Repulsion...

Looking at the entity files, I'm getting the feeling I've missed something... the Subjecters ability - it's a radius ability (although a very small radius). Can anyone confirm or deny this ?

"the other disablers"
guardians are no "disablers"

"it makes the game very irritating"
ever seen a non irritating battle ? ^^

"Any thoughts ?"
yes fix RA first..

I thought RA was overpowered...

Yep, repulsion is broken and annoying. Per previous threads, it should have a set cast-drain on antimatter rather than toggling infinitely, and it shouldn't blow my ships completely out of the gravity well like so many leaves. Basically, repulsion would be a useful, balanced ability if it cost 100-150 antimatter per use and repelled based on a specific area of effect (i.e. enemy ships are kept out of attack range of the casting Guardian for 20-30 seconds, 30-40 second cooldown). You could even up the range so that LRMs couldn't reach, which would keep your core fleet/carriers safe. The point would be that, like Subverters, eventually your Guardians would run out of antimatter and your opponent would have options again. Otherwise all that's keeping it from being punch-your-screen-bad at this point is that most people don't use it, either because it's poor form or intensive micro.

Devs have already made my day by announcing that in 1.1 they will be fixing Marza's ultimate ability and that Sins 2 will be even roidier (:P), any input on repulsion or Mehoo's UI stack-selecting question @ https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/313105 ?

You guys fail to realize REPULSION is the COUNTER to RA. That's why it blows away so many ships, because it has to. It's the only thing you can use vs RA as advent and not fail.

It is very vulnerable to Damper Field, which none of you whiners probably ever used.

The main imbalance with Repulsion as is is the way it applies the repel debuff. It repels ships traveling towards the guardian faster than stationary targets. That is why pulsating it works, as opposed to having to keep it on. The debuff it applies is -1000% speed and acceleration. So if you were heading towards the target, you get blow back. If you were staying when you got hit with it, you will move back slowly till you are out of range of it. That is just a little problem with the way it was designed and implemented. It is meant to push back all the ships it can.

If it was a 1 target ability, it would be a terrible fail. And Subverters are AOE disablers, thats what makes them useful. One target disablers suck, mostly due to bad Autocast AI. But TEC can manage to disable ton of ships with a good number of Hoshikos and Energy Flux. Demolition bots are good overall but can't really be applied on large scale once again cause the Autocast is stupid, and the ability is not instantaneous which causes multiple instances of demolition bots on one target! Still demolition bots are better than suppression. Suppression is only useful for ships that make it past the repel bubble and have the debuff applied incorrectly making them irrepelable.

Momma always told me not to reply to balance threads, but here I am again :/

Astax, that's pretty funny. Some fellow whiners on the subject of Repulsion include HuntingX, JinxofSin, Drexion, and Cykur @ https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/308320/. You know those guys, right?

I take your points - Subverters and Guardians are neat counters to each other and Repulsion works against full RA where nothing else will. The issue is that Repulsion, unlike Distortion Field, has no warm up, no cool down, doesn't require facing the target, and has no Antimatter cost.

The ability can be countered, even as TEC. I've used teched Cobalts and teched Kodiaks to some effect against it. I've used Subverters against it, too. What concerns me is that it is a very powerful ability with no consequences, something you don't see all that often in balanced games. I don't think it would ruin Advent to give the ability an AM cost.

(occurred to me on more than one occasion that repuslion could be a plot by the devs to force us to actually learn to use strikecraft :P)

IIRC I think Guardian repulsion works against any enemy target within the sphere of influence relative to movement of either the Guardian or the target, and not related to movement toward or away from the Guardian. So a Guardian plowing into a stack of unmoving LRMs or repulsing ships moving laterally across its ability horizon will scatter them just as effectively as it does ships moving at top speed toward the Guardian.

Since this will probably be my last "whiny" reply on a balance thread: Devs, you guys are great. You've done a good job of bringing each faction something unique, which is stupid hard in reference to balance. I'm not an advocate of dragging each faction down to equal but dull mediocrity, and the game isn't broken. What would be beautiful in the long run:

-Viable strikecraft in multiplay
-Buffed TEC support (actually, I'm looking at support cruisers for each race that just aren't used in multiplay, but those Hoshinkos need some help against Subverters and Guardians first)
-Give TEC and Advent endgame ultimates that can match strong Vasari RA.

Thanks

I called them whiners on this too, it's nothign new. But their problem was with pulsating it, which I kidna agree, and with the fact it pushes caps away, which I would say is fine by me.

Well, I don't think anyone has trouble with straight repulsion, since that will drain your Guardian's AM pretty quick. While it's not really spelled out, I'm pretty sure Amirabiri is referring to pulsing or toggling Repulsion. That's definitely what I was referring to

I found the repulsion to be very very very useful especially when you want to retreat a fleet and the enemy is acting like a wall.

The problem that you guys see with it is that it expand to the size of 1/4 of a planets gravity well.