Will you ever stop trolling?

One thing that's not entirely obvious about the Rad is that once it levels up a bit, it easily gets an armor of 13+6(bonus from its passive)=19, doubling its hull basically, meaning you can spend twice as long bombing an enemy roid (or some structure with AM) before you have to retreat compared to most other caps. So it's not as awesome or obvious as the Kortul or the [bugged/OP] Corsev in the survival department, but it is not negligible either.

On the flip side, detonate AM is more powerful than Kortul's passive drain early on. And the synergy that the Rad gets with "antimatter from damage" on its passive makes it a nasty repair platform nixer/killer. Early on, you can outfox and kill an enemy cap with the Rad by slipping the Rad to the enemy's repair bays ahead of their damaged cap, instead of just chasing it with Rad. Even if the enemy LF fleet starts pounding the rad, it will typically survive enough to deny repair/AM so that your fleet can kill the enemy's cap with enough time to retreat the Rad for its own repairs. Due to the high armor of the Rad, Advent repair platforms are extremely effective at saving it and keeping it alive even if the enemy chases it. It's not the most obvious synergy that the Advent gets, but it's there. (Remember that repair points are effectively amplified by armor and shield mitigation during combat. So a Rad with 19 armor and 65% sm only takes 8.75% actual damage from LFs' face value damage (0.5 x 0.35 x 0.5), meaning that a repair platform doing 30 hp/s can nix 342 dps on a Rad, basically 35 LFs' worth of damage at 10 dps each. The Rad's own [much lower] self repair in both shield and armor also helps a bit by getting same effective multiplier.)

The only thing/counter that the Rad sucks a bit at is if the enemy cap starts going back and forth on a long phase lane to keep itself alive. The correct thing to do is to give chase with your LF fleet but keep the Rad in only one well, otherwise its AM will also be depleted quickly. But the enemy's LF fleet can sink in a lot more damage to the Rad if it's onto it in that case than your LF fleet can sink into a cap that's doing the back-and-forth on a phase lane (unless you're close to repair platforms with the Rad.) So the Rad takes a fair bit of situational judgement to use properly... It's not a guaranteed cap killer (without dying itself in the process) unless it is close enough to its own repair sources, which for the advent are going to be repair platforms throughout most of the game.

This is completely wrong...probably the single biggest issue with your entire argument is that you take into account all the armor the radiance has (only a fraction of which is actually from the ability) and treat the other caps like they have zero...

Additionally....6 armor is like 30% effective hull points, which for the radiance is only about 50% of its total health...so really that's 15% effective health ignoring all other armor...all the other caps have armor too, comparable to the base value of the radiance...so really, the radiance still only has 6 more armor, not 19...that's an 18% bonus to effective hull, or about a 9% bonus to effective health...that's actually pretty bad, especially when you consider the TEC and Vasari caps have about 65% hull and thus their armor points are going to be more valuable...in reality, the radiance doesn't really have any advantage in terms of survivability when compared to TEC and Vasari ships, only an advantage over other Advent caps...the main difference is the proportion of hull to shields, which makes the TEC and Vasari ships much more resilient...

Advent do have abilities and shield mitigation to help with that, but an isolated radiance is not going to be tanking...if it does survive better than TEC or Vasari because of Advent abilities (shield regen, shield projection, shield mitigation bonuses), then it is the advent abilities, and not the radiance, that are really doing the tanking...

You're right that the passive bonus armor is included in the total value displayed and not added after that, even though the infocard displays the bonus under the total. So at level 5 a Rad can have 13 armor (of which 6 would come from three levels of EA), but that surely isn't awesome as 19 armor. My bad for believing that the bonus wasn't included in the normal armor displayed, but I blame the devs for another confusing/gotcha UI element in this game. (Incendiary shells passive bonus damage on the Mazra for example ain't included in the firepower displayed in the infocard.)

This is pretty much what the learning curve in this game is all about... bugs/gotchas like that. It reminds me of one of my first posts here when I discovered that capital ship firepower and graphics thereof are not only unrelated but sometimes inversely correlated: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/427922/page/1/.

Besides my overestimation of Rad's actual armor, my general idea for calculating its survivability is actually correct. Let me break it down for you. LFs do only 17.5% of their inforcard dps to capital ships after their (50%) "bonus" [de]multiplier vs caps and 65% shield mitigation of a typical cap, i.e. one LF doing 10 baseline/inforcard dps does 1.75 dps to a cap (of any kind) at that level of shield mitigation before armor and repairs are factored in.

Now adding the [correct] armor and repair plat to the equation: 13 armor (total) transforms ever point of hull repair per second to 1.65 points. So under plat repair (and ignoring the fairly negligible self-repair in combat) a level 5 Rad [specced for EA] can tank 1.65 * 30 = 49.5 incoming dps after mitigation. Now 49.5/1.75 (from the previous para) is about 28. So I've tried 30 [un-upgraded] Cobalts shooting at a Rad under repairs. The Rad stays starts to gain back hull very slowly after killing a couple of LFs. Recording: http://www40.zippyshare.com/v/21301524/file.html

So my general idea/equations for making these calculations is not wrong, even though my understanding of Rad's armor bonus from EA was wrong initially. Which gets me to the point that I should probably start a comparative cap ship survivability guide... e.g. how many LFs are needed to start chipping away at cap X at level Y under plat repairs. Typically, you'll get the cap to repairs when it's already badly damaged so knowing how many LFs are the breaking point under repairs is info I'd like to have at my fingertips. This info is easy to compute from the cap's armor/hull [and repair plat hp/s] alone, but when you add active self-heal abilities [that also need AM and regeneration thereof and also have cooldowns], e.g. the Kortul, it's much less easy to calculate on a napkin. Sure you can wait until you have 60-80 LFs and then it's a quick/guaranteed kill, but a better informed player can take down the enemy's free/initial cap sooner.

That Radiance passive makes a nasty combo with Animosity. Getting stuff to shoot it gives it more AM to cast Animosity again, keeping a big chunk of enemies from shooting at your LFs and instead wasting fire on the big tanky capital. It's too bad it takes two abilities to set up, it's not really practical to get enough points in both to make good use of it.

It's so funny seeing this post is from April. Just now he posted a little green face implying that I'm a smurf of Sinkillr (I'm not, I'm a WOEaintME smurf, already been over this)....... LOL

How are you my smurf if you've been around since before I was. I thought I was your smurf and you were Sel's smurf. I really need to update my smurf flowchart and send it to all our smurfs.

I'm just a sleeper agent account planted ahead of time by Sinkillr. This has all been planned out long in advance. The Sins Illuminati will rise again!

"Best Starting Capital ship?  Ragnorak :I have to say that for TEC, the dunov..."

Hi, no : always AKKAN first , accompanied by whatever following you strategy (no micro needed, he even auto takes over a planet after the fight)

PS, folks, stick to the theme, never respond to a troll, they love discussion, no reply : their dead!

Let annoying children be children (of all ages)  Bye, leko

Best starting cap?

I'd say it depends on your starting position, rez available, proximity to opponent, your opponents cap choice, and your opponents skill level.

I prefer the following.

Vasari: kortul+ kortul.

Egg.

Tec: corsev+dunov

Marza, akkan.

Advent: radiance+radiance, radiance+ rapture, halcyon+ rapture

Progen, revelation, halcyon.

The dual builds are for fun. Do not use them vs opponents in tier 2 and above.

Halcyon for Advent (bombers)

Marza for Tec (Dps)

Egg for Vasari (Nano)

"If you can't figure out why then you will one day when your SB rushed" 

Prog is hands down best lead for Advent, not Halcyon...

You should have enough disciples to handle a super early SB rush regardless of what cap you pick, and if you don't, then your cap choice is probably irrelevant....the Halcyon has higher damage output but the Prog has shield regen which is far more valuable in keeping your disciples alive....additionally, the extra planet bombing damage and ability to colonize makes the prog more valuable in preventing the enemy egg from taking/keeping the planet to build repair and speed up SB construction....

Against, TEC, the advantages of the prog are obvious...it has most efficient fleet killing ability for early game and has soft counter to missile barrage...

About the only situation where Halcyon would be superior to prog would be if HWs were directly connected, and I've only seen that in one 5s game....

Hi, Sol_r

...  for fun ...

You should not put people on the wrong track, as later they will have to use TEC Akkan in every combination ! (NOT the sadly quick-dying Kol)

Planet killers (Marza) come after the main battle group has cleaned up the "big ones", if not you loose them

Dual kols are fun too. But again, dual builds are not to be used against opponents of higher skill 

If you're playing as the Vasari against the AI an Antorak Marauder start to rush the Stabilize Phase Space ability is always a blast. This is especially true if playing as the Vasari Rebels.

1. Choose Marauder starting Cap
2. Research Starbases, Phase Stabilizers and Mobile Starbases while the Marauder levels up to Lvl 6
3. Send Marauder to enemy homeworld
4. Phase jump a fully upgraded Orkulus to the enemy homeworld
5. Profit

I think the only doable dual build is double sovas...if you focus on using missile batteries (no embargo till higher levels), your overall DPS will be competitive against the typical 1 cap + LFs start...the biggest problem with this is that your opponent can easily run their fleet and make your missile batteries useless...you have to force them to defend by bombing their planets without making it to their benefit to just send their (larger) fleet to your HW to wipe your factories....the biggest killer is that if you have to jump your sovas at all, the AM drain makes your strategy mostly moot...

That's the only dual build I have found to be remotely plausible in a competitive game, and I still would never recommend it...