Advent players build mostly disciples early on because illuminators are tier 3, expensive to build, and not very good compared to kanraks and LRMs...Advent has both the best LF and the worst alternative options for early fleet composition...that doesn't make LFs good, it just makes them the least crappiest strategy for Advent early on...

Later on, it depends on the player and the situation...I have not played legolas, and I don't mean to downplay his achievements, but if he has only disciples then his fleets should be pretty easy to beat with LRMs or kanraks...even HCs would crush a horde of disciples...if he is seriously owning people with just disciples then either his opponents don't know good fleet composition or legolas is a extraordinary player in other ways (like time management, being proactive, microing, etc...)...in either case, that says nothing about LFs...

I have played Advent quite a bit and have had my own hordes of disciples (somewhere generally in the 50s or 60s) but I never relied entirely on LFs because it simply does not work...a good player will not spam support ships, flak, and carriers without having the LRFs or HCs to protect them...

I play with a mod that makes LFs far better than they are now, and even with those changes LF heavy fleets are very easy to destroy with HCs and LRFs...the only reason an LF heavy fleet would succeed is if you heavily outnumber the enemy or they went heavy flak/support/carriers to preemptively counter an LRF heavy fleet...in either case, it wasn't LFs that gave you victory, it was your opponent's poor strategy...

I by no means am claiming that LFs should never be built...what I am getting at here is that they make up a very small portion of most fleets...in the cases where a fleet is almost entirely LFs, we are either looking at an Advent player who had few other options or a situation where the enemy fleet was heavily unbalanced...

LFs do not need buffed(again) lest we have tier 0 spam again.  As to them countering support ships, that will only happen if you can keep lrf numbers to a pure minimum(a rare thing).  They don't counter subverters particularly well either unless you are going to micro a handful of them to each subverter on the field and hope they dont get killed by lrf or neutralized by the subverter before they can drain them.  The only thing that does that well at all are SC or SB since they are unaffected.

[_]-Greyfox

LRFs are a pretty hard counter, as are HCs...if LFs were as good against HCs as LRFs (no better) and were a bit better against heavy armor, they at least would be able to destroy well supported carriers or support ships before getting pummeled themselves...

The LRF counter to LF was already softened already by making the LF more surviveable against the LRF.  After this point, the LF and scout spam became prominent and there was not much u could do except spam your own LF and hope u could catch up.  Buffing LF further will only exacerbate that problem.  In this instance the preferable thing would be to change the fighter to make it a more viable option at least IMO.

[_]-Greyfox

Making fighters better against light armor is a start and a change I'd like to see...however, LRFs will still dominate as flak can shoot down fighters real easily...another consideration is that fighters don't automatically target ships unless there are no SC in the area, which inherently makes them a weaker counter as you cannot easily target SC and LRFs with fighters without ridiculous micro...

The only successful scout spam you generally see is with Advent...that is because Advent a) have no good early options and b ) their scout ship is much more powerful...when Advent's scout ship is put on par HP wise with the other two scouts, scout spamming because much less effective...scouts work against pure LRF fleets but a good player won't build such an unbalanced fleet...

You can buff LF, nerf LRF, and change (among other things) HCs and bombers in such a way where neither LFs, LRFs, HC, or SC dominate...I don't say this from simply running numbers and theorizing, I have played extensively with such changes and been most pleased with how difficult it can be to win without having very balanced fleet compositions...

There are good players who spam LFs and own people...but I am inclined to believe they succeed with this strategy mostly because they are quick with getting their shit together, are proactive, and catch people off guard...mediocre players know LRFs counter LFs but simply don't get enough built quickly to counter rushes...I was on the receiving end of this when I first started playing on ICO...I left myself vulnerable to LF rushes not because I didn't have the right ships, but because I didn't have enough...as I got better and amassed a fleet faster, LF rushes were a non-issue (still had trouble with those double skirantra rushes though)...

Their hull is on par with TECH per supply (their shield is higher is all), and TECH's scout has better damage. So before we nerf advent scout's AGAIN... maybe other balance issues should be fixed first. A scout heavy fleet has a huge downside so I don't really mind if someone wants to invest upfront in that fleet. It's simple you see someone massing scouts maybe you shouldn't mass LRF...

Advent LF rushes have good synergies with their capital ships which is partly why it can work in large team games.

HIJACK

INITIATE THE FAILSAFE!!!!

BOOM!!

Get back to the original topic...

Please?

Well, it's pretty much been stated...

TECH early game counter to Skirantra's

Akkan + mass LRM

Advent

2 Halcyone + mass LF or 1 Halcyon + 1 Revelation + mass LF

Vas

Match his skirantra's or add a Kortul+Skirantra(s) and spam Kanrack's

If he's not building frigates look for a colonizer to appear, probably on the opposite side of the gravity well to build the starbase. You'll either need your own bombers or frigates to take out his starbase. Conversely if you are Vasari, you could employ your own starbase tactic.

If I remember correctly arcova's hull+shield is around 625 while seeker's is at 825...seekers also regenerate shields twice as fast and have more armor...early game, when scout rushes would be viable, those advantages are pretty substantial...arcova's do have more DPS, but somewhere around 5% more IIRC...I do agree scouts are pretty low on the list for things to be balanced but Advent clearly have an advantage (even if it is in something pointless)...