Repulsion and Distortion Field

agreed on both points. As much as I love distortion field, I honestly dont see how TEC can compete once you get fully upgraded subverters. Its just too powerful.

I can only comment at length on the Guardian from having a good deal of experience trying to use it most effectively. My only experiences with the Subverter have been on the receiving end, which aren't extensive enough or from the right perspective to really intelligently weigh in on it. So, I hope what I have to say on how to handle the Guardian is listened to, but also of course taken with a grain of salt because I mostly play Advent and am protective of my most effective abilities.

With that said, here goes...

I've always viewed Repulsion as one of the great equalizing forces in the game. Advent will never have as strong an economy as TEC, and won't be able to deploy free, endless ships of the Vasari, so an ability like Repulsion that can dramatically increase the survivability of an Advent fleet is nice, I've thought. You can't use it to actually beat an enemy like TEC's economy or Vasari's Armada can, but at least you have something to keep those Heavy Cruisers from murdering your most valuable assets, the leveled Capitals and open up some more tactics than just build as many Heavy Cruisers as possible.

But anyway, I've been using this tactic for a while now (usually just to buy time while I try to get a good mixed fleet going or to be a pain so my allies have more time) and there are a few counters I've noticed that work well.

The Javelis has always ground this to a screeching halt for me. The superior range of the Javelis allows it to sit well back out of range of literally all of Advent's toys hiding in the Repulsion field and just slaughtering them (and if the Illuminators go towards the edge of the field to fire, they can get murdered too). Sending suicide Guardians directly at the Javelis to further repel them can stall sometimes, but it doesn't take long for most people to just start focus firing on any Guardians that leave the pack.

The Assailant technically doesn't outrange the Guardian's Repulsion, but from all the games I've utilized in can effectively (since Repulsion doesn't instantly send units outside of range and keep them there, they can often get in range, fire be pushed back a little and repeat). Even with a number of Guardians all deploying from the same location the Assailants can often just get into their firing range anyway and release the pain. Due to the lesser range of the Assailant, the suicide Guardian tactic can work better against a Vasari, but the tactic isn't cheap and unless you're fighting from a factory won't be sustainable.

With the Guardians going it's unlikely, but if a Subverter gets within range it's game over. Kind of ironically, the Guardian is the best counter to the Subverter for this. Advent fleets need to keep close to be most effective so the Subverter is just so potent against them, you need some kind of counter aside from massed Subjugators to try to undo the damage). Using Repulsion to keep Subverters away takes away most of your killing power, but if just a couple Subverters get into an Advent fleet it can lead to slaughter. They kind of counter each other, which leaves TEC out in the cold for a very effective support cruiser.

It's only against other Advent that this tactic seems too strong to me, mostly because Illuminators have too short a range to easily counter it and strikecraft are generally rubbish. The best they can do is start Repulsing back, but if you can do that, there's no real reason to waste time fighting the fleet, can easily torch the enemy's worlds and let him sit in his bubble defending his Asteroid or whatever.

You can try other things, massed strikecraft (between multiple Guardians using abilities this isn't very viable unless you bring tons), Anti-matter stealing/sabotaging abilities (require you to get closer than the Guardians will generally allow) or simply bypass the fleet and go for everything else.

To me, the biggest balance issue with the game right now are LRMs in early game and Heavy Cruisers late game. These units make investing in literally anything else a questionable tactic at best. Each faction has a good 15 ships, but all you need are these two, that hurts the game more than any other single thing. How much strategy is there in economy and tank rush? Nerfing the Support Cruisers (the Guardians which can keep Heavy Cruisers out of range, and the Subverter which can stun whole blobs of them) just makes Heavy Cruisers all the better, and that's not a way I want to see the game taken, personally.

These abilities are both very strong, but personally I would much rather see one of TEC's Support Cruisers get a significant buff that would aid them in the fight against Heavy Cruisers and such than nerf the other two to try to bring it in line. A much needed improvement to strikecraft of all factions could also help (and also let Advents directly counter this). I think it's nice when things other than Heavy Cruisers can change the outcome of a late game battle, rather than just the classic whoever has the most Kodiaks wins. I would rather see more ships that have uses late in the game, bring up the Hoshiko and the Ceilo, maybe the Subjugator and the Overseer too with area of effect to counter the Subjugator more clearly, rather than take away their use.

I'm afraid nerfs would just make Heavy Cruisers even better, and I'm not sure that's the direction the game should go in.

My two pence, although it turned out longer than I planned.

The real issue is how the guardians just drag battles on forever, not accomplishing anything.

HC's would not be a problem if strikecraft continue getting buffed as they should. Bombers crush them very quickly.

Advent, even WITHOUT guardians, is a very strong faction. Malice and illuminators alone are a potent force, not to mention that crusaders are the best cruisers stat-wise. The problem with the game right now is subverters and guardians, both of which are clearly OP.

I honestly don't see Tec LRMs as all that strong now after the speed nerf.

Obviously wrong. Please, give us actual reasoning for your point, if you have any.

Does steal antimatter or damage antimatter work on capitals?

Why not?

I keep forgetting you're a scrub, but it's good every once in a while to be reminded.

Please tell me why the radiance is regarded as the ultimate anti cap ship. It's a little skill called AM burn, which frigates also have. Do the frigate skills work on capital ships? Why not?

What exactly does ion bolt or grav shot do? Stops enemy ships from getting right out? Isn't it regarded as a good ability? Now what if I told you a frigate could do the same thing, but huge AOE (about twice the radius of malice, which is already the largest AOE spell in the game besides repulsion), at next to 0 mana cost (it's not a spell, it's a toggle ability)? Would you consider that fair to do to caps? Would it be fair to have a single frigate, for near 0 mana cost, do it to ANY number of caps, indefinitely? Prevent them from escaping forever? Yes, position a single guardian at the exits of a grav well, and you can prevent jumps FOREVER. Not 700%, not 1000%, but infinity. They will NEVER leave unless you want them to.

Name one other stun/disable that works on caps that frigates can cast? The only debuff that works on caps is the subverter's reduce shield mitigation spell, which is the whole point of the spell.

I hate to be "that guy" (well no, I love it really), but you're bad. See, I wouldn't have started flaming your pathetic PUBLIC ignorance, but hey, what else is there to do when the tone of your post suggests I don't know what I'm talking about? Oh and BTW, Jinx is going to post like 4 more replays of GE getting buttstomped. Seriously, know your place.

I agree on the subverter but not the guardian. There are too many ways to counter the repel ability. The subverter, however, is a different matter. There are a number of soft counters that I have found effective. As TEC, the Dunov's EMP charge is area effect and can drain the subverters of anti matter. Won't stop all the subverters, but should make the situation manageable. However, this requires you spend money on a cap ship and a slot just to counter this one strategy, and the Dunov isn't particularly strong under fire as far as cap ships go. Disciples and cobalts might work against subverters if there are enough of them and you have steal anti matter / sabotage reactor researched. But by that point in the game, light frigs are basically useless otherwise and will die in prodigious numbers.

Name a single way to counter the repel ability. Just one. Please don't say Akkan lrms. That fleet dies to like 4 crusaders. A real fleet, capable of taking down heavy cruisers.

Strikecraft don't count for obvious reasons (let's not get into why bombers get owned by flaks again).

Distortion field is obviously overpowered.


Repulsion.. it's really good, but gaurdians are also more expensive than HC's.

With Gaurdians what's needed is better counters.
The problem is the range on subjugators and subverters disable is too short, so they get repelled away before they can disable.

The range on those abilities needs to be increase ~1000, and cobalts anti-am ability range increased ~2000(and get better auto-cast!) rather than nerfing the ability IMO.
Maybe make using Repulsion disable the shield ability for 30 seconds too.

Repulsion can be microed to push ships way out of the grav well range. Under a player with good micro repulsion is broken.

HuntingX, there is a huge difference between "no frigate ability should work on capitols" and "no negative frigate ability works on capitols". Some other time, when I'm not dealing with a minor emergency, I'll explain the difference to you. I responded to the first; you gave reasoning for the latter.

Semantics do not win an argument.

I clearly mean the argument to refer SPECIFICALLY to disabling/damaging spells frigates can cast, since it was referring to repulsion.

You can pick at the words all you want, but since the topic of the post was REPULSION AND DISTORTION FIELD, I think I'm safe in my statement not being misconstrued.

You are, in fact, the only person who misconstrued it (if you actually did).

You people are just now realizing the full power of the Advent. I cringe when I see people whine about Advent not being powerful enough these past few months, and now I cringe seeing people whine about how the most useful Advent ship is overpowered. Literally overnight the Advent went from being terrible to being the most powerful faction in the game. The guardian should not be changed. TEC gets their robotics cruisers and Advent gets their guardians. Advent ships, on a whole, are slightly weaker and less damaging than opposing ships, but their abilities make up for this problem to balance things out. The guardian is hands down the most strategic and useful ship in the entire game. Micromanage it and treat it like a chess piece, and your foe will kicking and screaming because they can't hit it.

If guardians are getting you down, then here's an idea. TELL YOUR FIGHTER CRAFT TO ATTACK THEM. It's very very simple if you're actually building things with fighter craft and not just spamming LRM's all day long. Oh wait, I just asked you to change your established strategy. Oh noes!11!! That's too much to ask. It's too difficult for 'competitive' players to adapt their strategies to what's going on in the game. Heaven forbid someone outplays another person via guardian micromanagement. Nevermind that guardians can't push away strike craft, it's just too difficult for you to beat them so now they need a nerf. This sort of thinking is yet another example of how 'competitive players' continue to screw things up. If you were strategically using things like the Vasari's damage nanites or TEC's ion bolt in addition to strategic positioning, then you might actually have stood a chance. Lining up like civil war soldiers and shooting until someone dies is not always a workable strategy when facing the Advent.

Now that you've realized the full power of the guardians, let me clue you in on just how unstoppable a couple of guardians, halcyons, and drone hosts are. They can just circle around your gravity well all day long while their strike craft lay waste to any attack force and/or structures. You're going to need a ton of flacks to actually make an effective counter. Then the halcyons can come in to bomb your planet once things are sufficiently clear.

But what do I know? I'm not a competitive player. I don't like clans. I'm just a casual person who has been playing strategy games since I was a kid. I'm just someone who has little trouble taking out multiple unfair AI's while playing Advent. I'm just someone who can play alone against 3 to 5 friends and completely wipe the floor with every last one of them as Advent.

The Guardians need no change, end of story.

Man, you're even worse than Ron.

Of course, I won't bother challenging you to play a game, because you'll just dodge as you "don't play multiplayer."

I'll just counter the pathetic arguments you made.

As stats have shown, strikecraft suck. They suck, a LOT. They die in massive packs to Vasari sentinels with charged missiles (usually several wings instantly).

Subverters can fight guardians on semi-equal footing with sentinel support. 1 good jump and everything will die pretty quickly. ZJBdragon continues to post on threads that he has NO clue about. He thinks that strikecraft are awesome, that 1.03 Advent didn't die to lrm spam, etc. And because he refuses to play online and lose like the miserable scrub he is, he will never know how utterly horrible everyone else knows him to be.

That's not the issue. Have you TRIED Advent vs Advent? Both sides get guardians, and it's a ping pong match. The two guardian fleets keep bouncing each other back and forth, and nothing gets accomplished. Forget about malice or brilliance, you will never get close enough. As far as massing halycons and drone hosts go, make a few defense vessels, and watch them do nothing. And clearly, late game strategy should not be repulsion getting rid of ALL the cruisers while strikecraft futilely try to damage things. Clearly, the game becomes less fun and more grungy, and it goes against the design of the units.

When microed properly, repel is completely broken. 3-5 guardians can keep an ENTIRE fleet out of shooting range indefinately. I played one game with HuntingX and Therlun where they had twice as many HC's as me as well as 12 subverters but I had guardians. Although I messed up my micro near the end (I leave nothing on auto-cast), their fleets were rendered useless for almost 10-15 minutes.

If you combine a massive carrier fleet with say, 5 guardians, all parked them on the side of the grav well that the enemy needs to get to your planet and you position the guardians in front of the carriers, it is an unstoppable army. Not even vasari's mighty upgraded flak frigate can stop it. The reason is that the repulsion pushes the units very far (potentially across the grav well) and the units all scatter, leaving the flak unable to defend certain targets. Yes, they'll kill some strikecraft, but they won't be able to stop them from killing units. This battle takes an absurdly long time, but it's impossible to shut down.

More advanced players will be able to drive their fleet around repulsing the enemy from the middle, leaving his units all over the grav well. Doing this, it's much easier to pick them apart with strikecraft.

Better still, players can have multiple fleets of these invincible carrier blobs, each supported by 3-5 guardians. You can even protect your planets from any assault with just hangar bays and guardians. The enemy's attack will not be able to do any damage.

Finally, when on offense, it's impossible to defend against. They blow your ships out of range and then dismantle you infrastructure which doesn't move. When you see the repulsion/carrier/HC blob, even if your army is vastly superior, you have no choice but to leave the grav well as it's a completely futile effort to stop them.

I also think the skill is bugged. It should only push the ships out of repulsion range and temporarily slow them down. Instead, it accelerates them backwards until they leave repulsion range. It's like a leaf blower.

@Ron, I understand that you're nitpicking a little bit. Yes some frigate abilities work, for example, matyrdom, drain antimatter, hoshinko's heal bots, etc.

However, there's frigate with an ability to utterly shut down a capitol ship. When repulsion starts, it is as good as a stun on your capitol ship as it will never get into range to do anything.

While the context may have shifted the meaning of what you said, I genuinely did not recognize it as doing such. If you check my posting history, such literal mindedness is completely believable -- its exactly the type of mistake I'm prone to. Calling me a liar is poor form, at best, and while perhaps my phrasing was overly confrontational, (hell, looking at it the phrasing was incorrect for what I meant to say, anyway -- that I simply couldn't see any reasoning behind what you said) any confrontation in it was driven by the knowledge that simply disagreeing with you is a quick manner to insure a flame storm. So, I apologize for the bad form of anticipating the flames you were going to send my way -- that was wrong of me. After all, its possible we could have had a reasoned discussion here.

You don't even need the Akkan, and you don't need to spam LRMs. Guardians are costly, comparable to a Destra Crusader. You can't just spam them. All you need is just enough LRMs to suppress the Guardians. The rest of your fleet can be the usual heavy load of Kodiaks.

That said, your point about the Guardian's ability working on capital ships is well-taken though. I don't know of any other frigate or cruiser ability that does that. The Guardian's ability shouldn't do that, or the Guardian should be weakened in some other way. Maybe a shield reduction seeing how it has a pretty much ridiculous number of shield points.

Also, your comment about strikecraft being buffed is also well-taken. I think there's a couple of ways to accomplish that. Personally, I think making the cruiser carriers cheaper would be the best way, but it's certainly not the only way.

What you guys need to understand about repel is that its a REPEL -antimatter/sec ability. So you charge an enemy blob of units, click it on, 2 seconds later, click it OFF. Antimatter used is TINY and you have just joined the ranks of Sins of a Bowling Empire. STRIKE!!!

Using this click-on-click-off method, you can have only a few guardians totally disabling an enemy fleet. If this ability took like 100 antimatter, had a tiny cooldown it would be fine...But as it is, if ya micro it, guardian repel does not run out of antimatter! And you only need 3-5 of them to do it!

LRM can hit guardians beyond repulse range, can any other LRF or do you only play TEC? Of course, even LRM will have a tough time killing guardians (tons of shield, etc) if your constantly playing digital bowling with them.

Heres another solution for repel: Instead of sending enemy units ALL over the grav-field, just push the units to outside the repel AOE. Increase the AOE if necessary. That way to keep units from coming in, you need to have repel on CONSTANTLY instead of just doing click-on-click-off once in a while.

LRM's don't outrange repel in 1.04, I believe. Even if did, they guardians simply need to drive into your lrm herd while spamming repulsion. Your units will fly away so far back they won't actually be able to do anything for a significant time. We just had a game that took next to forever and in that game, the TEC lrms were useless.

Regarding the whole subverter thing, I agree with HuntingX... However, I had a game where I told the opponent to make tons of disciples (with steal antimatter) along with his HC fleet... Disciples are dirt cheap, easy to get large numbers...

Well, I can say it was a huge pain for my subverters... Didn't make them useless but made them at LEAST 50% less effective. I couldn't keep his whole army disabled, at least not for long...Even with 14-16 subverters.

Not sure how other race light frigs would do against subverters, but the disciples did pretty decently...Definitely worth mixing them in the fleet when fighting subverters.

Agreed - also give the ability a casting cost to toggle it.

Regarding the subverters, they should be balanced so that they can only disable up to a certain amount of targets and perhaps lowering their AOE. It's incredibly stupid to have an 40 HC blob get stopped cold by a single subverter. If you have 12, you can even stagger them to have them basically shut down your fleet for several minutes. stupid.

That was because you were jumping your subverters around and didn't have enough antimatter... . If you had enough antimatter when they jumped in, you would have started the permastun and they would have simply all died. Unless of course, they sent them in waves.. that's really the only way to use them to 'counter' subverters.

Hehe, that was the first fight Jinx... I was just playing around by then, you knew we had the game . Afterwards I retreated back and had him come to me...and fought him again... I still won, mainly because his disciples were in clumps...But if you spread them around and keep more coming (waves as you say), it stops subverters pretty darn well.

Yeah, and then I went to clean those guys up with my army. However, it seems that that game was the first game where they witnessed disruption field. The result was that you become hailed as a Sins god lol

hahaha, that was funny I guess fighting back and never getting close to losing in a 2v1 does that =p.

Jinx, it depends on the LRM from what I've seen. The Javelis can do so handily without issues, upgrades or support and can better handle the suicide Guardian runs to push them away. Assailants can often hit the Guardians because of how inconsistent the Repulsion field is but have trouble with the aggressive Guardians going towards them. And Illuminators cannot reach the Guardians.

So that's probably the main problem I think, that the long range units still don't have the range, and the other long range alternative (strikecraft) are jokes.

Anyway, I don't think calling people miserable scrubs will sway opinions, honey than vinegar, you know that kinda thing.

To the point, Advent vs Advent fleets I do agree the ability is off because the fighting can be kind of ridiculous (assuming there is actual fighting, and not just Repulsion). Because of Advent's range limitations, two fleets doing this really can't do much to each other. It resembles a Carrier/Flak fleet fighting another Carrier/Flak fleet (for people who have seen such disasters), they can last for 10 minutes with virtually no losses on either side and no progress. When the Advents fight though there will be some minor losses, some ships tend to get broken off from the main group, stray one way or the other, and the ships that get too out ahead might actually get in range of the other fleet's main guns. Even when Illuninators get their range upgrade (T7) they usually have a hard time getting close enough to inflict any substantive damage. So it can be stalemate, have to go around and attack their worlds or try to build a stupid number of Drone Hosts in an attempt to do damage (Guardians have substantial hitpoints, some will be using Shield Projection, likely a Mothership with Shield Restore, so even if there's not flak just making headway would not be easy).

Personally, I think things should wait on a change to see how things shape up. The Guardian has had this ability, unchanged, since release and it's been very underused (along with Advent as a whole), so I think some time to see how things develop may be a good idea.

If Guardian use/abuse becomes prevalent and no suitable counters are devised, I think reducing it's range to maybe 5,000 (it's around 7,000 now) and slightly increasing the Illuinator and Assailant range might help for the Advent vs Advent battles as well as make things easier on Vasari. Any change that improves the Illuminator I am weary of, it's a great unit now if you can get them and improvements to their range could make them too good.

Repulsion probably shouldn't sway capitals either, but that seems like a less important point, except when the Guardians are micro'ed to isolate Capital ships and tear them to pieces (which can be frighteningly effective). Although if Capitals were not affected, I don't see what would stop a player from simply hugging the Capital with Guardians to deprive it of support and then destroying it, since only other Capitals could come to it's aid.

Personally, so long as it can outrange the Heavy Cruisers and can deny an area to them, the ability would still have it's place in an Advent fleet. That's the big, important deal to me, late game you can fight LRMs that focus fire on Capitals and various abilities and support can prolong their lives considerably. But those Heavy Cruiser blobs that can destroy any individual ship they please, including Capitals you invest so much resources, pop cap, and time to nurture into a decent fighting machine is just lost. Repulsion that can deny those beasts from feasting on your prizes is one I think is useful.

This type of thing concerns me though, mostly because Advent is good now after spending so much time out of it, and I like Advent. There are calls to nerf Malice, Cleansing Brilliance, the Malice and Brilliance duo of death and other real staples of the Advent fleets. Basically, the things that make Advent both strong and unique. I think the Guardians should always be able to use Repulsion against Heavy Cruisers and that all the faction's LRM's should be able to combat it. Hopefully if strikecraft become useful, they will also have a place against the ability.