Your Assailants are shooting at his Illums in the picture, and the Illums are near the edge of the gravwell.....by not having pulled them out at the same time as the cap, they are pretty much dead...they aren't getting out now.

It was mainly Malice that sealed the deal.

All the ranting and arguing is pretty silly...you can watch the replay yourself and see how it happened.  You are just protesting what you see as unfair.  Malice is less powerful than Missile Barrage....which would have killed everything without the help of ships.  You were dealing with level 3 Malice, I suspect...and that is what happens.

You never lost ships that fast to me because I never had a high level Kortul to put explosive nanites on your fleet first.      Haven't you ever been missile barraged?   Lots of ships go away fast!  Malice is a similiar, but much weaker mass damage effect.

So everyone stop arguing and go watch the final episode of Battlestar Galactica.  

Yes, well my first priority was clicking on my cap, unattaching it from the fleet, and then pulling it.  My second priority was getting the rest of the stuff out.  I didn't pull everything all at once because the fleet was set to jump all at the same time, which would have slowed it.

Secondarily, he was focusing his illums on my cap, so I did not perceive the rest of my fleet as being in any significant immediate danger.  So, imagine my surprise when I pulled my cap, then scrolled back to the planet to see nothing there.  In fact, my first thought was that I had accidently clicked them to jump to some other planet, so I started looking for them.  Silly me.

Strangely enough, I have not.  In fact, I'm always pestering my allies to inform me when they are going to use missle barrage so that I can freaking see one of these things go off.

I have never heard anywhere that malice was any good.  Never.  People talk about suck planet, missle barrage, etc. but nobody ever talks about malice.  I'm no Advent expert, but I played them a couple of times.  I tried malice a few times, said "meh," and afterwards always stuck the mothership on shield recharge exclusively.

Let me say this as loud and clear as I possibly can.  If 3 or 4 carriers sounds good enough to you to wipe the floor with 28 assailants in mere seconds, then we have a fundamental disagreement about game balance, and we always will.  Period.  Paragrah.  That won't change, ever, and we'll just have to agree to disagree.

I appreciate your analysis.

You know, looking at the picture, you are jumping in with 28 at 49:46.  It is 52:30 when you Evacuator jumps out and you have 16 left.  So you had about 2m45s to lose 12 assailants, though we don't know exactly when his fleet jumped in.  The remaining assailants are not at the edge of the gravwell and are engaged in combat / not facing the right way to get out.  It is completely believable that none escape from the force we see in the Empire tree at that time.  Back in the 1.05 days we did Assailant vs Illuminator fights all the time...you always went into a fight against Illums with superior numbers, or some other type of edge, or you would lose everything because it was almost impossible to disengage from them without losing everything.

Also, you have a lot of metal sitting around doing nothing for you.  Sometimes I end up with big stockpiles too...but usually later in the game when my fleet is much larger.  You could have easily had a dozen more assailants or some carriers by selling some of those resources.

I would have killed the Progen first, personally.  It would have went down under Nano and concentrated phase missile upgraded Assailant fire, then I would have run my cap and tried to salvage my assailants.

Make a fileden account and upload the recorded game if you want some help.  I don't have a Sins install anymore, getting rid of that computer, but I'm sure someone will be willing to look at the replay and give you tips.  Astax lubs replays.

There was a significant period of time between when I jumped in and when he jumped in.  I chose to screenshot my arrival in an empty well because Astax said I get what I deserve when I mindlessly charge headlong into a superior enemy fleet (this shows I did not).  The main point of the screenshot is, of course, to show the number of assailants I arrived with.

Yes, but believe it or not, I was not only researching returning armada, it was almost finished (the last tech was already researching).  In fact, it had probably finished researching by the time I lost my fleet.  Those metal stockpiles were going to be used to slap down phase stabilizers and buy ships, as well as fleet up to the next level.  So much for Astax's accusation that I'm a mindless "assailant spammer" who is completely devoid of any kind of strategic thought whatsoever.  "Where's the diverse fleet?" he thundered.  Well, it was on the way, it's just that sacrifices had to be made before it arrived.  I purposefully didn't research carriers because I would get carriers through the returning armada.

Yeah, well like I said, damned if I do, damned if I don't.  The lesson I learned the previous night of play, which I tried to apply this game, was "pull my cap the moment it is apparent the forces are present to FF and kill it."

Okay, fine.  Let us assume that this guy is a master of micro.  Let us assume he is a Tyr, a Cykur, a JohnJames, and a RagingAhmish all rolled into one.  Let us further assume that I'm 100% newb with no micro whatsoever.  So the point isn't that he kicked my ass, that he had a mixed fleet and I didn't, that he had a supporting cap and I didn't, that he outmicro'd me, blah blah.  Of course all of those things happened - this is a guy who could take on the entire dream team single-handedly and win!  The point isn't that I lost, nor how many ships I lost, nor the myriad of ways in which he caused me to lose them.  The point is THE AMOUNT OF TIME IT TOOK FOR THE TOTAL LOSS OF SHIPS TO OCCUR.  THAT'S THE POINT.

Transitive, the above line is the dumb part of your post, because I have shown that I did in fact scout my opponent, and that I did not send my fleet on a suicide mission.  The screenshot above showing my fleet's arrival in an empty grav well (if you had bothered to look at it) proves it.

However, the rest of your post (the bulk of it, in fact) is quite intelligent.  It attempts to address the point of the matter directly (the amount of time it took that many ships to evaporate), and even does a back of the envelope calculation.  Whether your calculations are correct or not, I don't care.  At least you tried, and at least you ADDRESSED THE POINT, and for that I giveth +1 karma.  From the "Agent of Kharma" no less

I think a lot of people are mistaking this as an issue about army composition and balance, because it's not.  I think from the original post, AoK knew that his army was severely outgunned.  His opponent had about equal cost/supply in units, but half of them were a significantly higher tech level and the other half were a hard counter.  These are obvious facts to just about everyone here, and aren't particularly interesting.  The issue at hand is how quickly AoK's army was annihilated and how little opportunity he had to react to his disadvantaged situation.

I tend to agree that in a slow-paced game like Sins, it can be very distruptive if it takes short time periods like ten seconds to completely decimate an entire fleet.   On the other hand, this is to be expected; it's what players aim to do in multiplayer, find the most ruthless way to annihilate each other.  It's not so much a game balance issue as it is a game design issue.  The question isn't whether AoK could have made a better balanced army, because the answer is obviously yes, but whether he had sufficient opportunity to correct his mistake once it became apparent.

if a mistake is easy to correct after its been made then it isn't a mistake. there are lots of mechanisms in the game to prevent quick kills like this from occuring but you do have to be self-conscious and utilize them effectively. 

flak frigates do a good job of warding off fighters, especially at the beginning of the game. defensive support cruisers (hoshiko, guardian, overseer) greatly increase survivability of a fleet.

just a basic example, with quantitative analysis provided:

just assume an Overseer can activate its Reactive Nanite Armor ability 2 times in 10 seconds (it can, as long as it doesn't have to turn too much to find a new target). thats 500 bonus hull points and 2 additional points of armor. at 57% mitigation rate (which you'll hit quickly during focus fire situations) the increase in effective health is 1279 points. thats HUGE! and that's just 1 overseer, they stack additively, you can just as easily include 4 or 5 of them. 

or if you want to look at it another way, each activation counter-acts about ~640 points of damage to a ship that's reached full shield mitigation. the cooldown is 4 seconds. if your micro is good you can have your Overseers spam heal on the target your enemy is focus firing. its gonna take like 375 DPS (before mitigation) to punch through each overseer's healing. 

how many fighter squadrons does that save your assailants from?

an advent fighter squadron has nominal DPS of 11.7, which is 23.4 against assailants. 16 fighter squadrons are needed to match the healing power of 1 Overseer. 

i'm leaving out alot of factors for the sake of keeping this post to a readable size. the pure numerical analysis reveals alot though. a small amount of defensive support counter-acts a gigantic amount of offense. the fleet isn't gonna take any major hits before the Overseers are dead or out of anti-matter. 

as far as i'm concerned the system works perfectly. lopsided fleets of weakly armored offensive support frigates get vaporized in seconds by their counter-units. a mixed fleet with adequate defensive support can last for a very long time in combat. 

*All of them*.  Why are you repeatedly framing the question as if it was the Mothership's Malice, *or* four carriers that defeated you, *or* merely ten Illuminators, when your ships faced *all at once* ?  So you can pretend that ONE of those three groups must be massively overpowered?  It wasn't four carriers that were so magically overpowered they defeated your assailants; it wasn't ten illuminators alone; the Mothership didn't cast some Mass Rapid Death spell and single-handedly defeat you.

Once you removed your capital from the scene, you had 28 light frigates completely unsupported, against a capital ship, four carriers, AND the Illuminators.   Not against three distinct elements in three rounds.

Astax,

its not a flawed analysis, its just an incomplete one. which i admitted. however, it would take a large quantity of fighter squadrons to one-pass an assailant. 16 squadrons could probably do it, so in that aspect its not entirely accurate of me to say that an Overseer cancels 16 squadrons. but any quantity of squadrons less than the critical mass of one-passing a ship can be effectively negated by Overseer healing. 

so out of curiosity, because i don't think i've ever counted the exact number, how many squadrons does it take to one-pass an Assailant? i'm guessing its somewhere in the neighborhood of 8-10. it might be higher than this when dealing with Overseers though since they can actually add 250 hull and 2 armor even to a full health ship. 

Not sure, I know about 10-11 vasari squadrons can kill lrm in 1 pass.  I would have to test.  I think 14-16 should be the numbet for assailants.  Overseer problem is that it would take a while to turn to face target to heal, often that would be too long for it to matter.  Either way, yes you are right it was incomlete, not flawed.

yes the shadow clone thingy

...hmmm back awhile ago the shadow clones were dealing damage...

damn i wish that they nadnt fix that