do this means that you're almost always better just putting that money into military fleet and getting your hands dirty. 

Using culture just to pressure the enemy isn't a bad idea, but don't expect a kill from it unless you go totally overboard.

Late-game against the AI, you can win with massed bombers.  Just keep moving away from its fleet while your bombers go to work killing stuff, and if they get to close use the repulsion ability of the Iconus Guardian to put some distance back between you.  The AI can't handle this, and as a rule of thumb 100 squadrons of bombers means you win in single player.  In multiplayer, you'll need to diversify.

I usually Mix my armies anyways, gonna play some multiplayer later tonight I think:)!

If you are really sirious about playing advent then u will learn more sins than playing other factions. Advent are a complicated race that needs greater attention in game mechanics to be able to win.

Hint: When u use illuminators and Defense vessels u have to move them into the heart of enemy fleets to make use of all the beam and laser banks. Don't attack at a distant.

Yes, definitely some good replies.  Late game strategies with the Transcendia star base Meteor Storm can be devastating.  Altho it is a tier 6 research, it is worth jumping up to.  Add Mass Disorientation (T4) for further killing power.  Since you have 6 labs, you may as well get Perseverance on Subjagators for unparalleled single ship healing.  And consider adding a couple more labs for Mass Transdendence.  Then you can scuttle 3 military labs, once you have them all.  With Mass Transcendence you can really take advantage of multiple high level Cap ship ability synergies.

lol

Why hint?  That's no big secret.  Hint:  move them around too.

Your probably laughing about the Subjagator, since everyone thinks its a joke.  But its 1000 point heal is no joke. 

It's 1000 points over 40 seconds though: 25 hull/sec, slightly more than the Hoshiko. However, it has to face its target in order to activate, which is a huge disadvantage: it takes a looooong time to turn, and by the time it's oriented, the frigate might have already been destroyed. Getting the Subjugator and even then researching its repair ability is logistics-expensive (6 labs) and very credits/resource-expensive. If we were talking about smaller early-game fleets the Subjugator would be nice because it would have time to orient and repair and would be able to keep repairing for a while until the frigate dies, but by the time 6 military labs plus research are viable, fleets are probably huge and frigates probably die way too quickly for the Subjugator to heal more than a small amount of hull on a single target.

The only use I see for it is for repairing starbases, structures, and capital ships, which it does pretty well in combination with repair bays - however, when LRF swarms can be doing like 500-700 DPS (before mitigation), I'm not sure +25 hull/sec would help all that much, even on large targets which'll survive long enough to soak up a good amount of healing.

At the moment I'm not convinced the 2600/450/725 cost would be worth it in most cases, although it could be nice for repairing capital ships out of battle if they can't make it back to repair bays.

Perseverance isn't a joke, but it isn't all that useful. In my opinion.

500 DPS after mitigation though will drop to 175 DPS. So with a perserverance & repair platform in sync, you are further nullifying 55 DPS. Thats equivalent to voiding 157 of the original 500 DPS. No Joke indeed. Can keep a transcencia alive a LONG time.

Perseverance also makes its target immune to disablement (ignoring the effects of Ion Bolt and Reverie come to mind).

Sure. It can be useful... in certain niche situations. But I'm not convinced that would justify its cost in most competitive games.

Wrath, you raise some good points, and Perseverance does have some issues, including forward facing activation. But also, since its channeling, it has to remain stationary during that 40 seconds.  I think people overlook this requirement, and interrupt its full healing cycle, so it looks like it is doing nothing.

I use it in much the manner you described.  Just a few, for high value targets.  I feel that if it saves one, then it is probably worth it.  But I did preface my above comments with "Since you have 6 labs, you may as well get Perseverance".  I wouldn't build 6 labs for Perseverance alone.  But I would for Meteoroid Control alone.  Also, I wouldn't build 8 labs for Mass Transendance if I didn't already plan to buy at least a couple more Cap Ships and quickly level them up.  (And I would really prefer to have Resurrection by this point as well).

And getting those techs are prefaced by the intention of scuttling military labs.  Those are really the only military techs above tier 5 that I find potentially worthwhile.  And they remain in effect even after you scuttle the extra labs.  In fact, I find that I can scuttle all the way down to 3 military labs, (if I want to forego Subjugators & HCs), but still maintain: Repulse, Illum's Deceptive Illusion, weapon upgrades, and all of the tier 4 techs for Starbases.

Perseverance wont save the advent. Only raw fire power: 

Do not lie to yourself that advent has time to repair its fleets or caps.

They are the masters of shields, instance defense:

You should only  concentrate on getting crusaders and flak and if u can't make it there get flak and illumminators. 

Your belief system in aqcuiring repair/utility cruisers is naive at best. Maxing out shield and mitigation research is your idea of repair.

The number 1 cap u should be making is the halcyon for offensive purposes.

The Ultimate choice to make use of synergies is non-other than the mother ship: It is the advent shield regen-repair ship and its also your main offensive+defensive. Its a plasma cannon and abuses malice. U can inflict massive amounts of damage with a fleet of crusaders and it can keep your damage reduction cruiser: Guardian alive . Its your best cap-ship in the game for all purposes and ignoring it is a fatal mistake. 

Some can start with a mother ship and defeat rushes and some can't. 

On a small map if u want to survive a vasari carrier cap rush : Repair Platforms is your first defense (2-3)

Defense vessels, Illums, 2-3 carriers. Why? All high hp/shield units. and counter everything: 

So yeah, go 3 hostility temples. 

Having carriers can also save u from a star-base rush but u should alwaya pick halcyon as an opener on small maps for this very reason. 

From there on: Mass produce the illum/flak or crusader/flak/illum combos

Economics: Just get the trade ports and worry about culture later

P.S -if anyone of u see people using subjugators plz snipe them and then shoot them in the face while typing: " I just malicested u. U should have made crusaders"