Hoshikos vs. Iconus Guardians - Which is the best?

I've been leaning strongly towards this same sentiment but in truth don't play Advent enough to see how effective Guardians are in different situations.

The Hoshiko is one of TEC's greatest early-game advantages. The Guardian, while nice, is also expensive, and soaks up damage rather than reducing/preventing/repairing.

But also remember that the Guardian can get the Repulsion ability, which can be incredibly useful in some situations. (of course Hoshikos can also get Demolition Bots...)

Guardians by themselves don't do much, you really need a mothership with it to keep the shields of both the guardians and your fleet up. Problem in competitive matches is keeping the Progen alive, though once you get repulse and with a lot of micro management it may be possible.

Guardians used to have a lot of love for two very simple reasons...

First, illuminators were the best damn ship in the game, and they could shoot from behind a repulsion field with impunity...anything other than LRFs can't outshoot the range of repulsion, meaning illuminators could hit the enemy while the enemy couldn't shoot back (unless kanraks or LRMs)...

Then illuminators were nerfed (thankfully)...and that whole strategy fell apart...

Second, dem bots got buffed, and now is very powerful....

So, not only did iconus guardians get seriously nerfed (indirectly), but hoshikos got seriously buffed...

In general, I think hoshikos are currently the best support ship in the game...

The Hoshiko is the best ship in the game. TEC absolutely needs these them to stay competative throughout the game. Fast healing, omni-directional demo-bots, and they're cheap.

Early-on it's the hoshiko hands down.  Later it's the Iconus, hands down.  The demo-bot change means the hoshiko stays on top for much longer than it used to, and combined with the general weakness of the faction Advent rarely lives to see the full potential of the Iconus anymore.  However, if you play a large multistar where the Advent has free opportunity to get a fully mature fleet online and you'll feel the full power of the Iconus Guardian.

Lol.

I don't know man...those dem bots can shut down entire fleets and unlike subverters without having to micromanage much...I mean, that's a full minute of no weapons and slow engines...50 of those things can shut down 300 (1200-1800 fleet supply?) ships for a minute and probably keep 100 shut down indefinitely...

It requires some good ship placement (so, some move orders) but that's about it, fire and forget ability with no real drawback...

I was trying to give an example where Advent would have opportunity to directly jump to their mature fleet.  Obviously this isn't played for a reason.

Would still take Repulsion between the two of these abilities once fleets get large enough.  Not belittling the hoshiko, it's an awesome unit, but the guardian does scale better.

Granted this type of scale happens usually only in SP as no MP game I've ever played is willing to go that long.

Would love to see the guardian given tweaks to make it more of a mid-game as well as late game player. Perhaps a slight change to Repulsion where it only slows all ships but violently throws and damages a set # of frigates.

Played on the custom map sol vs. orion.  I played it as both advent and vasari.  I was facing 9 lvl 4 computers (the one above hard) allied against me.  I played first as advent.  I proceeded to quickly expand and eco up and build some starbases on the star in close formation.  I built as large of a fleet as I could.  The enemy ships didn't take too long to start rolling in, and once they did it was a straight long term attrition battle.  I did this strategy for both advent and vasari.  Neutral acquisition early on was a similar pace between the races thanks to the abundant nearby neutrals, but colonizing all the neutrals was in the end about two times as fast with the vasari (giving the vasari a sizeable early chunk of extra resources). 

Advent starbases, with meteor, are still a crappy starbase.  Its laughable to even compare them to the orkulus starbase anyways, but my starbases at my home star (sol) were all destroyed relatively easily by the oncoming enemy forces. 

I stalemated around mars for a long time as advent, but in the end the advent fleet had nowhere near the firepower to deal with the enemy fleet. 

Thats right, not enough boom.  I could survive anything, but my dps as a fleet overall was kinda pathetic, when compared to that of the vasari fleet.  In the end the war of attrition was slowly beating back my forces and I called the game as a loss.

I decided to restart the next day with a vasari game using the same game perameters as before.

Vasari outclassed the advent easily.  In the time I was able to put up one advent starbase on my home star, as vasari i had easily put 4 orkulus and had upgraded all of their health by 1 upgrade. The firepower of the vasari fleet was in the area of about 3-4 times that of the advent fleet, and i would NEVER lose a ship...where as advent I would always have to replace a small amount of ships in every engagement.

the vasari outclassed the advent so clearly, with the same exact start, facing the same types of enemies.  I would say that the vasari fleet is about 2-3 times stronger then the endgame advent fleet given a rough capability estimate of the two fleets.

Naturally this estimate isn't just based upon the one trial above .

Depends on the fleet size we're talking about that they're fighting against.  If we're around 500 command points of units, Orkulus is the god of starbases and even a small amount of healing makes it invulnerable.  Once we start pushing over 1000, Orkulus loses its luster and can be bowled over by brute force and none of its upgrades will seriously help it.  The transcencia, on the other hand, retains a powerful combat presence against any size of fleet and is only truly threatened by uplinked Ogrovs or massed bombers.

Depends on the faction you're against.  Against TEC, I'd actually say that the Vasari are actually slightly inferior to Advent.  The late-game Advent faction is, IMO, much better equipped to take down the TEC than the Vasari faction.  If we're talking direct Advent vs Vasari, though then 2-3 times stronger is an understatement.  Vasari absolutely murder Advent in the late-game.

This one baffles me a bit. Your playing against compy. So you know that they will just rush your starbase. So I guess it really would depend on how you upgraded. 4 Advent SB with Maxed Weapons, 2 w/maxed Meteor, 2 w/maxed mass disorient and then the rest of the points in Health really ought to be able to utterly annihilate thousands of command pts worth of ships... Especially if you have invested in some shield upgrades as well.

Mass Disorientation nullifies movement for all ships and weapons for all Frigs & Cruisers for 30 seconds. With 2 SB close together, you can chain them and keep most every frig and cruiser useless. Meteor can then bombard for 750 damage also repeating in a chain. I suppose after a long while the SB could run out of AM but by that point all 4 working together will have decimated several thousand pts worth of ships. If you have Disciple's aiding with Steal & Transfer AM, 4 Advent bases should be nearly invulnerable.

With that combo, as Darvin pointed out the only thing really to fear would be up-linked Ogrovs or massed bombers.

Truer words have not been spoken.

That only works if you can get the enemy to attack your starbases in the star's gravity well...but even so, a single upgraded starbase on a friendly planet can also fight off hordes of attackers if you have frigate and structure repair abilities.

Sareth referred specifically to defending his home star vs AI so I replied with a strategy that would pwn under those circumstances.

IE-

And-

Guardians need too many variables to be effective: Shield regeneration, Vertgio and steal/transfer anti-matter from disciples. 

Hoshikos need nothing to be effective. They just pawn while being the most offensive repair cruiser in the game. Nothing gets better than these babies. 

As an advent player your job is to force your enemy into using light frigates and heavy cruisers by using the most effective early game units:

Defense vessels + Drone hosts backed by any number of mother-ships for shielding, rapture for vertigo and halcyon for push and aurora (Trinity +).

These units are bulky, hardened and can take a pounding from phase missiles. There comeback is also devasting on long range frigates and heavy and medium armor units. 

It means you can safely research the shield branch and get your guardians to soak up even more damage.

Guardians are however stupid. Be sure to activate shield projection manually when you can. It will ensure victory even in the late game if you survive massive punishment by preventing damage with vertigo and shield projection.

People don't see it but the advent defense vessels is their most revered unit. 

It is unfair to compare guardians and hoshikos.

It should be guardians vs Overseers 

The + from guardians is 1 guardian can protect the entire fleet from more damage provided your in range of the shield bubble.

Drone hosts early is not a very good investment I think because a halfway decent opponent will be building some LF anyway vs Advent, and LF melt carrier cruisers. And if you go for 2 Hostility / Drone Hosts as soon as you can that'll seriously eat into your initial tier 0 spam advantage. And if you have the freedom to get 3 caps and a good number of flak, you're already past your most vulnerable period as Advent.

It really depends on what size game you're playing, because that determines how far you are from your closest enemy's HW, which determines how much you can tech/fleet/eco up before you have to fight.

Its impossible to get drone hosts early on. Im neva clear wen i say things. U have to use flak+desciple, , flak+ illums then add drone hosts. I'll upload a simple replay to show u all this. 

U see once u force vasari to make light frigates or heavy cruisers it means less phase missiles and shielding comes into play. Objective achieved.

So basically...defense+illuminators+bombers?

Which is more or less how it is for all 3 factions to be honest...once you get to the mid-game, all the Vasari player has to do is match your defense+illuminators+bombers with his sentinels+kanraks+bombers...the difference is, the Vasari fleet has phase missiles and a stronger economy behind it...additionally, it has better FFing potential for killing SBs and caps...

I think I get what he is saying: you use flak+LF, the opponent sees this and counters, then you switch to flak+illums, the opponent sees this and counters, then get drone hosts. It's sort of a gambit. I think the idea is that you dont want them to ever use kanraks so you make them have to pick up other ships and fall way behind in the LRF race.

I don't see how this really accomplishs that though. How does flak+LF cause the opponent to stay away from kanraks? flak are tough, but if you have both flak and LF, and the opponent has an equal supplys' worth of kanraks, I think they would win, no?

Another thing is that the enemy will likely have a good number of Assailants anyway for their main purpose of fighting off (and killing) capital ships... regardless of the Advent fleet composition.

Couple of quick questions about the Hoshikos:

1. How many ships are affected by a single Hoshiko? And do Hoshiko repairs stack? I thought I read somewhere that it didn't but I was just checking.

2. Can Dem Bots be micro-managed in the sense of picking out a particular group of targets to affect?

The effect lasts 15 seconds, and the Hoshiko can activate it once every 3 seconds, so it can affect a total of five ships at a time.  Hoshikos do not stack for effect on a single ship.

The biggest reason you have multiples of hoshikos is so that you don't run into antimatter issues, and they can't simply be picked off.  If you have 4 or 5 hoshikos, it's easy to snipe them out first.  If you have 15 or 20, not so much, and you probably won't run out of antimatter any time soon either.

Yes, but the autocast behavior was improved substantially a few versions ago and you really shouldn't need to micromanage it unless you're rationing antimatter.

This is just the thing to be doing when you see an enemy with Heavy Cruisers and you happen to have spare Hoshikos.

You do need a motehrship to get most out of guardians.  But Hoshikos are just godly.  They are benchmark for support IMO.

Guardians are-in every sense of the word-high maintenance. In a firefight between defense vessels and assailants where you need to micro there movements between enemy lines the guardians need not be in that fleet but just near by to turn on shield projection while channeling. There basically static units in their role on the battlefield and should be treated as such.