A tournament mod has long been needed for the pro-players who want a controlled and set environment for competitive play--it's just getting everyone to agree on what is "canon fair" that's almost impossible.  Sure, balance is also a current WIP in Rebellion too--that's a given.

But the big issue for everyone is the dynamics of the game have changed and the consequences of a lucky break or mistake in a game action have a lot more signifigance now.

Pre-Rebellion was more like grinding.  Aside from rushing tactics, it was mostly a battle to scale up forces faster than the enemy and eventually smother an choke them to death.

In Rebellion, you can gain a decisive advantage with a single well planned and thought out action with even a single ship or ability.  I'd say it's akin to losing your queen first in a chess match--it's devastating when it happens.

If you look at chess as an analogy, a lot of these discussions could occur:

• "It's ridiculous that a bishop can swoop in from all the way across the board diagonally--that's 1.5 times the speed and range of a rook!"
• "What!?  A knight can just jump over my pieces and completely bypass my defenses!?
• "The queen is ridiculous...it's just a kitbash of almost all the other pieces in the game and their abilities and it's way overpowered. It imbalances the whole game."
• "Why the heck should a pawn get to become any eliminated piece just because it reaches the back row of the board?"
• "Castling is an exploit and shouldn't be used.  It's absurd that a king can simply jump over just because a rook is nearby."

A lot of it is perspective and learning to deal with the new complexities--and Rebellion is more complex.  That isn't a bad thing.

To me it's not the question of, "You failed to put the fire out!" but rather, "Have you made them better?". I'd like to hear more people who have learned to successfully ride the pig talk about how they have found balance in tactics and strategy rather than just say there isn't any.

It's not hard to get 7 civ labs as AR in eco spot but for a frontliner you have to be really outclassing your opponent for it to be viable - and even then it will be delayed until late game after you've finished off your neighbor. I honestly don't see why TEH SUPERWEAPONS is a stupid suggestion though. As VL, you're going to want it anyway so it's not like you are being forced to buy some expensive counter you wouldn't want otherwise. TL should be laughing as they get Novas cheaper and sooner than any superweapon. Wail is a deterrant to taking certain routes - it can't do anything else to you and it might get used once a game with a good wail. Superweapons can sit back and blast away all game long and do not cost you any economic/population loss when you fire them. A TL in eco spot should be scarier than AR in eco with wail by a long shot. Better economy, more and cheaper superweapons, 2 starbases at choke points, etc.

I'm curious if anyone has costed out the economic loss of using wail. How many frigates/HCs do you have to kill in order to make up for the cost of the Wail research plus the economic losses from the planet until you reach full pop again, plus the costs of again researching all the planetary population upgrades?

Lovely...now we have sinperium using mirror match anologies....cause you know, everytime I play AR, it's only against other AR players...

Translate:  I'd rather hear from the people who say the game is balanced even if it isn't than from the people who say it isn't balanced even if they're right...

And you complain when we troll.....the cheek you have....

Some of you have brought up legitimate and respectable reasons for why wail is fine, which include but are not necessarily limited too:

• AR have nothing other than wail
• Vasari have so many tricks up their sleeve it's not even funny
• It can be avoided (unlike a certain lvl 6 titan ability)

Most nearly everything else is just garbage/trolling...at this point, the line is so blurred, I can't even tell who is trolling and who simply has no idea what they are talking about...

lol..let me spell it out for you. Armistice allows you to jump to well adjacent to, and then well with, culture centre. gives you enough time to take it out without your fleet going poop.

If this is true, then my bad. 

No I'm not. Loyalists can just deploy an sb in the grav well with culture centre.

While in theory that sounds appropriate, those numbers would really be meaningless...losing your frigates isn't just lost resources, it is lost time and lost momentum...if your fleet get's wailed, your empire is now wide open to attack...furthermore, wailing a fleet can mean that the high level caps or titan are now unsupported and can be easily sniped by bombers or what not...a cost analysis with wail just isn't appropriate...really the only meaningful cost of wailing a planet is that you can't do it again until the population regenerates...

That isn't much different from the OP SttC...it was very difficult for frontliners to do it, but it was stilled considered OP based solely on how ridiculous it was in the hands of an eco player...same goes for jumping orkies (now that they require civ labs), which are mostly considered OP because of what eco players can do with them....that frontliners can't get a certain special something easily in and of itself does not preclude an ability from being OP, because other OP (formerly or currently) techs are very similar in that aspect...

In regards to superweapons, in my experience I have seen wail used or set up in a game changing way more often than I have seen superweapons...even as TL, a superweapon is very expensive and usually it is better to put those funds elsewhere...the cost of the nova deregulation tech makes the first nova only marginally cheaper than if you just straight up built the first nova, so it's not like TL have a massive advantage in that regard...I'd also add that a nova kills 150 population, which will not prevent a terran from being a brutally effective wail planet...

As I have mentioned earlier, the concept of one superweapon being needed to counter wail does not bother me...but, overlapping wail often can make it so that multiple superweapons are needed, and I think that's just ridiculous...only the maw and jumping orkies would require that much time/resources/commitment to "counter", and if you think those 2 things are balanced then this discussion is a lost cause....

The thing that irks me the most is exactly what the OP has brought up, that wail prevents you from defending your own planets...there was a reason that the kosturas were nerfed to no longer affect fleets..."fleet-killers" like RB are okay when they can be avoided without ridiculous opportunity costs...wail however cannot always be avoided without making massive sacrifices (like not protecting your planets)....

overall I think theres more people here who think wail is not op/viable to counter than those who think otherwise.

I realize the true cost is more than just the cost of the ships lost, but it would still be a meaningful thing to know - like if the economic loss to the AR player over time back to full pop was twice the cost of the ships that got wailed, for example. I've just got no idea what that cost is - I think someone has done the math though much earlier around release when it first came up - I'll try and search for it.

I wouldn't compare the old SttC in eco slot to Wail in eco slot...that's a whole different level of OP.

That (as well as many other suggested "counters") assumes no defending fleet...I think that's the thing people really fail to neglect is the situations where there is a defending fleet...I've been told that "well the same applies for RB, defending fleet makes it harder to counter" but I don't buy into that parallel...if an opponent uses RB, they can also damage any of their ships in range, so they can't defend the SB and use RB at the same time very easily...wail has no "friendly fire" and can affect entire gravity wells, so I do not find the situations equal....

I've only seen this done once, and that was with a lvl 6 akkan (duration would be longer for lvl 8, so it would then be slightly more viable)...in the particular game where this "worked", I (as AR) had an asteroid/moon (something not very wailable, I don't remember exactly what) bordered by a single high pop planet...the akkan went to the asteroid/moon, then to the high pop planet and used armistice...the fleet then jumped to the asteroid/moon and then to the high pop planet...I put "worked" in quotes because while the fleet successfully wiped the culture center and was poised to attack the rest of the planet, my fleet came and drove it off...as soon as I saw the akkan, I realized what was happening and had plenty of time to get my fleet there...quite simply, any strategy that involves "trickling" of any sorts takes a long time and thus opportunity attacks (when the fleet isn't there to defend) have much narrower windows...in this case, wail forced my opponent to do something that gave me much more advance warning about an attack...thus, wail was still immensely powerful even though it never was used and I never actually had a good chance to use it...

There are some things though that could throw a kink in that plan....if the "adjacent" planet has a fleet or an SB (which will drain all AM upon phase jump), it's pretty much impossible to pull off unless your enemy really drops the ball...even PJI's at "adjacent" planet can foil the plan simply because they require too much time to deal with...you also have to have a level 6 akkan, which while they are common is not necessarily something you can get "on demand" like most counters...

I haven't personally seen someone use strip to great effect in v1.04 yet but I have heard accounts of a certain vasari whore who's name might rhyme with woohoo...from what I have heard, it seems like strip rushing as VL eco is still OP, just not as bad....

Played a game again both VR and VL in game....

And it was decided by in gravity jump and maw  not vail.....

Are you playing Advent Loyal often? what? never pick them? i bet you always go for vasari!

How the hell weil can be unbalanced if it only work if advent is defending his systems and if he is in deep defence - aren't you winning? lol.

Not to mention tons of way to counter weil by smart fleet movement or superweapons.

Me and slayer were talking....

Potential sounters to vail by sneaking ship in grav well and disabling it 

subverter 

marauder

radiance detonate am (it does disable red button on tec)

dunov .....

So basically, wail is acceptable because we have other more pressing OP elements that also need to be fixed? Lol....

As I've stated before, detonate AM can only affect targets with antimatter....culture centers don't have AM, therefore they cannot be targetted...

Dunov with (presumably) magnetize is going to be very difficult to pull off...cooldown is 15 seconds while duration is 10/12/15/17...in practice, that pretty much means you are going to have to have level 4 magnetize (level 3 is just too risky), which implies a level 7 dunov...not impossible to get, but I don't think you see to many level 7 dunovs with magnetize....in practice you'd most likely have to have multiple dunovs....

Subverter is going to be even harder than working with a dunov...cooldown is 60s while duration is 20s, which means bare minimum you are going to need 4 to be on safe side....not impossible, but much more risky if there are any defending forces there...at least dunovs are going to be harder to kill...

Marauder really is the only viable counter I see there...phase out hull has a longer duration than cooldown, minimizing micro and reducing your risk of something going wrong...

Judging by your post, greg, I have a feeling you and player slayer haven't actually tried these strategies yet, just theory crafted them....

I don't know who this is directed at but most of the people in this thread, including myself, are not vasari whores...and FYI, I've picked AL quite a lot, even before the v1.04...

okay,

Most of the people in this thread, including the OP, are skilled players...go rant somewhere else....

If wail dealt damage to both enemy and friendly units and structures (and of course, couldn't target friendly wells) that could limit its use. Overlapping wails would hurt the AR player more due to lost labs, trade ports etc. even if the AR scuttled the planet targeted by wail. 

Some people in this forum know the advent are weak but make it there career to make sure they stay that way esp when they start loosing to them.

This is just the beginning of the end for those people. Its going to get really interesting with each and every patch.

Seleucia--it isn't a given that all the perspectives people have on balance are correct.  There's a lot of room to look more closely at how people are playing and look hard to see if there are avenues being missed.

There has never been an asymmetric game that I know of that was perfectly balanced.  Unless it's an incredibly simple one, it isn't going to be possible. So you/we can spend a lot of time discussing ever finer degrees of change--each one requiring more changes as a result.

There might be a lot of advantage in devoting as much effort to looking at variations of strategy and tactics from different players.

The chess analogy had nothing to do with the sort of matches you related it to--it had to do with the idea that people can get focused in on what they perceive is "the problem" and not realize there are solutions or utility to what's already in front of them that don't require any change to the game at all, just to the perception of it.

(And there are some constructive examples of good tactical discussions in your comments above)

These aren't the full counters me and Greg propose..only part of the counter. You disable the culture centre long enough for your fleet to move safely. Then onus is on your judgement on how you use your fleet in that window of time to avoid/overcome wail if you're moving through a difficult map layout.

Theory crafted, yes, because as it is wail is so rarely op that I personally have never had to use any of them thus far. But these are just some of the many options I'd consider to counter wail.

Agreed. But sb is a potential option if there isn't a fleet.

edit: and..if you suspect nearby fleet, then just back it up with overseers

Yes. That requires 7 harmony labs. A vasari in same position, on the other hand, requires only 2 labs to deploy an sb that MOVES and can take down the suicide spot even faster. 

STTC followed by fleet + kostura...now that's something that is virtually impossible to counter, and is something that I see far more often than wail

Agreed. +1

Does red button use antimatter???? It is counter to red button and it is tested and employed many times aka meaning you cannot use it for a period of time after sb was hit with it.

We know subverter can shut down structures so perhaps side effect is to make it so you cannot use ability that is attached to that structure.....

For the record, I didn't strip all that much, even pre v1.04.  I just found it very short sighted as putting trade ports on the planet will give you better options late game and bring more money.