Combatting Death Ball

[Mr. Clean]

Has anyone found a good technique to play against, or without resorting to, death balls?

I'd really like for there to be more tactics to fleet action: formations, angle of attack, planetary defences. But the answer to pretty much everything is always "just send a bigger fleet"

Sure, there are specialised ships that are intended for specific roles, like structure destroying aka bunker busters. But the difference between using them and not is like 45 seconds. Basically the time it takes for a defence fleet to cross a gravity well.

This isn't even a complaint about starbase durability, but a genuine interest in doing more than amassing the biggest fleet. If you use multiple small fleets you can hit many places at once, and claim a bunch of planets simultaneously, or in quick succession (assuming you have the resources to actually upgrade and hold them), but seeing as how expansion is largely linear due to resource constraints, again you're kind of shoehorned into taking one location a time, fortifying it and then moving on with your deathball fleet, while probably having a "home defence" deathball fleet to deal with any threats.

What can a player do against deathballs, without using deathballs themselves?

[Tjalmann]

As vasari the raider corvettes in a good size is always good to send in for resources and fly out before the enemy comes, it does not matter if you destroy something or not any hit makes you metal and crystal. About mid game i tend to let some roam around

[Nongenti]

Mobility like vasari generated and phasefates, tec acceleration item or advent Reborn recall can help out maneuver and either kill their hw or grind down all their worlds faster than deathball can do in return.

Advent Wrath can mi controller parts of the fleet with planet item, super weapon and titan, which allows yo grind meatball down.

Tec can set override traps with starbases, exploding them on jumping in enemy's, destroying or at leasting doing at lot if damage to fleets.

In team games starbase stacking in the same orbit can also be a thing.

[Outdated]

raiding is my favourite strategy against a strong enemy. invade several places and see how he reacts.
carriers are quite good for that as they will stay at the edge of the system.

[DM|Hachbubuch]

Advent: Reborn can split fleet in 2 parts: 1200 limit Capital ships + Guardians and Titan +
650 limit Non-CPs (Illuminas, Destras, Disciples). The 2nd fleet tends to be much weaker, but super-weapons and Unity abilities make it almost indestructible.

The other variant is to swith Titan into the 1st fleet, but make it 1000/1000 instead of 1200/800. This variant is good when you need to relocate your 2nd fleet fast enough - you can just salvage them at 1 place and rebuild them at another.

Well, this results in 2 nearly-doomstacks (AI will struggle to take down the CP fleet, as Advent ships have enormous damage-per-second, and Guardians excel at repairing them).

[Hurricane]

Originally posted by DM|Hachbubuch:

Advent: Reborn can split fleet in 2 parts: 1200 limit Capital ships + Guardians and Titan +
650 limit Non-CPs (Illuminas, Destras, Disciples). The 2nd fleet tends to be much weaker, but super-weapons and Unity abilities make it almost indestructible.

The other variant is to swith Titan into the 1st fleet, but make it 1000/1000 instead of 1200/800. This variant is good when you need to relocate your 2nd fleet fast enough - you can just salvage them at 1 place and rebuild them at another.

Well, this results in 2 nearly-doomstacks (AI will struggle to take down the CP fleet, as Advent ships have enormous damage-per-second, and Guardians excel at repairing them).

Maybe on easy... on highest difficulties the ai is no push over and had max level titans with artefacts...

Splitting your fleet is a death sentence

[DM|Hachbubuch]

Originally posted by Hurricane:

Originally posted by DM|Hachbubuch:

Advent: Reborn can split fleet in 2 parts: 1200 limit Capital ships + Guardians and Titan +
650 limit Non-CPs (Illuminas, Destras, Disciples). The 2nd fleet tends to be much weaker, but super-weapons and Unity abilities make it almost indestructible.

The other variant is to swith Titan into the 1st fleet, but make it 1000/1000 instead of 1200/800. This variant is good when you need to relocate your 2nd fleet fast enough - you can just salvage them at 1 place and rebuild them at another.

Well, this results in 2 nearly-doomstacks (AI will struggle to take down the CP fleet, as Advent ships have enormous damage-per-second, and Guardians excel at repairing them).

Maybe on easy... on highest difficulties the ai is no push over and had max level titans with artefacts...

Splitting your fleet is a death sentence

I've tried 1000/1000 on impossible bots (well, only twice I encountered lvl10 titans, they were Vasari Exodus and Alliance titans). Radiance battleships are surprisingly good at taking down titans. 10 of them with Plasma agitators, Vex amplifiers, Energy accelerators and Harmony Circuits can take down titans in moments. Besides, almost every Advent CP has a plasma weapon, which excells at taking down titans. Well, you might lose some of them, but the titan is going to be down for sure. Ankylon is going to survive a little bit longer, but it will eventually fall.

[Mr. Clean]

Watching the replies in this thread as they come in. Thanks for the helpful discussion :)

[DNA_Magic]

Play on smaller maps, more about scrimmaging with smaller fleets. The other strategy here are decent but at the end of the day you cant avoid using death ball if you have home-world victory on. If you play with home-world victory off you can get into out maneuvering the death ball with smaller/faster fleets. In the older game super weapons was a good way to do serious damage without needing a death ball. For example, as Vasari you could hit a planet across the galaxy and phase jump directly to the planet you hit. Making the enemy having their whole fleet in one spot not the best idea.

[DM|Hachbubuch]

Originally posted by DNA_Magic:

Play on smaller maps, more about scrimmaging with smaller fleets. The other strategy here are decent but at the end of the day you cant avoid using death ball if you have home-world victory on. If you play with home-world victory off you can get into out maneuvering the death ball with smaller/faster fleets. In the older game super weapons was a good way to do serious damage without needing a death ball. For example, as Vasari you could hit a planet across the galaxy and phase jump directly to the planet you hit. Making the enemy having their whole fleet in one spot not the best idea.

It works until lategame, when AI has fully equipped starbases at each planet. Then it becomes nearly impossible to break the defences without at least a 800s fleet. Yet doomstacks destroy starbases easilly.

[Japanese shaman girl]

This game needs some sort of supply system. Maybe planetary items that provide bonuses to adjacent gravity wells with debuffs relative to the distance to the nearest supply hub. Death ball meta is actually bad and is the biggest downside right now, especially with the new fleet size system.

[Shadowhal]

The response in strategy games to death balls often falls into the categories of outmanoeuvring or area of effect damage. I think people commented on both. There seem to be several low-level aoe damage but truly big aoe damage is rare. But then again, those are very powerful so probably should be expensive and rare to deploy. What about medium ones? Abilities that can affect a few dozen ships at a time but not a whole gravity well worth? Are there many? Should there be more?

[DM|Hachbubuch]

Originally posted by Shadowhal:

The response in strategy games to death balls often falls into the categories of outmanoeuvring or area of effect damage. I think people commented on both. There seem to be several low-level aoe damage but truly big aoe damage is rare. But then again, those are very powerful so probably should be expensive and rare to deploy. What about medium ones? Abilities that can affect a few dozen ships at a time but not a whole gravity well worth? Are there many? Should there be more?

The major problem is that deathballs are especially good at taking down the most valuable units - capital ships, titans and starbases. But theese are the strongest units, without them there is 0 chance to counter a deathball. And the only units having decent AoE.

Also, deathballs usually mainly consist of capital ships, and theese are tough, so no AoE can actually deal enough damage to them.

[Lywelyn]

Originally posted by Mr. Clean:

Has anyone found
What can a player do against deathballs, without using deathballs themselves?

as a wise engineer once said "the answer? use a gun, and if that don't work, use more guns!"

[H-master]

I agree with OP.

Gameplay resolves around who has the biggest death ball.

[Immortalits]

As a Vasari alliance pnly player, I've never struggled against even 'impossible' AI after building just the core 4 capitals (starter+Kortul opener, then a bit later 2 Skirantra), after that, full turtle on one side with buildings, push the other, no ships die, only upgrade beams in the later tiers, fleet 'expanding' only with additional Kortuls and 1 Antorak for mobility and focus breaking for safety. After you get lvl 5 with 2 Skirantras, even an entire fleet with a Titan can't kill a capital ship from the Vasari... 300+ armor strength is insane and if the Kortul is the one tanking, it's gg, the Jarrasul can also prevent important targets from escaping.

For safety against hard CC effects, you can deploy some extra Skirantras to have some redundancies, but 2 can keep everything topped up in a full capital fleet.

A High level Kortul with maxed upgrades and items can have an almost 100% uptime on the Power Surge and have 180+ Wave (300 pierce), 6*35+ = 210+ beam (150+ front; 500 pierce) dps. (Phase missiles are not worth the item support on Kortuls, but can be done, it's ~40 dps baseline on higher lvls) not to mention the armor debuff passive.

So in short, you can counter any 'deathballs' with a simple Vasari 'survival ball'.
The 4 core ships are capable of tanking at least 600 fleet supply if not more.

Depending on ship lvl, but if antimatter and disabling of ships is not a concern, from lvl 5-6 Skirantras with at least an antimatter recharger on them and some defensive techs at those tiers, like combat shield regen, you can tank prety much anything the game can throw at you, like an entire pirate base (including the towers) as an example. Even with minimal static defense support (upgraded regen bay with an additional 36 armor regen/ sec) I highly doubt anything can even dent the armor of your ships - don't even bother caring about shields breaking - outside of them being an extra layer of damage mitigation - armor is your main defensive layer and it won't realy break