Sphere dance (description in main post)

posted on August 3rd, 2010, 9:59 pm

in my case they would just pop in and destroy miners until I couldn't get enough resources to build ships.   i never got enough ships to destroy even one.  But that was before, and I"m a little better at the game now.

posted on August 4th, 2010, 7:25 am

Well, if you play klingons/rommies, its pretty easy because you can raid pretty easy with your cloaking devices. If you play dom, take your breen battleships to counter and support it with a few bombers. You can also use your arty while placing probes in a nebular or so.

The feds cant use cloak but have the ability to build nice torp-platforms to ensure the expansion. While a sphere never gets torp-resistance and is mid ranged you have some counters:
- Intrepid with Defiant/Excel II support
- Raiding with Monsoons and Steamies
- Back up your fleet with a Descent and your repair ships to hold on pressure

To be honest...your strategy advice might work against AI or what but not in a 1v1 and not in a 2v2...
Especially Romulans lack torpedoes to take on Borg miners...so raiding is almost no option in early/mid game. As Dom your Breenbattleships take a significant time as do you bombers...not to speak about the resources. The advice for Fed is also more a lategame advice which is not what we are dicussing. Raiding Borg miners with Monsoons and Steamies is also quite pointless since you split your Fleet and a small number of scubes can easily take out the steamrunners and retreat. And for all races goes...build early turrets and you have less ships against the Borg...which is not good since ships > turrets in this case.

To be clear, we are not speaking about 7-20 Spheres here...we are talking about 2-5. Those range into late midgame imo. While Non-Borg have lower hulls and need to retreat to a shipyard, the Borg ships can easily retreat a few screens away and regen. While moving to your base slowly.

Maybe it can also be a good idea to allow the regen special only while the sphere is not engaged in combat...just an idea

posted on August 6th, 2010, 9:04 pm

Hmm, has anyone done the math to see what size of a fleet an opponent can mass in the time it takes to churn out 2-5 spheres?  Might be interesting to see come comparisons, assuming both players are equally skilled and build at a similar rate.

posted on August 6th, 2010, 11:25 pm

Hmm, has anyone done the math to see what size of a fleet an opponent can mass in the time it takes to churn out 2-5 spheres?  Might be interesting to see come comparisons, assuming both players are equally skilled and build at a similar rate.

A hell of a lot  . Little Timmy and I did a matchup like that a few weeks back (I think just around 2 weeks ago) and I managed to put out a fleet of 40+ ships quite easily when he had about 6 Spheres and assorted other vessels (including Cube). Just by resource count and time it takes to get CC's you can get a rough calculation

posted on August 6th, 2010, 11:39 pm

Hurray for the Devs' mathematics that make all races pretty equal in terms of ship/cost ratio!

posted on August 7th, 2010, 7:25 am

I managed to put out a fleet of 40+ ships quite easily when he had about 6 Spheres and assorted other vessels (including Cube). Just by resource count and time it takes to get CC's you can get a rough calculation.

So you had a staying fleet of 40+ ships?

I am not sure if this math brings us any further...its not such a matter of ships you can have at that time...its more a problem, that you cant finish any ships because of sphere dance...
And it significantly depends on the map and on the faction.

posted on August 12th, 2010, 5:45 pm

Would be wise to use quotes next time so that it is easier for others to understand where it is coming from . And no, of course I did not have a staying fleet of 40+, that is what I built up to as did those Spheres  . Even though my opponent did not lose many Spheres, I kept him penned up in a nebula (or rather, he kept retreating into one) and if he stayed out too long he'd lose a Sphere. The lack of heavier hitting units or 'helper' units became an issue (especially as Trans Center was foregone for all those Spheres).

posted on October 3rd, 2010, 11:45 pm

I have not experienced a sphere dance, but after reading everything I have an idea of the pros and cons.  I think that sphere dancing is annoying, but not overpowered. You have a choice to leave your fleet out there to get destroyed or you can retreat one by one. The fact that you are making a borg sphere retreat is a victoryj especially if you don't lose anything except a miner, but all races have the ability to be annoying with their raids.  The Feds need to play with a better strategy. They could send a main battle fleet into push the spheres back while a small fast detachment goes around the back and kills any fleeing spheres.  This games is not about resources or ship numbers it is about strategy. Find a strategy that works.  Maybe the feds could just fly their ships behind the sphere so they can't retreat anywhere but your base. One other point made was about ship piloting is bad, but Armada 2 had bad ship piloting to begin with and the devs can't be expected to fix everything right away.

posted on October 4th, 2010, 3:18 am

Laor go play on multilayer so you can see how annoying sphere dance is, a retreating sphere is bad cuz it means they pop another sphere and THAT sphere so you lose either way, cuz they keep building more spheres. >.>

posted on October 4th, 2010, 9:40 am

In the time he build a sphere, he didnt build anything else, right? So go and kill the miners in the time.

You need 50 collective cons and some ressources to build a sphere, and a dance is only possible with two of them. Enough time to build up a little fleet to make him suffer some losses. If he sends the sphere to support the miners, you can kill it too, if he got two spheres, you made something wrong with offense.

One sphere is okay, two not. With a cloaking race, you can engage some ships, like 2 or 3 BOPs or rhien torp-refit or just break through with some bugs or warpin to destroy a building sphere. You need two things:
- Good scouting
- A small fleet

The rommies can pull that off, the klingons also. Dominion and feds cant cloak, so they need another tactic.

B-8 with a bomb, defiant with critical shot (cant regen) or atry. Lots of methods to counter it. Remember: The borg have only few ships. Make it out with 2 fleets, one that attacks some minders (the smaller one) and the second fleet, that will make intelligent kills against the borg.

posted on October 4th, 2010, 2:23 pm

Kill Borg miners? With what, they have a ton of health and you can do a sphere rush with you base miners close to the base. Usually in 2v2 ppl dont rush to spheres so fast...they will put up some other ships first like probes or a few scubes.

posted on October 4th, 2010, 3:19 pm

If you encounter scubes, probes and such things, then your own little fleet can counter.

If they wait till they get spheres, you have a time window you can use to either kill a miner, kill his building-sphere or expand and build a small forward base.

posted on October 4th, 2010, 4:09 pm

you should do a game vs ray or another good Borg player...you will see what works and what not.

posted on October 4th, 2010, 5:31 pm

The thing about regen spheres is, the damage they put out is horrible (at least for their cost)  When there's only 1 of them you can ALWAYS save the ship it's shooting at unless you go all in.

A bunch of spheres are hard to kill when they start dancing, but by then you've had a LONG time to adapt to them with anti-medium range ships or whatever.

posted on October 6th, 2010, 12:06 am

The thing about regen spheres is, the damage they put out is horrible (at least for their cost)  When there's only 1 of them you can ALWAYS save the ship it's shooting at unless you go all in.

Yeah I say spheres should instantly kill things like a cube!! 

A bunch of spheres are hard to kill when they start dancing, but by then you've had a LONG time to adapt to them with anti-medium range ships or whatever.

Lol... please define a LONG time? If you mean 6 minutes then you are correct sir!