The Raging Scout Plan: A counter to the LRM spam that we all know

I love this game, and enjoy the strategy involved in it, but one thing pisses me off. The holy trinity of frigates don't work as well as they should, so everyone spams their race's respective lrm early in a game.

What I mean is Light Frigates counter Flak, Flak counters LRMs, and LRMs counter Light Frigates, but the LRM is so effective at killing other LRMs and flak that people just spam the long range frigate. It really pisses me off and made me want to find an effective counter to this besides another better implemented LRM spam. I think I may have struck gold.

As a primarily Advent player, I always build 4 diciples to start a match to accompany the starting cap, but I always lost them as cannon fodder to lrm spams or I would just scuttle them, so I figured, I should make a starting fleet that will actually come in handy against the opponent, and I figured out one way.

I've dubbed it the Raging Scout Plan. What can I say, I'm humble about naming my strategies. This strategy requires using the TEC. Instead of making an accompanying fleet to start the game, make a Marza cap, a colony frigate, and 11, and I chose 11 for a reason, scouts as your starting fleet.

You can do this as Advent as well, but then you will not have the follow-up bomb ability. This is a major drawback and will make this strategy little more than an annoyance for your opponent.

I absolutely advise against attempting this as Vasari. First, the scouts require metal (20, but that's enough). Second, if you're going to be raiding as a Vasari, you should be going assailant spam, not scout spam.

The build order of this strat is as follows:

1. Buy 200 Crystal, sell 200 metal
2. Buy Cap Factory, select Marza
3. Up Planet
4. Buy Metal mines
5. Buy colony frigate
6. Buy 3 Scouts, set them to explore
6. Scuttle the cap factory when the Marza finishes
7. Buy 8 scouts ( there will be a break around #5-6 where you will up your asteroid instead of buy a scout)
8. Set the Scout Rally Point to a point in the grav well closest to where the direction your enemy will be
9. You should have found your enemy by now, so send these 8 scouts to your opponents planet and target his constructors first, then his colony frigate(s) if you can find any.

*If this planet is more than 4 jumps from your home planet, stop this strategy at this point. You will be too far away to be effective.

10. Colonize and pay for everything at the asteroid as necessary
11. If there's a second adjacent asteroid, send the marza to that, if not, then the lightest defended Terran or Desert. you want to keep colonizing towards your opponent, hopefully getting the lighly defended planets around his area.

*If the Desert and Terrans are VERY heavily defended i.e. more than 10 defending ships, you should not do this strategy and focus on getting a fleet to assist the Marza.

12. Get 3 Military labs, you're rush teching to the bomb ability of the TEC scout
13. When your scouts do get there find the constructors and get them.

*If you did this right you got there at about 7-8 min into the game, just before even the best Advent player can have illuminators rolling. With no constructors at the homeworld...he's kinda stuck. He has to buy light frigates to repel yours, or more scouts. Either way, you've managed to get him spend on something unexpectedly, a big purpose of this strat. The more you can get him to waste, the better.

14. Eventually, the scouts will be outgunned, so have them go to the asteroid, get that constructor, and come back to the homeworld.
15. You may have to get the homeworld constructors again, they take about 1 min to respawn. Here's where it gets interesting.

16. You should be able to move the Marza in to assist by this point. Send it to the third planet your opponent likely tried to get, if he didn't, then the asteroid.

17. Start another batch of scouts as soon as you can after the military labs and the bomb tech. 8 more. Have the first batch of scouts target another building when ready, preferably a weapons lab, especially if they're an advent. I said 8 orignially because it takes a minimum of 6, but you tend to lose up to 1 to pirates on the way to the opponents homeworld and 1 to the opponent while the scouts are bombing.

The order of building targeting should be:

- Weapons lab only if it's an advent. You have to stop illuminators.

- Frigate factory if an advent with no weapons labs or any of the other races(he'll have to move it to his asteroid if he wants to make another)

*I will say a Vasari is the hardest race to to this to. If you see your opponent is Vasari, forget this strategy. This is really designed to hurt those who need the labs to get up to that unit of choice

- Whatever lab is there (most likely will be of one type, if you find logistics labs then that means you really caught him with his pants down)

18. Once that second batch is ready, start sending them over. Don't send them piecemeal, have them jump to the homeworld again, and again go for whatever logistics building will hurt the most AT the homeworld.

19. Now you should have at some point teched up to LRM's and gotten a third planet along the way. Sorry, this strat is very complicated as it requires constant checking of a lot of things.

20. Start making Lrms, once you have a group of 5, send that group to the Marza and then set the rally on the Marza. Tech up to the next tier for population when needed.

21. Once your fleet arrives, send the scouts away. Have them try to find something with light armor, be it more constructors, scouts, and this would be ideal, a colony frigate.

Congrats. If you did this properly, you should have him on the ropes. Somehow, you kept him to just three, most likely two planets. The Marza can clear the newly colonized worlds and the lrm's can come in to clean out the light frigs he had to make to repel your scouts. He may have a larger fleet than you, but you will be pumping out lrms to now give your follow up raids some punch. You also MUST keep that Marza alive at all costs. I'd go as far to say as pull it back once shields are gone.

Also, since he will likely just spam the lrms that he finally reached, once your fleet is just SLIGHTLY bigger than his, tech up to kodiaks. This will be the finishing blow.

Some notes to clarify

- I have not perfected this strategy. I know there's some fine points that need to be adjusted, but I ironically beat a clearly competent Vasari player with this strat.

- I'm not going to go as far to say this strat will always work. Too many things say this can wrong, hence why I advise at a lot of points to abandon this strategy.

- This is designed to counter those annoying people (and I'm one of them, I love advent) who play advent and go straight to illuminators. Illuminators take 8 min to get to until the first one is made. The scouts can be there and attacking constructors in 6.

- I don't advise this on random maps, except for large single star systems. There, you may end up so close to your opponent that he'd never expect this.

- I have a couple counters in my head for how to stop this strategy cold, but I'm not about to say them, because it would be the ultimate humilition to lose to someone using this strategy against me.

- All criticism is welcome, positive or negative.