New Advent Loyalist proposal: Improved capital warfare capability

Corvette spam are going to be nerfed since they are so boring...

corvettes aren't boring, just overpowered.  They are quite fun to use, and there are other ways to limit them while adding to the games fun factor, without taking anything away.

read --> Corvette spam are boring... like LRF Spam where effective but was quite boring... so it was removed (technically), lets just hope it's "nerfed" just enough to still be useful while not being a one million man army of clones!

Yeah, I agree, their Caps are too squishy. So improve their durability, not their cost. [Edit: yeah it might make them OP late game, so maybe reducing cost is a better route].

Yeah, the Advent Loyalist need a killer strategy.  I was thinking maybe early access to the Deliverance Engine.  Or possibly have their Caps ship spread/emit culture, as well as repel it!

I would like to see them be able to buy up to level 5, the mechanics are already there!  Experience is spread amoungst multiple caps, so there is less danger of level 6 caps with Advent.

Yeah, Corvettes need to be nerfed some more.  This is a problem for all race's Cap ships.

@sagewon

Early super weapon capability for the advent loyalists wouldn't do anything in helping them militarily (having 5-6 harmony labs isn't conducive to having a strong advent military).  Also the idea has already been added to the game, with the TEC loyalists.  The developers don't like reusing good ideas over and over, they try to make each faction unique feeling.

Improving Capital ship cost is more important.  The advent loyalists will be better able to deal with capital losses in the early game, that would be their advantage.  The developers have already decided many times that they weren't going to buff advent capitals durability.  This is after many exhaustive threads/replies put forth by myself and others.

I believe you didn't quite understand me here.  The technology I was referring to was meant to change the cost of training a whole new capital ship crew.  The change would be noticed above the logistics technologies.  With this upgrade the advent would have lower new capital crew training costs and be able to field more capital ships faster, while retaining their original cost.

The only exception is the Corsev which can acquire an AOE ability at level 1 to deal with Corvettes.

@ rovert

well to be fair, the discordia also has a lvl 1 aoe ability that is very effective.  at level 2 it starts to eat corvette spams as long as you have some corvettes of your own. 

I laughed at this... I'll admit to a twist in each version, but Returning Armada = Truce amongst Rogues = Return of the Fallen in my opinion.

Returning Armada and Return of the Fallen are only alike in that they both give you ships. RA uses resources, RofF only occurs on death. The first uses resources, the second is free but only on chance. Why not add the Sova's missile turrets, the Skinatra's replicate forces, and the new Vasari battleship together if they're all the same to you?

Truce amongst Rouges though doesn't even get you ships, so I'm really missing this comparison.

I don't really TEC... the one that does give you ships then. That was the point... they're all research that gives you ships.

As I said, there is a twist to each, but it feels like the Devs said "RA! Now, that was a good idea! Lets give it to everyone! Yeah!". And I did say it was my opinion.

@sithlord

I see no real comparison between the three, they are very different tactics wise, and operate within the game very differently.

As for staying on topic, this thread is failing.  Its a good idea warranting merits, perhaps we could refocus on the main topic at hand.

thank you all for posting!

I would vote for advent loyalist capital ship buffs, but I don't think I'd do it any of the ways you describe.

I'd do something like add a tech to Ruthlessness that makes capital ships take less damage or add an armor tech that only affects capital ships or maybe add some defensive benefit for comboing capital ship abilities together.

@ sithlord AJ

Any reasons why you wouldn't do it any of the ways I describe? 

Techs that reduce capital damage taken aren't needed and in the endgame it would make advent capitals very difficult to kill, throwing off endgame balance.  Reducing advent loyalist capital costs keeps the delicate math balance of combat untouched and allows the developers to maintain time efficiency by using the easily balanced researchable money sinks.

Ruthlessness+Animosity synergy? 

Ruthlessness is right now just a weird ability.  If you make it stack at all (like I did in RR), all you need to do is spam Destras and between the FF and Ruthlessness, in larger fights, lots of things will suddenly start to pop.  If it had some utility, that'd be fine by me.  Regardless, Ruthlessness is a T7 wheras the OP is talking about early-game.

To fix early-game, I think primarily corvette spam should just get fixed.  Fix that, and IMO, you should be a lot better off.  There are various threads on how, but still.  I do agree that the Advent are weaker earlier on, but I'm unfortunately not a big fan of the ideas you posted and don't really have one of my own to counter.

@ Volt

Well the advent as a race will always be underpowered if there isn't a way to balance this.  What i'm suggesting actually would work as a cost effective addition that would shore up the weaknesses of the advent game.  Being able to actually build a relatively early advent synergy fleet would be quite fun, and at the same time risky because of how weak the advent capitals are to focus fire.  That being said, considering the capabilities of the other races, coupled with the lack of power of the coronata, the advent loyalists are looking like they need something else to hold them up to par (even if the coronata gets buffed, imo).

Its the culture buffs giving:

• Hit chance protection that combos with vertigo-->Disable targeting on corvettes--> shield projection---> Suppression Aura---->shield Mitigation---> high tier armor
• Phase Missile Block

I think if they keep buffing these values then thats the right approach.

Hmm so you are saying a relatively passive, relatively low skill building placement should be responsible for an entire factions military edge?

Active abilities, Active ships, that is what makes a game/race/faction fun to play.  Culture is nice to have, yet the loyalists need something more...culture improvements by itself does not make a unique faction.  The advent loyalists still feel like a gimped version of the advent rebels.

Your correct and at the same time wrong.. 

Vasari is Active ships, Active abilities..  why follow the same pattern. Be different. 

Advent always has been about no repair cruisers and damage reduction and debuffs. Why repair damage if your not getting damaged...thats there style. 

The loyalist take this strategy a step further with there titan and corvettes. I'm thinking they still need to add ability cool-down debuffs to some unit or culture.

Advent is fine, they are designed to fight within culture, The loyalist titan is the best fleet support titan the problem is they have made it easy to kill fleets with titans and certain abilities.

Because I feel that early game the advent should have money problems. They have good ships, they aren't the same ships as the other races, but the challenge is in getting enough of them out. Besides, it seems like it wouldn't work the way you intend; look at the rebel's reduced temple of communion cost tech. By the time you can grab it, you're done building them. Same thing applies. When you start a game, you immediately build your capital ships. Tech comes slightly later. Well, you're done building capital ships now.

The direction I was aiming at was:  

So, my line of attack on the problem was either make them not as easy to kill or make it less attractive to take out the advent capital ships. I think making capital ships more effective or synergistic would make them worth the investment more.

@ Sithlord

First things first, i'm very clear on your position.

One relatively low cost military tech to get a larger long term advent capital fleet would greatly help the advent loyalists.

The advent loyalists would still have to earn the cash to get more capitals, 25% capital ship cost reduction is still going to be a serious investment. 

Idea #1 allows for advent loyalists to better deal with capital ship losses and encourage them to have a larger capital fleet.  This ensures a stronger mid game advent loyalist capital fleet, and ensures that even with some losses the advent fleet will be able to recover their capital ships to maintain fleet viability.

Idea #2 allows for a stronger advent offensive right off the bat, the most OP idea of the bunch.  This ensures a strong Early game advent loyalist capital fleet, that the loyalists would use to gain the tactical advantage and have more power to gain the upper hand in early game territory acquisition and skirmishes.

Idea #3 allows for cheaper capital crews so that the advent can field a second/third/fourth+ capitals much easier then the other races while keeping the same attrition costs.  This ensures a strong advent loyalist mid-late game capital ship fleet because new capital ship crew training costs are the biggest barrier to having a large endgame capital fleet.

I'm torn between idea #1 and idea #3.

I would greatly like to see your reasoning behind why my method of implimentation is flawed.

You want to approach the problem directly, and buff advent capital durability when in fact there is no need for a direct buff.  The problem with this is how this will greatly change other fundamental aspects of the game.  Capital ship cost is easy to balance.

Changing combat values is NOT easy to balance. 

Changing the advent loyalist capital ship durability would do nothing to really help the advent loyalist faction, and they already have had their capital ship durability buffed.  They were buffed by having loyalist culture reduce the efficacy of the vasari phase missile shield penetration capability.  So, as long as the advent loyalists have cultural influence on vasari worlds they attack, their capitals will hopefully have enough durability to withstand a vasari opponent long enough to make a difference.

Also, the developers have shown a strong desire to make economic balance fixes to the game(time efficient and effective).  The main two changes to the Titans and the Corvettes have been with increasing titan and corvette production costs. 

Instead of considering lower advent capital durability as the problem, you should accept that advent capitals are weak, and that is okay because since they are weak, they can be buffed to ensure that they are more numerous.  This would maintain balance, because one advent capital by itself is relatively weak.

 This plays well with advent racial synergistic capital ship abilities.  Also, advent capitals would be far more resilient against the vasari phase missile assault considering they get more phase missile blocking inside their own culture.

The rebels are unique in that they have a super powered titan.  The Advent rebels are like the "sith lords" of their race in star wars, they have their strong individual, while the advent loyalists are the "jedi" because they use the group synergy to overcome their opponent.  The loyalists hold true to the old advent military philosophy that synergy is king, while the rebels hold to the military philosophy that bigger, badder, is better.  Please note that i'm using the term "military philosophy", this isn't a made up idea, this philosophy is actually how the two factions play, or should play.

The Advent Loyalists suddenly start to make sense as a whole faction, and their endgame support titan suddenly becomes less gimped, because the loyalists don't necessarily HAVE to have their titan to win anymore.

This would mean that the Coronata really doesn't need to be improved a great deal (its abilities still are rather gimped at the moment though). The powerhouse of the Advent loyalist fleet is in its Capital ships.  This also follows well with reaching tech level 8 advent military, and researching that ever so lovely experience buff/gain for all capital ships.

All of a sudden the Advent loyalists have a viable, balanced endgame strategy as well.

The ideas I presented above are all different ways to solve the problem.  After all, i'm trying to provide a range of ideas to give the developers a wider range of options to choose from, if they deem any of these ideas worth looking into.

Lets say you just bought a car and now you get a deal from your insurance company (or something) to get 50% off (!) your next car or next 2, you simply have to pay them $1000. 50% is a great deal, but paying half price for a car is still a lot of money. Since you just bought a car, you don't really need another. This has the limitation that your cars have definite lifetimes whereas capital ships only do if you lose them.

You seem to be saying "fix the initial investment and you'll see more advent capital ships that are already balanced". I'm saying "make it more attractive to have more advent capital ships, and the initial investment will be the balance". I don't think the capitals are weak in anyway, just that once you have a couple, there's no reason for more.

I think you are missing the part where I was suggesting it be techs you research, like your suggestions were. actually, my favorite was "maybe add some defensive benefit for comboing capital ship abilities together". This makes players want to use multiple abilities and have multiple capital ships. It could even be an offensive bonus if that flies better.

I see, so you're not arguing for necessarily the best fix, but one that has the best chance of succeeding? Ok, I can go along with that. however, you're not asking for a straight cost change like the corvette and titan changes you mentioned. You're asking for new techs, which is a different design altogether, and does not fit in to the category of 'most likely to succeed' anymore than my ideas

I am all for the Loyalist strategy to involve more capital ships. Capital abilities have always been a prime focus for the Advent. Making the loyalists go further down this path seems natural. having them do it via cost reduction, something not historically advent, seems to me the wrong way to do it. Adding more synergies does. To me, at least

...Wait... was I just pandered to?!

I appreciate that. However, they don't feel that different to me. All your ideas are about reducing the cost, and I think that is the wrong approach to the true problem. If the majority of people felt that it was, I'd bite my tongue and see what happens. Since you asked for an opinion, I gave it.

@ sithlord

Hey thanks for spending the time for bringing some good responses to mine.   I have to say I laughed hard at the "sith lord" response.  <3

The point is that the advent loyalists should be able to capitalize on their capital ship ability synergy.  To this, they need 5 capital ships.  The advent need every one of those capital ships!  This is a significant investment, even in the endgame.  The advent are balanced around their entire fleet capability, so if they are never realistically capable of achieving their total fleet synergy then they will always be gimped.  Other races can have a perfectly deadly combination of only a few capital ships.

The point is attrition losses.  Replacing capital ships even in the endgame is expensive, and if you field a lot of capitals you WILL lose some.  The advent loyalists should be designed so that their lower durability ships don't hurt them so much when attrition comes in the mid-endgame.  In this way the advent loyalists can field more capital ships safely over the long term and maintain the viability of this strategy.

Oh I agree, greater synergy would always improve the advent fleet.  If there was a greater synergy between a smaller amount of advent capital ships then they would be strong enough to do the job, hopefully.  Yet increasing the synergy to this degree for fewer capital ships would mean that overall an endgame advent capital+support fleet would be a monster.  Balancing the synergy is going to be very difficult because of all the variables, and it is easily watered down.  That is why a price change is made, because you reduce the risk of fielding more capital ships for one faction.  If you reduce the risk, you will see more capital ships being fielded.  Opponents will then be facing fleets with higher synergies, and therefore will be facing the advent as they were designed to be.  The developers, you and I, would all win. 

As it stands the synergy seems weak overall, and even high level advent capital ships are easy to kill without guardian support.  If you get guardian support that means your fleet firepower is going to be severely gimped.

Its true I missed this detail, I apologize.  I agree the merits of your idea are sound and very interesting.

The true problem is risk vs. reward.  Spending a lot of credits is risky.  If the reward(military/economic capability) doesn't substantiate the risk, the action isn't continued, or is done so to a lesser extent(the reason why there aren't huge capital fleets in multiplayer).  The risk of fielding capital ships is fundamentally built into the "capital ship crew training".  Its a straight up barrier to entry that does nothing else in the game except allow you to build one more of a certain kind of unit.  Reducing this cost alone makes it easier to field capital ships, especially if you do it by a % value.  This way you don't need to change the synergy components of the game (which are already balanced via spreadsheets). 

The biggest problem with the design aspects of this game is where the spreadsheet balance of the game doesn't fit with the real economic cost/benefit (or risk vs. reward) of the game.  The developers know this.  They haven't really started acting upon this idea in full force in all aspects of the game, but they are really coming around to the idea.  Also, this is not to say that "I know and they don't"...this is just becoming readily apparent and we are all learning together.

hmm... I guess my response is that I don't think it really works that way.

When it comes to games, I think people go for the best thing... costs be damned. Obviously, you have to field something while working toward that goal, so the cheap stuff starts you off. The midgame is where it gets hairy to predict what people will go for, so I guess you could be right at this point. The way you put it, I don't think that people stop and say "can I pull this off?" I think they say "will this buy me time to get X out?"

The cost reductions still don't feel very Adventy to me, so I hesitate to endorse any of your choices, though messing with the capital ship crew, I agree, is safest and probably the more attractive of the choices you presented. Why not something that just adds an additional crew supply each supply level?

I think I was shooting more to make capital ship heavy/diverse fleets a strategy in and of itself. maybe even the long-sought 'theme' of the AL.

Cost reduction for capital ship crew training is very advent oriented, since they would use their telepaths to transfer experience and training far faster then any of the other races. 

Capital ship cost reduction itself would be reduced because the advent capital ships just aren't as substantial mass wise as any of the other ships.  Less mass = less resources to build= lower cost.

Adding one extra capital ship crew per level would be intriguing, perhaps the first research tech level of capital crew training would net the advent loyalist 2 capital crews instead of the singular version.  If we continue the pattern and add +1 capital to every research upgrade though, we will run into balance issues for the endgame.