Stilakus Subverter - effective counters?

from Sins Forums

Let me start by saying that, in the hands of the CPU, the Stilakus Subverter is a *pain* to fight against - pretty much nullifying my entire fleet when faced in numbers. I have the feeling that they would be less effective (relative to other solutions) when playing against a human opponent, but for the purposes of this thread lets assume we're talking just about AI-controlled ships.

So - can anyone give me any effective counters for the Subverter? I *could* build an assload of light carriers, I suppose, but when facing a fleet with 50+ carriers and 40+ subverters my fighters are pretty much engaged with keeping fighters/bombers off my back. Capital ships are not completely disabled, and are good for engaging a small number of the beasts, but against a large swarm they just don't have enough firepower to clear them out quickly enough to avoid my fleet being decimated, unless I have all 16 in one place.

I play as TEC, and when I face a vasari fleet I always take out the subverters first, but like I say, with large swarms it becomes impossible to destroy them all without getting frozen out of existence. I favour 'blob' fleets of heavy cruisers (which probably doesn't help the matter), backed by capital-ship carriers, but I have no problem mixing it up a bit if the situation requires. Is there any 'area-of-effect' counter available? As it stands the subverters seem cripplingly powerful.

(As an aside, I play against multiple AI opponents all 'ganged up' against me, so destroying/damaging enemy fleets quickly is important. Losses can be replaced, but lost time cannot)

16,809 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
Nobody has any effective counters? :(

I have to throw around the term 'overpowred', but perhaps it would be a good idea to limit the umber of ships which can be affected by a single subverter? Maybe to 16 or 32 ships? This way, if the abilities stacked, a large fleet could still be crippled by using enough subverters, without being an absolute nightmare to fight against.
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
I'm a Vasari player, but I'll try to give a hand...
The subverter's distortion field is powerful, but very expensive in terms of anitimatter. Some theoretical counters I can think of are:
1) Mass rush: (carefully spaced, perhaps subdivided into different fleets, so that when you see the subverters coming you can split your forces up)
2) Light frigate anti-ability abilities: Your Cobalts are pretty easy to spam, and you could temporarily cripple the subverters, long enough perhaps to take them out.
3) Out-Range: Shoot them from farther than they can jump. Your LRF's should do the trick. They also could have splash damage, so you could possibly roast several at once.
4) Decoy: send in a small force to coax the Subverters into crippling it, then send in your heavy cruisers (hopeflly they were sitting a safe distance away) to shred the subverters.
As I said before, these tactics are theoretical, and I have never tested them before. If any work, please let me know!

Best of luck!
ChaoticMagician
Galactic Civilizations IV
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
Repulse does the trick. It's more a game of cat and mouse, seeing if you can repulse before it gets in range.

You need enough capital ships. By the time a player has subverters, you should have a minimum of 2, hopefully 4 capital ships. They can defeat subverters as subverters are very fragile.

As of the moment it's overpowered. 1.1 is bringing a heavy nerf to this ability.
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
Thanks for the replies, guys :)

ChaoticMagician, your suggestion of providing a few 'sacrificial lambs' seems to work reasonably well. I tried with the very cheap cobalts, but frankly they just die too easily to be of any use against a large massed fleet. So, what I've been doing is just using my kodiac heavy cruisers in this fashion instead:

Select 5 - 10 'sacrificial lambs' depending on enemy fleet size. Send them in to the centre of the enemy fleet, ahead of the rest, spread out. This usually nets about 1/3 to 1/2 of the enemy subverters, and also helps draw the fire of the rest of the fleet. With the rest of my kodiacs, I split them into two groups, roughly 2:1 ratio. The larger group dives in and attacks any visible subverters, particularly those that look like they're lining up to jump in. The smaller group stays out of range until the larger group gets 'infected' with active subverters, then close in to take them out. When the number of subverters has been reduced to less than 10 or so, I start focussing on the rest of the fleet and using my cap ships to take out any remaining trouble-makers :)


The annoying thing about the subverters, from my point of view, is they interfere with my favoured method of attack :p What I like to do, when facing superior forces, is dive in with 80 or so heavy cruisers and a few cap ships, and cut down the number of enemy carrier craft to a 'managable' number - ie less than 30 or 40, then jump out. During this time I can often mostly replenish my losses, and next time I jump in I will have air superiority, so I take only half the damage-per-minute that I did in the first attack. On the second jump I target the main damage-providers - heavy cruiser equivalents and long range frigates. The third jump I like to just annhiliate the rest of the enemy fleet :) Having a superior economy allows this tactic to work well, as I can always replenish my losses faster than any *single* given enemy (if not the mass of enemies as a whole).

Oh yeah - glad to see that the subverter has been somewhat nerfed in 1.1!