Do not use repair abilities.

Repair bays, like all defenses, become worse and worse as the game goes by. They hardly become useless, though. They can keep cap ships and other structures alive far past their usual lifespan.

Not if 20 HC's and bombers are focus firing, which is what inevitably happens late game.

repair bays might work on buildings... for a short while

Personally I think repair abilities should be spammable like units are. If you can get 20 HCs focus firing at my one ship, I should be able to have 20 Robotics Cruisers all repairing it at the same time.

Repair would never be useless like that.

So what you want is to be invincible? That sounds nice. Make it so you can be completely outnumbered and not lose because you don't think it's fair.

agreed.

no, not invincible. I just said agreed because i hate HC spamming. I'd rather repair abilities have utility late game. I already posted my answer to this problem in what i want in the expansion. I think being able to spam repair is just as lame as spamming HC's or LRMS. I don't want them to make units invincible, but having them keep units alive longer would be nice...

They worked better when they stacked... 200+ repair a second is nasty.

Ugh. You don't know the power of repair that's for sure. Secondly, hull upgrades and armor upgrades make repair a lot better. Of course it will not make your ships not die, that would be stupid. But in a close fight, the side that repairs wins.

Stacking repairs would be interesting. It's not like it would make you invincible since you first have to get those 20 cruisers with repair abilities for that to work which is a considerable investment and should give some benefit.

Right now repair abilities are great only early in the game. But especially repair bays are hardly useless. They help a bit (what better to do with those tactical slots?) and they make sure the surviving fleet is ready to fight again very fast after the battle.

True -- thats why I always add at least a few hoshikos and cielos to every fleet. Sure, their repair abilities aren't all that powerful in large fleets with FF, but the increased damage / disablers are nice, and as long as they're there anyway, you might as well use both of their abilities.

I can see the point with TEC late game, but Advent Subjugators do more than just repair. Their buff can make a ship temporarily impervious to stunning attacks. Very useful if your opponent is Vasari and he's loading up on subverters.

So, an interesting point of fact... That vasaari overseer unit that everyone hates... Has a direct hull-point heal that is in fact spammable, so multiple overseers= greater healing power. Fuel for the fire...

Well, its true that repair loses some ability on lightly armored units in the late game, but it still helps for units with 8 or more armor, and many ships with repair also have other abilities that they can employ. If the opponent has a handful of heavy cruisers, definitely disable them. If he's uses large waves of bombers, toss 10 flak frigates into your fleet.

You should always be scouting your enemy can keeping an eye on which units you see being built, and there is no excuse to not do this if playing as TEC. If you find you're being bombed by a particular unit, you've let your guard down(unless its a defensive Vasari player using RA, but that is an argument for another time).

I just played a game against AI. Repair definately helped me there.

i think repair is very handy early game, it makes a small number of ships able to fight off the early skirmishes.

but as already stated, late game it becomes rather insignificant.

as for those that want repair to stack, i think it is a great idea. But it needs to be inversely proportional to an exponential function. ie, there is diminishing returns.

So the first repair a ship receives regens 25, the 2nd regens +18, 3rd +14 etc., up until a certain number repair is just adding 1 or below regen or none at all.

I wasn't suggesting it should stack, I was just relating an amusing bug that popped up late in the beta cycle.

  

Another interesting mechanic might be to use a malice style damage spreader... Instead of spreading damage, you could spread HoT effects, so full HP units that still had the buff would add a slight amount of HP/sec to injured ships with the same buff that are in range. This could represent clouds of 'finished' nanites migrating to a new ship. Make the buff a targeted AoE with a max of 4-5 targets, and you have yourself an interesting new mechanic and a HoT effect that scales upward with fleet size.

Balance the over-seer by giving him a 'hibernate' ability, so he can shut down engines and guns in order to regain antimatter with which to heal. Make this ability have a pretty lengthy cooldown... This way, he can still heal the crap out of your forces for an extended amount of time in one engagement, but the downtime in between healing spurts prevents him from becoming too awesome, as his inevitable downtime opens up the door for casualties. Just as an FYI... Currently this little guy can heal 125 hull points a second when he's running at full steam. And it's a direct heal... So multiple overseers = faster healing. I think that's quite fast enough... Just that he blows his wad in 10 seconds if he chain-casts... So an ability that let him be useful for more then ten seconds would be pretty sweet.

I think everyone can agree that the advent have things well under control when it comes to using abilities to increase fleet survivability.

You mean logarithmic???

Wow, you just got roasted.

No, he means exponential. A diminishing returns system based on a logarithmic graph would let a couple more repairs cycles be stacked upon a ship before the stacker saw heavy penalties for stacking. However, a system based on an exponential graph would see immediate and heavy penalties.

--EDIT--
Whoops, thought this was on the first page when I replied. Apologies for the necromancy.

Eh, its only a few days old. Necromancy isn't a problem untill the corpse has been "in the ground" for a few weeks, at least!

Well you still lose a strategic position by focus firing. It is a lot slower thanks to overkill (the game is still turn-based, even though each "turn" is approximately once every second), so even if you should do enough damage to kill an enemy unit, it wont register until the next "turn". This means that there is lots of wasted shot on overkill.


Also, I have yet to see, even in 3v3 games on Hard AIs, enough burst damage to kill a mid-high level capital ship with 1 hit. If it can happen, everyone should have more than just "big fleets" in their card deck to kill the enemy by then.


Since it is so difficult to 1 hit capital ships defended by a large force of support craft, that means that the only way to kill it is to concentrate-fire on the support craft, which can give the support craft's fleet time to kill the enemy capitals, since it has little or no support craft.




I do see the advantge to concentrated fire in small and medium engagements, but in very large fights it can drop the kill rate from 4 to 8 (or more) per second, to .75 to 3 per second and no capitals, which is a lot worse. (All estimated on a 1v1 maxed fleet engagement). Also in smaller engagements support craft can still make a smaller fleet destroy a larger one, it just depends on micromanagement and fleet-makeups.


And remember that support craft do not mearly heal/repair, they have other very useful abilities too, which support concentrated fire and damage.

But in any case, the side with more light frigates will have the advantage for capacitors in the late game. They are really a big deal!


However, all in all, if the "turn" game design mechanic was not in play, concentrated fire would be much much more powerful without its delay.

Ok, I see how I was wrong. If I add fighters instead of just bombers, I can save my capital ships for awhile, long enough for repair to take effect.