As many of you know, I play Vasari almost exclusively. Well, I was playing a game yesterday on Whirlwind with an Advent ally set to unfair with four enemies on hard and locked teams.
Good news: I have every pact with my advent ally.
Bad news: a TEC adversary is pounding away at me with Sova spams.
The choke point is a desert world protected by the best defenses I can put on it. Maxed out SB, turrets, hangars, repair bays, and the adjoining asteroid has a phase stabilizer. Unfortunately, my egg is elsewhere colonizing and my fleet is split because I am fighting a three front war against two enemies.
Because of that last item, the AI is able to practically steamroll me. I can't mount any offensive because of that. I am attempting to build my fleet because I finally reached the point at which I have unlocked the Vasari's late game arsenal, but whenever the AI attacks, my fleet gets shattered.
The only way I found to mitigate this is Skirantras. SB is now incredibly powerful and makes taking down capitals far easier. More importantly, RC is awesome. The point is, without them, I get slaughtered and the planet is bombed to oblivion.. With them, I take minor losses.
So, my point is that in this game, Skirantras are more or less the only thing keeping me alive. Without them, I get annihilated. Maybe it is because a good chunk of my FC is used on Envoys, but still, I almost feel obligated to use them. No longer is Scramble Bombers some worthless ability. Now it has a real effect on gameplay.
That part is good, but the problem is how critical it is now. This large amount of carriers makes countering them more difficult since it can throw more at me than I can return. I don't know if this AI's RNG just likes Sovas or if the Devs actually made it like them, but either way, it is significantly more difficult now than before. I'm fine with a difficulty buff. I am just wondering if the Skirantra should be the only thing able to stand up to Sova spams. Obviously it shouldn't, but the point remains... It is far more powerful than the others and as such is unbalanced. Do I think its OP? No. Do I think other caps should be buffed? Yes!
Reject it all you like. So what counters do you expect people to bring? Fighters get raped by a handful of flak. Cap counters get raped by bombers along with a few assailants before they are adequately thinned plus they can always spam more bombers once the refresh comes. The only workable counter is LF or LRF spam depending on what your enemy (lrf or flak or both)has and trying to snipe a cap IF you can before it jumps out to repair. Even that is kinda iffy because you have to try harder to kill his cap than he does yours and more often than not you are left with damage wasted because he jumps out to a repair and he has killed your counter with the assailants or flak he has built in response.
[_]-Greyfox
Excuse me... Did you just suggest that PMS was good? And did you also suggest that Power Surge deals massive damage? Neither is correct. PMS is a bad ability, as is PS when you are talking about damage boosting. Its power is in its ability to heal itself and vastly improve the power of DS.
Think about it... What would happen if you tried having 12 of any caps fire their primary damage ability? Ever wonder what 12 nanos would do to you? How about 12 Det AM's? And better yet, what about 12 SB's? That kind of an ability deals monstrous damage. Think of it this way... Each squad has three ships and each deals 6 DPS I believe. That means 18 DPS per squad. You can then get 3 squads at once from SB so that increases it to 54. Don't forget though that it can overlap with other uses and I believe the number is 3, so that puts it up to 162. Then multiply by 12. This is 1944 DPS. That would be devastating.
LOL, dont get me wrong. I killed his Skirantra with my own mid level Skirantra, a lvl 3 Egg, about 20 Assailants and a few Sentinals to counter your supposed counter. So I KNOW its OP. It wasn't killing 12 at once. The most I killed at one time was 4 in one grav well. But they both just kept building new Skirantra, and basically nothing else.
I reject your notion that 12 Vulkoras Desolators with Phase Missile Swarm would be all that lethal. Out of curiousity, I just tried 6 lvl 3 Vulkoras w/ 2nd PMS against the AI, and I wasn't impressed. The range of the PMS is just too small, damage mitigated away, and its lucky to get off a more than a couple volleys befor antimatter is gone.
Against 12 Skirantra, half would be dead befor they got close enough. In a normal game it would be difficult to even aquire up to 12 of them.
I did some LAN testing awhile back (1.18) of a single Skirantra vs a Vulkoras. Level 1 Scramble bombers beat Phase Missile Swarm by 1600 hull. In other words the Skirantra easily killed the Vulkoras, and still had 1600 hull left. Yes, multiple Vulkoras would potentially double or triple their damage on multiple targets, but I suspect that muliple Scrambled Bombers would easily take out several individual targets.
Finally, yeah the beam weapon (Disintegration) is awesome, and great for taking on StarBases. But its level 6! Its lucky to get 1 of these in a normal game.
Look, Itharus... PMS is actually justifiably worse than the standard weapons on the Vulk. The Vulkoras has the highest PM damage output of anything smaller than the Orkulus with it maxing out at 78. Now, with maximum buffs, PM's can effectively deal around 240% of their listed damage. This means that you are effectively dealing 187.2 DPS passively. Then throw that in with the twelve and you have 2246.4 DPS. That is under the best circumstances, but those are incredibly rare, so the more common thing is 170% which is a total of 1591.2 DPS which is worse than the DPS of Scramble Bombers and bear in mind that the Vulk's high level PM batteries are more powerful than PMS is.
Another good option to look at is how much these things actually deal in one volley as at this point you are reaching critical mass... Bombers have a cooldown between 10 and 20, so that means that you multiply the 2k DPS by 10-20 and get 20-40,000 damage per volley. Mitigated, which knocks down about 75% of incoming damage yields 5-10,000 damage dealt. That is enough to take down any capital that is weaker than a Kol, and even then, it is cutting it awfully close. Oh, and my I remind you of something else which I forgot to mention thus far... Bombers deal PM damage which can crank up their damage by an additional 70%. Once you get that, anything you train them on will die.
PMS deals 300 damage, so that means that with 12 Vulkorases, you would deal a maximum of 3600 damage to any single target. That is not DPS, but rather instant damage. Even if you multiply it by 7 which I believe is the maximum target cap, you only deal 25,200 DPV which could be spread across anywhere from 7 enemies to potentially 84. Either way, this ability sucks.
The Vulk's PM batteries have a cooldown of around eight seconds if I remember right. This gives them a maximum of 624 DPV. Combine that with the +70% and the 12 ships and you get 12,729.6 DPV.
If you refuse to accept this, I'll gladly look at the code itself and find the exact numbers, but that ought to give you the gist of why you are wrong. The only thing you have to fear from 12 Vulks would be their ability to take down any planet within seconds. That is what you would have to fear of them, nothing else.
EDIT: I discovered that the maximum damage for PMS is 600, so all numbers need to be doubled of what I said for it. However, even with these new numbers, it is still not that good.
Nah. I accept it. I just wanted to point out the fact that the target cap on PMS (and the fact that the missiles are NOT phase missiles) sucks without being the one to say it first .
I'm psychological like that.
Buff vulks
If you remove the PMS target cap, you make the Marza'a ultimate less of an advantage. (Maybe raise it to 1.5-2x its current targets though) They should be phase missiles, tough. (Honestly, I didn't know they weren't)
As to SB, the only real options to counter it are
Destroy the Skirantra(Best Idea)
Flak/Fighters
Use abilities that drain antimatter on the Skirantra
Bring your own Skirantra to nulify the enemies advantage
-Twilight Storm
soez... anyway i did some math, and it seems that the primary reason Skirantra is spammed the most of all the capital ships is simply economics.
IF i did my math right... its cheaper and uses less fleet supply to get a second and third skirantra with scramble bombers, and BUY lv 3 than it is research and build carriers able to hold equal numbers of squads. Bonus bucks if you get them to lv 5.
not to mention the perks of the skirantra able to deal damage, other ablities, and better strike craft regeneration rates when antimatter becomes an issue.
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