I like what CommanderAdama said. It is a stalling ability. Repulsion can be seriously abused, and I won't deny that I definitely you use it. I would like to say though that proper microing can counter this. Subjagators just need to get to them once to make them hurt, and PROPER lrm microing will take out these ships.

I also have one thing to say that screws the guardian philosophy. This is the only place I've ever seen this rush as a viable option, but someone with say 10, actually, even just 4 or 5 kols and 2 dunovs and then 20 repair cruisers really negates repulse. The kol can reach Guardians with it's beam attack and it's other attacks will destroy the enemy ships. The only problem is getting to this point, but it really forces an Advent to reconsider their tactics.

Howdy, i just wanted to add a little to the discussion. Let me state that I'm just a casual player, mostly playing against the AI (unfair) or small maps with/against friends.

1) Are strike craft really that bad? I play mostly Vasari, and when i micro my 20-30 squads of bombers/fighters (i have a 50/50 ratio) they usually take out any non-capship on one run. At least when i have upgraded the missiles.

2) The idea of making cap ships immune to repulsion seems like a bad idea. Wouldn't that only lead to Advent players using that to their advantage, repulsing all enemy ships, thus isolating the caps and killing them?

3) An activation cost for repulse seems like a good idea. That will make it more difficult to spam, while not making the Guardian completely useless to the casual player with low micro skills. Like me.

4) How come tolerance and respect for other peoples opinions tend to disappear as soon as a discussion takes place on the internet? We're not discussing the Iraq war or religion, it's just game. Entertainment you know. Let's have an entertaining discussion about it instead of flaming people who have a different idea about game balance.

Cheers

If I was rude or disrespectful in anyway, PLEASE, let me be the first to apologize. It wasn't my intention. More my intention to lay out things the way I see them.

All good points for 1 - 3. Especially #2. I think it could really make taking capital ships against the Advent fleets really painful!

alright ive read large majority of the posts here and its time for my two cence any way
i play strictly as advent i love them and think there a great race and all ive seen so far is the same chatter in every other rts and rpg ive played this skill is to imba fix it nono it not to imba >.> seriously people deal with it

now for the point Repulsion is an extremly handy abilty it allows you to break enemy fleets down so you can deal with them because as advent every ship that i get in my fleet ether costs me a ton of credits+resources or a ton of fleet supply or both as the case is now the most effective way to deal with guardians is get strike craft and nuke them this means sacrficing a portion of your fleet to take them out how ever I do agree repulsion as it is slightly powerful if its ranged was decreased slightly also any one who thinks it shouldnt effect capital ships is a moron because picture this scenario i have 80+ bombers you have 60 flak frigates i repulse your whole fleet what didnt get repulse o i know your capital ship which is now trapped and surround by my whole fleet with 80 bombers to one shot it >.>. also if repulsion sent ships flying half the distance they are currently thrown that would be a fair balance but as the case stands for now Advent dont have fast income or free ships so when we build fleets we have one choice DONT DIE! or else i then have to spend that 50k+ i spent on my fleet all over again and buy time i get my fleet back your at my door step
and any one who says strike craft suck dont know how to use them >.>

I think using strikecraft to counter a heavy-armor type target is just an inherently bad plan. Fighters and bombers were designed specifically to be ineffective against heavy armor, if you're resorting to waves of strikecraft to take down heavy armor type targets, something in the game balance is broken.

We are also forgetting that these guardian have around 2300 shield. They are like a capital ship sized target, they take a long time to die vs. -anything- more or less a unit that was desinged to be innefectual against their armor type. If you manage to overhwelm the enemies flak with strikecraft, this doesn't mean you've countered them effectively. It just means you have dedicated a disproportionate amount of your fleet to strikecraft.

Essentially what I'm saying is that if you succeed in this tactic, it's because you're overwhelming your opponent with sheer numbers, not because you're using an effective strategy.

So the employment of like 5 guardians in addition to a standard fleet composition has forced you to dedicate a huge portion of your economy to building a strikecraft fleet, which is easily countered by defense vessels, and does poor DpS/supply. Yes, this is unbalanced.

Repulsion should not be counterable by LRMs. That would entirely defeat the point of the ability. It needs to either have a re-work of the ability, or there needs to be an increase in effectiveness of the units that were supposed to counter utility cruisers in the first place, the light frigates.

Another interesting idea would be to make the ability root all friendly targets and ground all friendly strikecraft in its range for a medium duration, say 30-40 seconds. Then it would be impossible to use the ability to do anything but stall, making it very viable to simply fly past them. I mean it should at least root the guardian, so that you can't do that lame "bowling" crap.

If caps are immune to repulsion then that actually makes guardians even more powerful, because you can position them in a way to keep the enemy fleet away from their own caps while you focus fire and tear them to pieces.

For example:

Fleet "A" has a Radiance 40 illums, 5 guardians and 15 Destras

Fleet "B" has a Kol, 50 Javs, 4 Hoshikos and 20 Kodiaks

Fleet "A" closes in on Fleet "B" with everything, with the guardians in the middle of the fleet. Once in range the guardians engage repulsion and every enemy unit except the Kol goes flying away, leaving it exposed and unprotected. Fleet "A" focus fires the Kol and in a matter of seconds it explodes.

Very rough example but you get the point.

That's why Repulsing Capitals seems like a tricky issue. Right now I've used it to cut off a Capital's escape and push it away like the other ships, but if it weren't affected it would seem very easy to just envelop the Capital with my fleet, then just smack Repulsion on and suddenly the Capital is all by it's lonesome. It would still retain it's ability to retreat though, something one being ping-ponged around by Guardian's loses as it waits to die.

Upon thinking about it though and with some more experience, I don't think Capitals should be affected for an unrelated reason. I use Guardians and Repulsion mostly to defend my higher Capitals, because Malice and Cleansing Brilliance is one of the most useful things in the game. Alone, I think either the Repulsion or Malice and Cleansing Brilliance combinations are balanced and counterable.

The Malice and Cleansing Brilliance requires two high level Capitals to work together (either of which can be disabled by a single Capital of lesser level, or focused fire on by much less valuable ships and killed) and it requires more ability than just drag clicking your Heavy Cruisers, clicking on a target, then watching it die. It allows Advent's inferior economy and production capabilities to compete with the superior numbers of ships it will face. People may not like it, it might be unfair to Vasari and TEC since they don't have the same technology, but they have some very mean abilities of their own. There are other threads to argue these points more, but this topic is for Guardians and Subverters, so I'll leave it at that. Strong, but counterable.

And Repulsion can be beaten by massed LRMs or perhaps strikecraft in some situations (although they are still in dire need of improvement). It's annoying, but as has been said, it's not a game winner, just a game staller.

But here is where the the synergy comes in.

The Guardian's Repulsion outranges many of the disabling abilities of enemy Capitals (all except Reviere, I think). So a good player that knows that one of the two ships in the Malice and Cleansing Brilliance duo-of-death have to be stopped can be prevented from even doing that because of the Guardians. So in the absence of a ton of LRMs they will be forced to not only have the frustration of the Guardians, but also get the Malice and Brilliance combination wielded against them while they can do little to combat it.

And that is unfair, if they're smart enough to see the ability coming and build a Capital (or multiple Capitals) with the express purpose of disabling the combination, they should be able to and some little Cruiser shouldn't stop them dead. What if the Vasari could make it nearly impossible to kill their Phase Gates, or the Sova could outrun all of your other ships? Guardians can make one of the faction's greatest strengths a bit too strong, depriving the others of what would otherwise be a solid counter-tactic. It's a combination of three different ship types all working in tandem and does require some ability and micromanagement, but I think it's too big a game tilter in the right hands. I have only used this combination myself, and have not had it used against me yet, but I expect such ideas to catch on as more people get used to Advent's toys.

Advent has gotten much more popular since the patch, and I've used or had used against me Repulsion a good number of times even since my last post, but here's what I currently think...

-Reduce it's slightly range while slightly increasing the range of all LRMs, so that LRMs can all effectively counter the tactic. It should always remain a good counter to Heavy Cruiser spam (at the very least to encourage mixed fleets) but Vasari and Advent now have a rough time even with a mixed fleet getting close enough to the Guardians to do damage.

-Disallow the Guardians from pushing targets too far out of the initial circle, I had one Guardian knock a Halcyon easily a good 10,000-12,000 game distance last night while preventing it's escape from the Gravity Well, I thought perhaps the distance knocked outside the circle was based on ship size or something, but that didn't even seem so.

-And don't allow Capitals to be affected by it. This will make Capitals vulnerable to being surrounded and cut off, but at least they won't be simply out of your control if an Advent starts micro'ing to coral your ships. You can always run away, and this makes countering the abilities of the Progenitor and the Radiance that may be lurking inside the Advent fleet possible.

Although multiple suggestions, I think they're all light enough by themselves to not risk sending the unit to the doghouse (reactionary over-nerfying really hurts most games I've played, incremental changes are usually the way to go, from my experience). If they're not enough though, the idea of expanding the range of Sabotage Reactor and Steal Antimatter I think is a great way to give the Light Frigates some more use the game as a whole (they hit obsolescence the moment the first LRM roles out, typically). The Subverter would need tweaks of it's own to fill the same role, but I'm no expert on them.

I do read my own posts if (and read, and re-read, most have a half dozen edits because I have some obsessive tendencies when it comes to my writing) if you really wanted to know. I probably spend far more time reading what I've written than the things I'm replying to, in most cases.

But anyway, I don't exactly trust the pathing of my Capitals when they're surrounded by enemies to actually get them to retreat out of a fight in a timely manner.

I don't know about you, but I've found that my caps love to make big wide turns when told to go in a direction, and if it runs into some enemies blocking it's way (particularly Heavy Cruisers) they have a tendency to run head long into them, then stall out and try to gradually turn to an open direction as the enemy fleet focus fires them into oblivion. It seems like if the Caps weren't pushed by the Guardians, they pretty much would have to get out of Dodge once they saw the ability employed to avoid being left standing where their fleet was alone, try to turn around and meet up with the ships being pushed, or just get out of the Well entirely.

It's either get pushed around, probably eventually isolated and killed while being more or less helpless, or risk being totally isolated and trying to scramble out of the Gravity Well and hope the ship doesn't decide to play stupid. Choose your poison, I suppose.

Either way your caps can wind up screwed by Guardians, either by tossing them around like toys or depriving them of any and all support. But at least when the Guardians can't push the Capitals, they can be used to combat Advent's crazy game winning abilities.

I don't think that trying to make the Support cruisers counters is just terribly feasible right now, for the reason you said.

Autocasting on many ships is weird, inefficient, or seems sometimes to just not feel like doing so in a timely manner. Having to micro 15 ships each to stun 15 individual Guardians in and of itself would take up most of the micromanaging abilities of people (I doubt I could finish casting before the first one ran off, even using the Empire Tree and all).

Waiting for a counter that's reliant on both an AI fix and changes to multiple units and tweaking the stats of a number of different units, it will probably be a while. LRMs seem to be practical, if tired solution. I agree, it's boring, I still think it's lame how Heavy Cruisers and LRMs are the dominant forces in the game, but I'm sure it would work, at least, because I'm not confident the autocasting and tweaks needed would come in 1.1, or even a subsequent patch.

Maybe the Devs will fix the AI's abilities, reduce the area of effect of the Subverter and also increase the range of the Subverter, Subjugator and Cobalt, all at once. But I guess time has made me a bit cynical on how fast and how elegant most developers make solutions to balance problems.

Innociv, if there are that many units focus firing a cap (as I showed in my example), retreating it isn't going to do much but maybe delay it's death by a few seconds. Now, if there are multiple caps then it's a different story.

Obviously I read my own posts, I wrote them. What kind of idiotic question is that?

Do you realize how slow they back up and strafe sideways? That tactic wont work, it's simply not fast enough to save their ass from getting blown up if they weren't effected by repulsion.

And why are you wasting valuable micro time clicking repeatedly next to your cap ship?