tihs is troll talk, absolutly untrue. LRMs are tech 2 thus advent has dronehosts but you need to got to iconus right away to defend the dronehosts against focus fire. Then it works. In 1.04 this doesnt matter anymore cause dronehosts can run circles away from lrms
and btw: hcs dont counter everything.
Currently drone hosts are worthless when trying to kill a fleet or defend (they have their uses for raiding, though). All I'd do is build some flak to completely negate your drone hosts at nearly a 4:1 ratio. Doesn't matter if your drone hosts can do circus acrobatics, I'm just going to ignore them and concentrate on relieving your of your structures/cap. LRM's main objective is simply to kill your cap, structures, and light frigates anyways. Guardians are also tier 3 and have research prereqs. Furthermore, they are expensive and can be countered by **moving your fleet around. If you have a lot of guardians, your offensive ability is a lot weaker than someone who dedicated their resources to offense. Someone massing LRMs just needs to fly them past your bubble and force you to move your ships and rebubble. You'll run out of antimatter quickly.
Flak completely shuts down carriers. If you micro the flak blob to either stay close to the lrms or even better, to go in between the lrm and the carriers, their fighters get completely chewed up before doing very much. LRM's ordinance cannot be stopped. Fighter/bombers ARE the carriers' ordinance. That's their problem. Right now, advent has no choice but to get defense vessels. In a 1v1 fight against a lrm spammer, that's the only unit that can beat lrms even though they kill slowly.
Disciples' drain antimatter is not even that good unless you're up against swarms of units with antimatter like light frigs. The reason is that yes, they drain, but it costs them 100 antimatter to transfer it to another unit. Most of the time, when they're all draining willy-nilly, they end up with 30 here and 40 there. And that only applies against fleets of ships with lost of antimatter. LRM's don't have antimatter plus they counter your disciples.
You also need to stop thinking about only fleet vs fleet combat. The trouble with lrm blobs that have reached critical mass is that it's incredibly hard to stop them from razing your structures and killing your cap. Their damage type is the most valuable in the early/mid game and they outrange anything. Plus, they're faster than cap ships, so you can't run from them. The last point will obviously change in the upcoming version making it much harder to kill caps with lrm blobs. There's nothing the advent can get early game that can stop lrm's assault. People are suggesting defense vessels because lrms have a hard time killing them and in a long dragged out fight, defense vessels will win. Once defense vessels have reached the critical mass, they drop lrms like flies and multiple at a time. However, the problem with the defense vessels is that when you get lrm rushed/spammed, you're not going to have many of them, as they're only good against lrms (thus, it would be silly to mass them if the opponent was massing say, cobalts). Thus, when the lrm rush comes, it's unlikely you'll have reached the critical mass for your defense vessels to really stop the lrms from killing your cap and structures then leaving.
The illum buff (MASSIVE buff) will at least give advent the ability to counter lrm with even better lrm. Sure, illums won't win 1v1 against lrms, but an illum fleet can beat an lrm fleet. I'm suspecting that illums will be "THE" great spam unit of 1.04. Their overall damage has gone up (from 33.8 to 39 avg) assuming their rate of fire isn't changed, their front bank now deals double damage, and they got a buff to their shields and hull. As a tradeoff, they cost one additional lab, hardly something that will lose you the game unless you and your opponent start off as neighbours.
