Flak is OP
Flak is fine against fighters.... BUT ,IS grossly OP against other units. Espesialy TEC and vasari flak.
Tec due to higest hp /cheapest cost and vasari due phaaaaase missiles and charget missiles.
That said: Flak is fine against fighters
Why? Well...
It is night impossible to remove flak from the battlefield due to near immunity to LRF fire and STUPIDLY hig hp... best hp/cost ratio of all frigs and cruisers.
So flak that is nearly unconterable is now a permanent deterrant from using fighters. This leads to 60/40 ratio in LRF/Flak fleet composition wich is now the "way to win". You cant use LF's due to LRM precense and you cant use fighters due to 75% building penalty of flak. HC's are only option, but by the time you get to that point, it is usualy too late.
Sollution?
Nerf Flak HP 50% and lover the armor a bit. It is still usualy most ignored unit in the field, but atleast now it whuld be removable, not like 1200HP 300 shield gardas are now.
if you can't get out HC at the time, you could always get out LF's which is the hard counter against flak to tide you over until you get the big guns. You could also build a second or third capital. Flak barely do a thing on caps and HC. Even 30-40 barely scratches the paint. I am not kidding, a self repairing skarkovas can easily survive continued fire from dozens of flaks
Add to that hoshikos and you have one tough little bastard. Agreed. Flak needs a nerf. If you keep them as fast as they are they shouldn't be any tougher than a LF. If you want to keep them tough then slow them down. They shouldn't be able to chase strike craft all over the grav well and also be tough as nails.
The replay is now outdated, but I posted one not long ago where I killed my enemies with flak because I was tired of listening to people complain about it being useless. My ally got rushed and he bailed on me and left me with a 2v1, so I did some hit and runs for a while and finally culminated in a fight where I destroyed both enemy fleets, including HC's, 3 enemy capships, and a small starbase -- I used a big pack of flak with hoshikos backing them. Flak doesn't do a lot of damage to your focus target, but they are hard to remove from the field. Enough of them will kill even a capship. The thing they had a real problem with was starbases. LF's are the hard counter, but flak is so fricking tough, it actually holds its own ok.
BTW, I have tried this with Advent flak under a progen and guardian shield umbrella, and it worked well too. I have the most problem doing this with Vasari sentinels because it is hard to get adequate repair for them, though if you group them with a couple Skirantra's and some Overseer's, you could probably accomplish the same kind of abuse.
Good times....
(i believe) the original intention of high HP for flak was to allow them to survive the swarms of SC they are supposed to counter. particularly bombers, which they do not hard counter.
Flak to me seems fairly well balanced; they don't do too much damage to anything heavy, but can rip apart light craft and fighters. Build more light frigates to counter them?
Your original post is filled with a lot of hot air(like, literally. Condense that spacing a bit!). Flak is hard to kill. So? Their weapons are useless against everything that isn't a fighter, and even have trouble against the thicker armored bombers.
The only "issue" here is you suddenly discovered that a flak frigate is far better armored than the paper thin LRMs which get spammed in every game.
Dear god siddy. I'm going back to sleep.
lol more people not figuring out that LRMs shouldn't and aren't meant to be your core fleet unit anymore. LFs are the core unit you should have. They counter carriers and flak, and if you back them up with hoshikos, gardian+progen, overseers you can take them into combat againt LRMs.
Basicly:
Why do people lose to carrier spams. Because they didn't have enought LFs.
Why do people lose to flak spams. Because they didn't have enought LFs.
Understand that LFs are the core unit and the game is extremly well balanced. Fail to understand it and keep making LRMs your main fleet unit and keep raking up the loses. I for one barely ever reaserch LRMs anymore and I am winnign more games now then before.
Lmao. Siddy. It's you. I read posts like that thinking it's some n00b bitching for no reason. You never cease to surprise me.
Flak is fine. If anything just lower the damage percentage vs anything but anti-fighter
DamagePercentBonus:ANTIVERYLIGHT:CapitalShip 0.5 DamagePercentBonus:ANTIVERYLIGHT:VeryLight 1.5 DamagePercentBonus:ANTIVERYLIGHT:Light 0.75 DamagePercentBonus:ANTIVERYLIGHT:Medium 0.5 DamagePercentBonus:ANTIVERYLIGHT:Heavy 0.5 DamagePercentBonus:ANTIVERYLIGHT:VeryHeavy 0.5
Don't think u can get any lower than this!
how long has this game been out? how much practice and experience do we have with this balance matrix? haven't we gotten used to this yet?
lights counter flaks and carriers (the source of fighters)
long range counters lights
fighters (hosted on carriers) counter long range
back to start, ad infinitum.
maybe we should change his tag from Cpt. Siddy to Cpt. Obvious.
congratulations on noticing that flaks are on the upside of the counter chain relative to long range and fighters. also notice that they are on the downside of the counter chain relative to light frigates. thanks for playing.
Man, first its lrf are too powerful, then SC are too powerful, now flak is too powerful.
What next, Caps are too powerful? (That would be nice)
Don't forget scouts! They are over powered!
You know we could just turn down the damage on everything and have a nice light show. I think that would be balanced.
No, so far the HC are not overpowered. You can keep their damage up.
LRM's are good against LF's, so you want to get LRM's in the beggining. I never really go away from LRM's after that, but I really shouldn shouldn't I, in mid-late game. That would also help with lack of crystal. Humm...
You have discovered our sinister plan!!!! Once we successfully lobby every ship in the game to be nerfed, we plan to go back to siege frig spam! The Galaxy will be ours!!!
(seriously though, I don't really want anything to be nerfed)
And that eaxctly what you shouldn't do go for LRM before you ahve a solid LF force, your backign your self into a potentialy deadly dead end. Because look at it this way.I have LF and carrier while you have LRM and carrier. My LF go after your carriers, you have 2 choises kitte them or leave them stationary. If you kitte them they will live longer but you LRMs will have toruble killing my LFs. If you let them sit you carrier will die very rapidly and so will my LF but their cheap and quick to build so replacing my LFs loses isn'T a big problem.Now my fighters ill be moewing down your LRMs letting my LFs live longer and do more damage. Your fighter are chasing mine around but it won't matter in the end sinc ei am keeping my carriers while your losing yours. So my total number of strike craft will rise above yours even if you killign my strike craft. Now once yoru carriers are dead your LRFs are toast as my LFs will add their firepower to my fighters. I WIN! YOU LOSE!
Now if you chsoe to make you LRF chase my carriers instead it still doesn't matter. I'll kitte my carrier and focus my fighters on your LRMs. In the end my carriers will out live your and my LFs will take no loses while you toke heavy carrier and LRM loses. Once again I WIN! YOU LOSE!
Time to get it people LIGHT FRIGATE (Cobalts, Skirmishers, Dicciples) are the main unit that you need in your fleet, especialy int he early and mid game. In late game add in HC to help them out but don't replace them with HC thou. You'll always need a decent amount of LFs in your fleet. 20 or so is a nice number to have.
flacks are defenatly overpowered. I was creaming a TEC player early game with a fleet of 30+ assilents. I saw him spamming flack so I retreated and started spamming LF. then he attacked me. my fleet had about the same lf as he had flack. his fleet creamed my fleet. he had about 30 flack, and 15 hoshikoes and a marza. my around 25 LF got destroyed because the flack just wouldnt die. I even had my assilents attacking his hoshikoes. now figure this out around 25 vasari LF is about 175 fleet points. while 30 flack is only 120. my fleet had 55 fleet points more than him, filled with a "counter" to his fleet but his fleet still creamed me.
there has to be something wrong with the balance here.
are you really sure LF is a counter to flak. i know that defense vessel vs. Disciple vessel, the defense vessel shows twice the damage on the infocard, and has i dont know how much more health/shields.
LFs, soft counter yes, but i don't think hard counter...
It is more of a soft counter due to the survivability of flak. Flak has a high damage on the infocard, but it is broken up into 4 banks, and it is further reduced by only doing %50 damage to most heavier armor types. The LF will actually do more damage to the Flak than vice versa. The problem is Flak is very tough, and when you back it by repair, you need a lot of focus fire to take them down, or kill the repair first. I recommend killing the repair first.
Crashtrust me LFs are a hard counter to flak. Roughly 1/3 the amoutn on flak that you have in LF will be enought to wipe him. So if he's got 30 flak 10 LF should be sufficent. However dicciples migth ahve some troubles so 15 migth be preferable. I don't play advent very offten so can'T tell you for sure exactly. What i can tell you for sure is that 15 dicciple will fair better againts 30 flak then 15 illums would.
And for the rest Cykur nailed it. You probably lost that battle because of bad target callign and not because you didnt use the rigth counters. Also Skirmishers do more dmg to support cruisers then Assailants.
Even considering they are firing from their three beams ?
Ead....get a buddy and test this sometime....10 LF will not kill 30 Flak if the Flak is using focus fire. 20 LF probably won't kill 30 Flak if the Flak is being microed all over the place confusing the LF. It is more of a soft counter, and it is damn near unkillable with repair if nothing is killing the repair. That is why I made the "Power of Flak" thread a while back and demonstrated killing off other players using only Flak and repair. I tested this with John James one time, and I was microing my Flak back and forth being a pain in the butt, and I was killing equal supply cost of LF with micro, though it was a very close fight.
tbh as far as flak vs LF are concerned, i view flak as LF's big brother. obviously flak canot kill bigger ships and LF cannot kill SC(directly), but as far as the two versus each other, the tech level if nothing else, and also the mere stats of the the flak, make it superior; enough so that even if LF's are hard counter they are not hard enough for anything less than 1:1 ratio for sure.
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