How should Advent capital ships be improved?

Don't know if I agree with the general thesis, and especially not the Halcyon. That is one of the most useful advent capitalships period.

The Advent have a lot of AoEs, they are just mostly buffs rather than direct damage like the TECs are (Vertigo, Amplify Energy Aura, Shield Regeneration etc.). Whether that is a good thing or not is another question, but there is no doubt the Advent excel at large late fleet battles, though their strong buffs also make them the most vulnerable to damage AoE abilities...

With that many targets, and if you're going to make it affect strikecraft, you may as well have an infinite target cap. I'm not sure if it working on strikecraft is a good idea though, but I do agree animosity needs a buff to the Radiance's surviveablility.

What the heck are you even talking about? 15 squads is use, I can only assume you're talking about a Skirantra with max bombers from scramble bombers. And while there is no doubt that Scramble Bombers is effective, the bombers from that are temporary and use up antimatter, and are in no way equivalent to owned strikecraft.

You're also ignoring that every one of the Halcyon's abilities is fairly to extremely useful, which few other capitalships can say (*cough* Microphasing Aura *cough*).

However, both the Halycon and Radiance are fairly good capitalships, so I don't know why you'd start a thread about Advent capitalships and not complain about the Revelation. 

There are useless capital ships and many useless abilities for Advent, but the basic problem is NOT this, the Advent capital ships lack of hull is way bigger problem, these are the weakest ones of their categories and they are killed too easily if not being constantly repaired, oh Advent has crap repair functions so.. even bigger problem. Not to mention Halcyon and other stuff die so easily to shield ignoring phase missiles..

Not really. Shield regeneration is amazing, and I think the Domina is now extremely underrated now that it's healing ability is no longer channeling. However, it does take 6 military labs to get...

This is the problem. So much of the Advent's defense come from shields and shield abilities that PMs just cut right through them. It would be more manageable if their debuffs like Vertigo affected the primary source of those phase missiles though... bombers.

I play multiplayer and with better players, sometimes skilled games, and it greatly changed my attitude from old AI times.  Online the dominas are awfully late and the cost of their ability is outrageous, just look at the same ability of the Hoshiko.. Not even near. Yes I know shield repair is good and I always use Progenitor, BUT it's nowhere as effective as repairing hull as hull is always better because of the armor effect. TEC can easily keep fleets alive with hoshiko, same goes for Vasari because of Skirantra, but Advent hull repair is so late and so weak.. and it's only good for somewhat healing and keeping your most important ships alive, and you have nothing to help weaker frigates or waste brutal antimatter by leaving Dominas on autocast. If they repaired 50 hull, I would consider building them..

Anyway, Rapture and Revelation are wastes of money even in the mid or late stages of the game as they can't really offer anything useful on their lower levels, and it's likely they won't reach level6 or above due to their physical strength.. Rapture could be useful for bomber swarms BUT it will die before making any change.. Revelation is not good for anything, average for taking out 1 or 2 escaping capital ships by disabling them (I lost most capital ships this way against that stupid AI), but that's all..

And Advent has almost nothing against Phase missiles and I can't understand developers what the hell are they doing? Over many years all they could do is put absolutely useless PM block research on culture that you will not likely to research anyway.. and thats only good for defense and where you have full culture, and it wont be an enemy planet..

You're forgetting bulls#$ oveseers.  They should really tone those down.

The advent really should get some tier 3 or 4 tech called "Preparatory Blocking Systems" or some such that gives a 5/10/15/20/25/30% phase missile block.

Of course that won't happen, but you can always dream.

And yes, the halcyon is powerful, but my problem with it is that its survivability is so low that it usually dies before it can do much.

And yes, the Revelation is worthless.  The problem with doing anything with it though is that all of its abilities cannot be really changed in such a way as to make them more effective without changing the ability's purpose.

Although maybe reverie could be switched up.  Give it the ability to hit multiple targets (4/8/12)and you could make it a sort of uber-subverter.  Give it a 30-40% boost in health and shields to help its pathetic survivability and it could become a useful ability-suppressor cap.

Just had a thought.  If provoke hysteria was given unlimited range and if the damage was increased to 2.5% a second, we could have an extremlty useful hit and run attacker.  junp into a system far from the front lines and use the ability, and you could kill the planet in under a minute.  A very useful way to attack the opponent's eco,  especially since the Advent have a bad eco anyway so they need all the devious tactics they can get.

Toning down the overseers will just not happen anytime I think, and there are many more serious issues needing fix in the game. Anyway draining antimatter or light frigate abilities are effective against them.

The thoughts about the Revelation are interesting but it's not likely happen too, any of these changes, they will leave that ship as useless as it is now, maybe improve it a bit and getting a less but still so useless thing. And you will never get the Revelation level6 online, you can do it gainst AI, but practically you can do whatever you want against that dumb system..

Just think about how Advent economy has been improved since Diplomacy, what to say not much.. Still garbage. And this is way bigger problem in balance than a small useless Revelation :/

Since we are at it.... the Radiance has little going for it besides the - not overly impressive - antimatter drain. I think it was rarely build because of that in Diplomacy.

Detonate Antimatter: With Titans being far less dangerous without abilities, this is a must have. Although you might consider using two Radiances because a lone one needs some time to drain enemy ships. 

Animosity: Only reasonable use I can see for this ability is to buy your nearly destroyed Titan a few more seconds..... just pray that it were not bombers that nearly killed and that you can live without your radiance afterwards.

Energy Absorptive Armor: Helps to make the Radiance a little bit less fragile, but thats about it.

Cleansing Brilliance: In theory this could destroy several weaker frigates... in practise you can call yourself lucky if hit you 2 ships. Add a very long cooldown (what for? ) and your want to use it on enemy Titans or Starbases alone. A job it does futfil not very good.... going both against shield mitigation and armor the total damage done is rarely more than a minor scratch in the paint job. Even enemy captital ships easily withstand it.

For an ability that requires

• A level 6 Radiance
• A promising target and considerable effort on your part (autocast doesnt work very well)
• Nobody interrupting it or overwhelming the Radiance (looking at you Kortul) ,

the damage output is most unimpressive. In many cases a level 2 Evacutatur will do more damage with Level 1 Nano Disassemblers.

I see to options to make Cleansing Brilliance more usefuf: Either you widen the area by a huge margin... which would look pretty stupid graphically or you give it a hefty damage increase. A beam of this magnitude should melt enemy capital ships hull like a hot knife goes through butter.

Right now many Vasari Capitals have far more dangerous ultimate abilities, that dont require half the effort or the skill to use them effectivily. 

I realize that, but if the game goes long enough and I have some high level capitalships around, I'd still try to get a few just for my caps and titans. The Hoshiko is economical enough for fleet repair, while the Domina is more like the overseer and should only be microed on high priority ships. Of course, you can stack any number of Overseer heals so I don't deny that its better for that.

The problem with that is just the problem with culture period. If culture actually was very useful, a lot of the Advent's disadvantages go away.

The Rapture is not a bad cap IMO. The problem again is that it is geared towards fighting groups of combat frigates that you just don't see online because titans and strikecraft make them obsolete. Though being able to give a buff just by hanging out on the edge of the gravity well probably makes it better than everything but the Halcyon late game anyways, in that at least it doesn't have to face the high risk of destruction to get some use out of it.

The only Advent capitalship I've noticed to be magnificently less durable than the rest is the Discord. The Radiance might have a bit of an advantage from its passive but the rest seem about the same. I think part of the problem is if you're not paying attention until you get the "Shield failure" warning, about half of the ship's total durability is shields so you have less time to retreat than the TEC or Vasari. Not to mention phase missiles will have already caused hull damage.

What? To be honest I think only the TEC have really good ultimate abilities. Replicate Forces and Volatile Nanites are okay but not game changing, you certainly don't build those caps for their ultimates. Drain planet is nice but it doesn't hurt your fleet. Disintegration is amazing but has a long cooldown, and a Vulkoras is a situational cap anyways. I guess Greater Nanite Swarm can be exploited but who builds a Rankulus? And it is usually better to build a Kostura cannon than a Marauder for stabilize phase space anyways.

the durability problem applies to everything the advent makes.  The problem with this is that the dev's neglected to make the advent damage output high enough to counter this weakness.  

Cleansing brilliance is actually rather good against large numbers of frigates.  That makes is useful for the Advent Loyalists, since their titan cannot do so well against frigates and cruisers.  

What would really make the AL competitive again is if they got an ability that 

#1 is unstackable, but the duration is 3 seconds

#2 restores 100 shields over those 3 seconds

#3 is an aoe shield buff

#4 one of their cruisers gets this