Advent Illuminator -- should it only require 2 military labs?

Maybe, we could also give them a buff up. After all, they were constantly nerfed before their extra damage was noted. Maybe bringing it back up will help them become useful. After all, they have the shortest range and cannot bypass shields. Having a higher damage rating would not be a bad thing.

I really think that a research shift will not happen.  The devs have not shown a propensity at all to do this in the past.  IMO, there are several things that could use shifted but aren't.  I don't mind illums being a tier 3 research but a buff would be nice.  They were nerfed too hard and vasari buffed too much.  Change may occur but it will not likely be this change.

[_]-Greyfox

No technology has ever changed position in the tech tree in a patch.  So I think it's safe to say it's not gunna happen.  While getting illuminators out faster would allow Advent to be very competitive at the 2-lab level, I think a buff to the strength of the illuminator is a better approach to fixing this guy.  It's become very apparent that behind its bugged damage output, this was actually a relatively weak unit.

Vasari was barely buffed at all.  It was the scout nerf that gave Vasari such a strong opener.  Vasari has always had second-rate combat scouts and light frigates, so when these untis got sidelined by LRF-based fleets Vasari prospered.  Simple as that.  Wanna nerf Vasari?  Bring back some early LRF counters and they can't just lean on their precious assailants anymore.

Late-game, Vasari has always been a bit of a nightmare, able to go toe-to-toe with 1.181 battleballs with ease once they reached maturity.  Now that there is nothing else in the game remotely at that level of power, they appear obscene later game.

In any one patch, vasari was not buffed much.  Looking in the past several patches however there is a steady advent nerfing and vasari buffing(rightly or wrongly).  When caps were buffed to begin with(including carrier caps), vasari got the better end of that deal with several buffed caps.  Advent caps got nerfed in general(progen being the one that sticks out in my mind).  The progen colonization pretty much represented the advantage to an advent econ.  Scouts got nerfed which hurt advent the most(I still support a scout nerf despite that being an advent strength).  The vasari scout(4 on the info card) now has twice the dps of the advent(2).  The vasari scout was nerfed less than the rest which could be called a relative buff.  Illums have been nerfed a few times in the history of the game with the latest being the bug fix(still a nerf despite it being a bug).  Scramble bombers were buffed as well to the massive benefit of the vasari.  This is just a few things I think of off the top of my head without scrutinizing the old patch notes.

Also back at the time all this was going on, phasic trap was not highly used and not considered in any balance equation.  If I could bomber spam myself and expect it to do much good when pursuing my enemy on his territory that might be different.  As things stand I cannot.  I honestly don't see how they expect an advent to besiege a vasari world and expect to kill the sb or even put a large dent in it.  Phasic trap removes bombers from the equation.  Bomber spam leaves me with no HC answer to the orkulus.  Illums suck against starbases.  Not to mention the SB is terribly hard to kill anyways even with overseers and skirantra healing the damn thing.  If it's late game I have to deal with subverters too.  If I hole up on my worlds and wait for them to attack, I end up getting kostura spam.  It is a bad time to be an advent.

[_]-Greyfox

At this risk of beating that dead horse again, I always held that the TEC/Vasari scouts were fine and what the Advent scout needed was a nerf to its hull/shield/armor, which are still out of line even today.

Most scouts had to tread carefully around fighters and flaks due to their fragility, but the Advent variety could just go charging into the middle of the fray and pick off LRM with impunity.  If they could be cleaned up more easily like the other scouts, I feel they would have been fine.

Fact is that we need an early-game LRF counter, and the scout fulfilled that role quite well.  To be honest, I think we either have to look at buffing the carrier cruiser (fighters in particular) or the scout.  One or the other (or both) need to  be viable in the early-game to provide us some alternative to the LRF backbone.

This is untrue; the info-card is rounding off the DPS to the nearest integer.

The Advent scout used to deal 3 DPS, now it deals 2.4
The TEC scout used to deal 3 DPS as well, now it deals 2.55
The Vasari scout used to deal 4 DPS, now it deals 3.4

Relatively speaking, the Advent scout took a bigger hit than the TEC or Vasari variety.  Overall, though, they were all knocked down far enough to become non-viable combat units in most cases.

While we're on the topic of patch notes, it's worth mentioning that the Enforcer got an undocumented buff in 1.19 as well. 

To be fair, only very high level Skirantras have enough antimatter to juggle both scramble and repair cloud.

Doing this would not help at all.  It doesn't matter where advent illums are in the tech tree, i won't use them unless they are buffed.  I'd much rather just use disciple+seeker which is far more effective then illuminators.  case closed.

Generally if they get the sb up against advent, that world is lost if not a good portion of the fleet.  You don't need scramble if you are keeping an SB up long enough to do what it was meant to do.  The SC and few assailants will whittle down the fleet while the advent works on the SB which is generally a fruitless attempt anyways but leaving it sitting is just as bad an option.

I think fighters need an endurance buff.If they can live longer they can counter lrf and bombers better.Bomber spam late game is also a problem especially for vasari.Thier bombers are hard to kill and kill stuff at an insane rate.Advent need caps to make their fleet powerful and against vasari with 20-30 assailants OR 2 or 3 skirantra and 4 ups is not even an option.Tk push does not work and neither do fighters with a enemy flak.Advent flak do nothing to vas bombers.There really is literally nothing advent can do but try and snipe vas caps with less firepower than vas has.I have also been in situation with 2 halys vs 2 skirantra and handful of lrf where I had all fighters and he has all bombers with bomber spam and my fighters could not even keep up with bomber production.Fighters are in a pitiful state only viable in large mass of numbers to put a dent in anything.

I would like to see ilums beam upgrades to be higher.Maybe double.They are expensive ups and high on the tree compared to others lrf ups.Also vasari has 8 ups for lrf while advent 6.Last 2 are for range which extremely expensive putting their range at par with far less dps.Range ups are only useful if you can repulse a fleet and used to outrange then.Rnage is totally worthless against assailents because you are massively out dpsed unless you go point blank range and then still out dps.So give them better upgrades and help fighters out.

Redonkouslly op against advent since sc is only way to kill sb.Unless they buff starfish by ALOT this ability is crazy.Potentially completely deadlocking a planet for indefinite amounts of time.

I think ilum at lab 3 is ok since they get carriers at 2.Its not really a problem except for advent fighters are useless and ilums suck right now.

No Don't change the tech trees around.  I would recommend reducing the cost to build the advent fighter bays to provide a better counter to early tactics.  you can still spam enough illums to defend yourself, its the skirantra/sova support that does you in early.  Perhaps a slight buff in illuminator focus firing would make the tech and expense of the unit more worthwhile.

I also agree with mindseye that fighters need a buff vs. flak.

The advent hangars aren't terribly expensive as is.  They are not worth the expense however as a counter to skirantra/assailant spam since they are immobile and just as dependant on AM as a carrier cruiser.  The benefit is if you spring for shield projection which is 3 labs(granting shield mitigation for buildings and small but not negligeable shield regen for your fleet).  They also take a large amount of tactical space which is generally better used for repairs seeing the large amount of phase missles on already thin hulls.  This is less helpful in an early rush but very helpful in later defense.  It can really slow down destruction of repairs or factories.  The fighters have the same difficulties as every other fighter has and wane in efficiency once any amount of flak shows up.

[_]-Greyfox

Honestly I am just pissed at Stardock right now. I have lost a good amount of respect for them as developers. This is mostly stemming from their long silence concerning this game, the disaster that was Elemental, and them turning their backs on THEIR OWN Gamer's Bill of Rights and slapping us in the face with Elemental being completely unfinished and without the ADVERTISED multiplayer.

I doubt seriously another patch is coming for quite some time and when it does I doubt it will fix issues without making more issues. As for Ironclad and their "support" for this game I am contemplating not buying any of their products anymore.

I am starting to look toward Gearbox for my games now, considering they made the completely awesome Borderlands and they just bought the Duke Nukem franchise and are finally going to release DNF so soon after purchasing the IP. They are seriously becoming the heros of gaming. While Stardock is falling behind steadily.

The problem is the hanger + the tactical upgrade.  If you just want a hanger, this is exorbitant, around half the cost of a fricken starbase.  If you're building a concentrated cluster of defenses, then shield bestowal makes it all worthwhile, but for a lone hanger this is completely out of the question.

The fact that hangers have absolutely atrocious antimatter reserves only makes this worse.  Hangers in general need a buff, and the Advent variety which essentially cannot be deployed until late-game as part of a coordinated defense is the worst of the bunch.  Not that the Vasari variety is much better; people don't even USE it as a hanger, just as a phasic trap.

Antimatter regen for hangars is the problem. It's absurdly slow. Needs to be doubled or tripled.

Sounds good to me; bump up the antimatter regen on these guys and tweak the cost of phasic traps to compensate (it needs rebalancing anyways; personally I favour a stringent target cap coupled with an antimatter cost decrease).