Vassari Capital Ships

Since I don't like explaining things, and I don't play Vasari much, I say try them yourself. First-hand experience is best.

While the Vasari capships look a little weak on paper, you won't really notice the difference in the game. What you will notice is how powerful some abilities seem vs others. Ultimately, capships are support ships to frigate fleets, and the abilities they bring to the fight define them much more than 200-300 shield or structure points. And yes, Advent caps have very powerful abilities -- in the first patches of the game, the consensus was that the powerful Advent caps made up for the frigates being a little bit weaker. This isn't really the case any longer with Illuminators being buffed in 1.04, but then Malice got nerfed...so it almost kind of balances out....almost.

Vasari is kinda the middle ground between Advent and TEC. TEC Capital ships are very direct in what they do. Advent capital ships are the nexus of support for an Advent fleet. Vasari are right in the middle. Still critical to a fleet, but still pretty direct. An ability like Nano-disassembler, the nanite bomb on the Egg, is a good example. It deals direct damage to a ship, but lowers its armor too so it's a better target for the rest of the fleet.

Advent easily have the best caps in the game. They do so much for an Advent fleet. To call Vasari caps, or TEC caps for that matter, bad is just not a fair statement. All caps have some way to be exploited.

I'm feeling a little lazy so I don't want to look up all the names of the ships, so I'm just going to go in the order the caps appear in the in-game view screen.

Battleship (Devestator)

This ship is an absolute beast. This will win 1 v 1 with a Kol because more of its weapons are in the front. This ship has two meh abilities and two awesome abilites. The first ablitity, Power Surge, and second abilitiy, Jam Weapaons, are ok, but tnot game changing. The third ability depletes antimatter, quite useful against someone reliant on antimatter, such as say Advent or a Sova rusher.

The lvl 6 ability, Volatile Nanites, is one of the better ones in the game if you can get it to work. When a ship gets destroyed that was effected by the nanite, it damaged everything near it, setting up a chain reaction.

Carrier (Skinatra)

Quite uesful if you're massing fighters. The repair cloud will heal everything, including the Vasari's trademark tough fighters. Unfortunately, repair cloud isn't that useful for a fleet because to heal something, that ship has have lost its shields, so if you activate this ability in battle, you're likely only healing said targeted unit. Scramble bombers is meh, but the passive buff that helps the fighters is ok. Keeps 'em alive longer.

The lvl 6 is actually very good. You can clone your own units, but what's great is that you get three, not one unit, at least that's what I think it does. I've never bothered to get this to level 6, but this is what I've read.

Colonizer

Oh my how I love the space egg. This round ship has colonize, meaning you can expand quickly early with this ship. The gravity bomb is nice, but the nanite bomb is a beaut. No enemy capital ship is safe when you have this ability.

To top it off, the lvl 6 turns it into a sieging machine that gives you resources.

Support

This ship is getting a massive buff in the coming 1.1 patch. As this ship stands right now, all of its abilities are rather bleh. Phase out hull is great for negating an enemy ship's presence OR saving one of your ships that's being microed. People undervalue distort gravity, for ships affected by it ignore phase jump inhibitors. What's getting a huge buff is subversion. This ship will personally be able to ruin the "factory planet" that someone chooses.

Sieging Cap

It gets a passive buff for sieging, and a siege platform to help it siege. YAY! What most people don't realize is that seiging platform is actually as effective as the TEC Marza Dreadnaught. The damage per second is very close because the Marza does all its damage very quickly. The Vasari one does it over time consistently. The phase missle swarm really is kinda bleh. I like it early, but in late games where the enemy fleet is huge, this ability is just kinda weak.

The lvl. 6 is unique. You can leech hull points from enemy ships. Rather useful actually.

Good morning Amish! One comment on the Kortul -- for a long time this was my favorite capship. Disruptive Strikes made it capable of taking on just about any cap head to head, including a Kol or a Radiance. But I wouldn't count on it to stop a Sova rush. I have tried =( Good Sova rushers just fly around the outskirts of your system, and it is brutally hard to keep them in range for long enough to let Disruptive Strikes work, cap ships being as unwieldy as they are... I find it is more effective to use bombers from your own carrier, or use the egg and tag the Sova with Nanites now and then. Heck, even a Marauder works by phasing out the Sova as much as possible.

Speaking of Marauders, Phase out hull used by a micro intensive player is extremely annoying. I don't know if it is still the case, but back in 1.03, it used to cancel the move orders of ships that got phased out. When you combine this with the Marauders speed, it is really effective at pulling an enemy cap out of a retreating fleet so you can kill it. It was also fun to race your Marauder behind enemy lines and create a phase node, then warp in a fleet from one of your phase gates. You almost never see this anymore, since by now everyone just makes space eggs.

Vasari generally have more shields then Tec but less HP but they have the same armor rating while they have less shields then Advent but higher HP and Armour.

The Vasari fleet is also very different then the others. They don't need a big cap ship to cover up for any weaknesses like the others. The Tec their frigates are made of paper but the cap ships act like the battering ram of their fleet. The Advent the Cap ships are as the Ragin Amish said the nexus of the fleet. The Advent also feels the loss of their cap ships like no other. The Vasari cap ship doesn't have to make up for any weakness in the Vasari fleet as the fleet is very strong. So instead it just adds another layer of capabilities to an already strong fleet.

The damage that say a Kortul Devastator does is signifigantly better then the Kol due to weapon placement.

Oy, I read my post from before. It has grammatical errors like crazy. Thx to those of you who bare with it.

Raging Amish, that was ridiculously useful.

I wasn't saying that the capital ships were bad.... maybe I was. And I've played through several matches as Vassari, at least a dozen, and never noticed a difference in capital ships, they all seemed, like you said, about as good as the other. Except Advent, but we don't talk about them.

It's very helpful to know that even more than normally, the capital ships aren't solo vessels, they are for use in the middle of you fleet, to bolster it.

This said, does the Nano DoT that the Egg has stack? Someone said something about no one using the Maurader anymore, just eggs, and it made me wonder. Does the DoT stack?

The marauder is at best semi-useful, and it's rare to see it anymore unless it's a long game. I would say it's at best the third capital ship that should be built. It's not that it's useless, but until it gets the buff, the others are a better choice.

I have a hunch the Nano DoT doesn't stack. I think it's meant to, and I won't be surprised if it does as the game stands pre 1.1. I think it doesn't because the 1.1 update mentions that some abilities don't stack but should, like the malice example the developers gave.

If two progenitors are casting malice, enemy ships will only feel the effects of one malice blow because the ability doesn't stack. So I don't know. It will 1.1 is my guess.

Kols and Dunovs for unlimited gauss spam.

What?

He's talking about Flux Field, but those are TEC ships.

The Marauder is very good in big games vs AI, but it sounds like it doesn't fare well in PvP. The speed boost is great when used with 'all jump' on defense, and Phase can be used for several purposes.

Desolators are weak by themselves, but 3-6 of them with a nanites cap will thrash fleets and raze colonies/orbital structures faster than just about anything else. They can also Disintegrate in unison and flatten a cap, or just whenever they need HP. One nice thing about the bombing platform (even one) is that you can pull the cap ship away to fight without having the planet regenerate.

What I noticed is the except for the maurader all the vasari capital ships seem geared toward single ship destruction. They basically destroy any single ship they fight. While the other races capital ships seem to have abilites geared to attacking multiple targets.