There are culture buffs for the Advent that will actually prevent phase missle penetration through shields.

Your arguments are interesting but you're throwing away the fact that the TEC player spent exponentially more researching and building said novalith(s) to counter ONE planet using Wail at a time. There's a HUGE difference between negating the ability and being able to force a use on ONE planet per X many cooldowns. 

One Novalith cannon can keep not 1, but 3 planets bottomed out in population.  Novalith deals 150 population damage every 6 minutes.  Even terran/desert planets only generate 45 population in 6 minutes.  Moreover the novalith only really NEEDS to bottom out one at a time- the planet they plan to attack.  After which they will bottom out the next planet they need to attack.  Essentially even if thewy could only do 1 planet at a  time, they in the end could ultimately preventing any planet from ever using wail against them by just bombarding whichever planet they plan to assault next.   If the novalith were literally built so it could never be fired on one pre-determined planet then I may agree with you, but as it is a single novalith can basically negate Wail for the rest of the game.

 And it's not like that's the only effect of novalith.  The economic damage novalith causes is far greater then the cost of said novalith.  So no, you can't just compare the cost of novalith to cost of wail of the foraken and call it a fair hard counter- because the primary purpose of novalith isn't said hard counter.  We all know most players who build novaliths will do so regardless of the presence of an advent rebel- so do pretend that Wail is the entire purpose of that 800+ credit investment.

The first shot of a novalith to a terran world costs the opponent 5000-7000 credits in taxes(dependant on game resource speed) plus a hit to trade.  A novalith that fires twices can easily pay for it's self in economic damage to the opponent.  

Moroever this is less of a matter of "X has a higher cost counter" and more just a matter of it being bad for faction diversification.  No single faction specific tool should have it's usefulness entirely negated by a tool available to an entire race.  As I said before it's like if some faction were given a technology that disables any second starbase in a well they are attacking as long as they have units present(Which would in turn completely negate the TEC loyal's twin fortresses).  Such tools shouldn't exist as they utterly negate key technologies that define a faction.

 I'm strongly of the opinion that there shouldn't be hard counters to said key-faction specific advantages.  There need to be counters to be sure, but the counter should never be hard enough that these advantages literally yield no benefit against opponents utilizing said counters.

In one of my recent posts I had already noticed my mistakes and ceded I was wrong on the gambling comment.  That said it doesn't make a difference.  Even if you can wail when a novalith shot is incoming, it is still is allowing the TEC player to dictate when the ability is used(he can shoot the novalith when his fleet is a safe distance away). A wail forced to be blown when the enemy has no fleets i nthe area isn't much different then a wail that never got to be used.   As long as TEC can harmlessly trigger Wail when they have no fleets in the area novalith will have essentially neutered Wail.

When it comes down to it for wail to fufill it's purpose, the threat of a large AoE has to be present when the TEC player decides it's actually time to invade.  The entire purpose of the tech is to make attacking players hesitate to commit their entire fleet- if they can force the advent player to blow wail when they have no fleet present and then send in their fleet Wail does not serve this function.

I addressed that in my other post... just bank the dead pop. Problem solved.

If the Novalith STILL does too much damage in a universe with the "soul bank" implemented, that suggests a game-wide issue (everyone but TEC has weak bombardment mitigation), not a faction specific issue.

Aye I remember your previous post. I had though hedging back to the previous "gamble" comment you were implying it was counterable now(as that was the original context of that comment).  My mistake.

And banking dead population would certainly be another way to go about it.  A bit more complicated, but it would accomplish the intended goal just as well my proposition(actually even more so).  It simply takes a seperate approach(allows both novalith & wail to apply ther effects at full potency rather then my approach which would result in them both have their effects partially mitigated).  Honestly I think both would be equally balanced methods of solving this issue.

Why can't we just have wail also be a passive, so if the enemy shoots your planet, if its a border world it will automatically trigger the wail, so adjacent planets will suffer damage too?

Same could go for bombing.

As I said to a few other suggestions: then wail wouldn't fufill it's purpose.  If the enemy chooses the time & location of Wail's damage, they can easily harmlessly discharge it without suffering any serious damage.

In the most extreme case a TEC player could novalith the population down, blowing the AoE when theier fleet is at a nice safe distance, then attack with their entire fleet.  Frankly if it were passive it's be objectively weaker then it is now(countered every bit as hard by novaliths and less cotrollable then the current wail).

Wail is suppose to make enemies hesistate to commit their entire fleet to an attack on large planets controlled by the advent rebels.  The only way that can be accomplished is if the advent rebels ahve the ability to hold back the AoE damage until a alrge number of enemy ships are present.

In short, only changes that allow the advent rebel player to be in complete control of when the AoE damage really will work.

Well, if it doesn't trigger the damage anyway, a TEC player can still just bomb border worlds as much as he wants to keep population down. So he's alot safer this way, than if planet damage would cause wail damage always.

Tweaking this to having any damage to planets have the wail effect would more likely lead to the enemy bombing planets further inside, so you will have your planet at full strength whenever you want it. Or the enemy uses the nova only to keep your border planets low so you cant wail him, which will also benefit you, as most times you have more core than border worlds.

The only other viable method of dealing with this would be to massively boost population growth (maybe only for border worlds?). But you proposed that already.

As Bilun pointed out, the problem with "auto-triggering" damage is that it gives TEC (or anyone else doing bombardment) full control of when the damage is applied. If we let Advent "charge up" Wail with population they lose to bombardment in addition to the existing mechanic, bombing can't neutralize Wail's long-term damage potential.  Any population growth that happens can contribute to Wail (and this is the important part) even if it gets blown up in the mean time. So if you try to sweep in with a huge fleet after a few Novalith shots, you'd still end up eating a huge amount of damage.

You could do some clever things with population growth to solve this problem, but I'm partial to my own "soul bank" solution. I figured I'm allowed a little bias towards my own ideas.

With the upcoming limit of two super weapons per faction, it will be much harder to completely disarm all wail possibilities seing as you would have to kill the population of the planet you are planning to attack, and every other advent rebel planet adjacent to that one.

With only two novaliths, that probably won't be possible.

2 novaliths can still kill population faster then 6 worlds can generate population.  Moreover among surrounding planets there will rarely be more then 1 or 2 large worlds(including the word it's self), asteroids/moons have small enough populations even sacrificing a few of them don't offer the disuasion that Wail is supposed to create.  

In all honesty the whole reason I made this thread is that at present all it takes is a single novalith to neuter Wail.  If it had actually taken 3-4 I would have thought it entirely reasonable(that's a huge investment in immobile superweapons that offer no defense).  The whole problem is it only takes smart use of a single novalith to do so as things stand being the novalith population damage so vastly outpaces population generation rates.

Again not saying my method is the only solution(for example Evidence's idea would work just as well as would any number of yet unnamed options).

But when it comes down to it, the advent rebels need to be able to rely on some portion of wail damage not being negated by novaliths(at least 30-40% of the damage methinks).   If everyone else can deal with the full threat of wail, the TEC will be perfectly capable of dealing with the threat of a 30-40% strength wail.

You're still talking about a lot of time setting up a single attack. Assuming the border planet itself is a large planet, and ajacent to it is another large planet, as well as an asteroid and a moon, it will take two shots per large planet and one for each other, six total. With two Novaliths that's three volleys, each at 6 minutes intervals, for a total of 18 minutes of firing novaliths to kill off populations and partially disarm Wail.

First, the populations on the first planets hit will have started to come back by the time the last planets are hit. Not enough to wipe out the enemy fleet by itself but enough to deal damage.

Second, you just had almost 20 minutes to figure out your planet is going to be attacked and prepare in consequence: mobilize your fleet, buff defenses. A Wail from a half dead planet or an asteroid by itself may not be much, but when you've got your fleet ready to come in and finish the job, it makes a difference.

BUT

This scenario is very circumstancial, you could have 5 adjacent planets and you could have only one. It depends on the map, on which planet being hit.

Having some sort of safety net to fall back on with Wail would be nice. Having it possibly entirely shut down by Novaliths is not amusing.

Not really, generally a given player only has a few big worlds anyway(unless they are winning) in whichc ase even before considering an invasion, the passive firing of the novalith is probably going to be keeping the large worlds down just for the economic damage it causes.  Shooting those planets isn't really going out of the way of what the novaliths would be used for even in the absence of invasion plans.

Its true to completely neuter Wail it would take a few shots at the moons and asteroids, but frankly

Again, even before an intent to invade comes into play, the TEC player is probably going to be able to keep all of your large worlds under bombardment(so once they decide it's time to invade the target large world will likely already be bombarded down).  Two Novaliths can kill population at the same rate as 6 terran/desert planets regen pop.  Most of the time a given player will only have 2-3 such worlds unless they are already winning(at which point the discussion is mostly moot).

The only real preparation for the attack would be 1-2 possible shots to asteroids/moons.  18 minutes advance notice is a vast exaggeration. 

average is something like 3-3.5

Here we agree.  Like I said I do think novaliths should be a partial counter.  I just think the advent player should be able to rely upon having novaliths mitigate no more then 60-70% of the damage potential of a given world.  30-40% of a desert/terran/ice world is still a potent threat discouraging the enemy from sending their entire fleet.  Blowing up one or two adjacent moons is not.

I don't think novaliths should have zero counter potential(it's fine if they mitigate Wail), but too high of a mitigation potential doesn't allow Wail to attain it's full effect.

I suppose another solution could very well just be a tech that puts a lower bound on how low population on planets can be reduced(perhaps 30-40% of max).  In all honesty it would barely touch the economic effects of Novaliths, being that the best way to hurt the target player's economy is to spread shots around(applying the debuff to more planets) being that 150 population to one planet makes just as much difference as 150 population damage to another.

Or base Wail damage on the highest population the planet had since it's last wail rather then it's current population. Honestly I'm not dead-set on one solution.  I proposed the one in my OP because it suited the advent rebel theme and addressed the issue pretty well without having a huge effect on the economic damage caused by novalith.  That said, anything that would allow the advent rebels to reliably have a significant portion of their Wail damage even under novalith bombardment works for me.