-- Kol
Gauss - Sounds good, until you realize it's blocked by Shield Mitigation. In additon, the Kol has to ever-so-slowly turn to face the attacker to use it. One shot from the main laser array will send shield mitigation to at least 40-50%, the Gauss will almost never do more than half damage, meaning ONLY 400 at level 3. In addition, the antimatter cost of this ability is through the roof for how worthless it is. If you leave it on autocast, the Kol will drain its antimatter trying (and failing) to destroy just one ship.
Thats still a
lot of damage compared to what its "main guns" put out. Additionally, later in the game antimatter becomes a
lot more plentiful between tech upgrades, culture bonuses, and finest hour.
Flak - This is without a doubt the most pathetic ability I've ever seen. If it were replaced with a button that would self-destruct the ship, I'd probably use it more. Seriously, I've probably destroyed one or two fighters with this (that were speedily replaced). I don't even purchase it any more, or even bother to turn it on auto activate. All it'll do is waste antimatter trying to destroy one fighter, and I'm pretty sure at level 3, it can't even destroy a fighter from 100% health.
No real arguement here -- you need 2-3 Kols to make Flak actually kill fighters, as opposed to simply degrading them. That said, if you can time it to actually engage while the fighters are busy on their alpha strike, you can do a lot of damage with it, making your flak ships lives a lot easier.
Antimatter Shield - Wow, a semi-decent ability. The fact that it consumes more and more antimatter at higher levels is pretty sad though - I thought the point of higher levels was to make the ability better.
It
is better at higher levels. Duration and its defensive strength go up, while cooldown goes down. With the high levels of antimatter available at later levels, you can have this almost permanently activated.
Finest Hour - A pretty good ability, as far as level 6's go, I suppose. There's better. It'd be nice if the Kol's perimeter guns did a bit more damage to make this more useful. I can't complain about it, except for the fact that it's one of only two non-shit abilities of the Kol.
The antimatter regen is a godsend for this ability, even ignoring the other (rather nice) abilities it grants. You go from having lots of antimatter to play around with, to effectively unlimited (you can't drain antimatter quicker than this restores using the ships abilities, and most players don't bother with anti antimatter techs).
Embargo - An ability that becomes more and more useless as the game goes on. Early game it can cripple the enemy and provide a huge boon to your own economy. Late-game it really doesnt' affect the enemy much (as they have many planets, losing one isn't too bad) and you won't notice much income (you can't see how MUCH you're bringing in, which is disappointing at any rate)
Yeah, it looses
some utility in later game as far as income drain... but the ability to halt (for all intents and purposes) the enemies ability to build at that planet, be it replacement defenses or additional ships from his factories, can be highly useful.
Heavy Strike Craft - Every race has something that makes their strikecraft better, and I'm pretty sure that the TEC have the worst strike craft by design. The shit part is that their 'improvement' is a capital ship ability, whereas the Advent are done by research (unsure about the Vasari), meaning ONLY Sova strikecraft get what is effectively a mild improvement.
Um... all there races have carriers with some form of fighter improvement for them. All three races have damage/HP improvements in their tech trees for their fighters. The only Advent tech I can think of that qualifies for what your talking about is that
hangar bays get 2 extra fighters from one of their techs.
Not their fighter craft in general; only their defensively stationed ones.
The end result is that it's a DECENT ability as far as the Sova's upgrades, it's really the ONLY ability that helps it do its job better, but in the big picture it's pretty stupid.
That fighter upgrade is nice -- not great, but nice. 30% damage from a signifigant number of fighters (up to 7 squads at level 10) is nice.
Heavy Manufacturing - Really? A level 6 ability that's designed around what? Helping my carrier just in case I'm a retard and got the swarms of strikecraft killed? Are you serious? Oh, my bad, it improves my planets somewhat too - give me a break. One of the most ridiculous level 6 abilities.
Here, again, I have to agree. This is a sub-par ability -- mainly because of implementation. If fighters were actually replaced
instantly, I'd like it a lot more, but they still have to have their anti-matter cost paid, as well as having a slight delay between two separate fighters. If the fighters were really "instantly" replaced, it might actually be nice.
-- Akkan
Colonize - Whatever. Every faction has one of these.
Yes, every faction has a colonize ability -- and each faction has a different bonus from it! The TEC one involving free mines is a little iffy though, given that when colonizing a planet you just took from the enemy, often you can't get the mines because his mines are "in the way".
Ion Bolt - Oh here we go. The second worst ability in the game, right in front of Flak. Sounds great doesn't it? Paralyze an enemy ship and get some real damage on it - oh what's that? At Level 3, it ONLY LASTS 7 SECONDS? ARE YOU SERIOUS? Hahhahahahahahh! The only reason it's better than the Flak ability is because it can disable a phase jump. Aside from that, this is a complete joke. For comparison, the Advent's "Reverie" ability does the exact same thing, consumes less antimatter, and lasts 4x longer.
Your overlooking this things real power. Not only does it break phase jump, but its
cheap, and its
spamable. At higher levels, you can literally chain cast it so your enemy
never gets to do anything.
Oh, and reverie has its own problems -- while it can do the break jumping part, it
can't be used to permanently disable a ship, because incoming damage breaks the ability.
Targetting Uplink - It sounds like a good passive ability, until you realize that the base accuracy of all ships is pretty damn high to begin with, and the bonus is pretty low. I've never noticed an improvement whatsoever with this.
Its useful when engaging fighters with your flaks, as thats pretty much the only time your going to see a miss.
Armistice - I've never found a good use for this except running away. This is like Heavy Manufacturing - an ability designed not to help the ship do its job, but to help you in case you're a schmuck and you're about to die. I'd rather NOT have abilities based around RETREATING, thank you. The only other purpose this could have is a temporary delay to bring in reinforcements, but if you're playing on a big map, chancese are this will be a minor boon, at best.
Well, you don't have to take the ability if you don't want to. But I've seen it used to
devestating effect in both retreat and reinforcement approaches.
EMP Charge - A 'decent' ability. It really doesn't do that much even at level 3, however. It's only really useful for burning Antimatter. The shield portion is pretty damn weak.
Except that, IIRC, its an AoE ability -- thus it doesn't just hit one ships shields, it hits a bunch.
Missile Barrage - *sigh* What exactly is 150 MITIGATED damage going to do? To ANYTHING? It looks pretty, that's about it. I'm pretty sure I'll save the 150 antimatter (or however much it costs) and use Radiation Bomb instead, since it does damn-near the EXACT SAME THING.
150 damage,
to every single unit in range. Yeah, it could use an upgrade, but don't knock it too hard. In team games, this can get combined with the Vasari's nannite ultimate (increases all damage done to effected enemy ships,
and causes them to blow up in an AoE detonation) as a very nice "starter" damage. Which is half the reason its so low, probably.
Ion Bolt and Flak are without a doubt the two biggest jokes in line here - Ion Bolt especially since Reverie can be chain-cast almost indefinitely and wipe out a capital one-on-one, but Ion Bolt will just make your enemy laugh at what a worthless douchebag you are.
Simply because one ability is overshadowed by a similar ability held by another race, does
not make it anywhere
close to useless.
