Hi fellow sins players, a newbie here. I've recently gotten sins rebellion after playing the vanilla version and I am enjoying the game very much, so much so that I got my friends into it, and we started doing some lan compstomping. Now I have moved onto multiplayer where I mainly play TEC loyalist (I have an affinity for novaliths). I usually play on 2v2 random medium map, sometimes 5v5s. Very exciting games, I'm sweating half the time lol.
So, onto TEC strategy, I hope you guys can critique me on this. I start by queuing scouts, then a Marza to colonise in one direction, and some cobalts to colonise in another direction. If my enemy is not close I go for 2 civics labs and grab any ice/volcanics nearby. If they are, fleet up ASAP. Depending on what my scouts see I tend to build up whatever fleet I need (up to 250 supplys worth, ie. the first fleet logistics research). Usually its a few corvettes and cobalts. I get a sb up at the frontlines, then tradeports. Once the eco is humming along, and the frontline is defined, as quickly as I can I get novaliths out - requires 6 military labs and such.
This is where I am not sure if my strat is valid. I am assuming the enemy is fleeting up big time, and is spending a lot of money on military. If I manage to blow up (via special novalith delivery) their homeworld, I am hoping that it is a huge enough setback to cripple their eco. Sure, they got tradeports and stuff, but without their hw their allegiance drops over time, slowly crippling them. To rebuild a hw, itll cost em 2k credits along with some metal and crystal, and if they dont have a starbase with enforced loyalty (very expensive) itll just get novalithed again. In short, I hope to expand early game as usual, fleet up to an ok size, and then suddenly go eco and novaliths, and *hopefully* survive to cripple them economically for the rest of the game.
This strat is vulnerable to serious rushing early game. Usually it goes like this - I'm about to get novaliths out after I fortified the frontlines, and then they attack with everything they got after I start building/complete the novalith. I dont have a big fleet at this time for low upkeep, but I should have a starbase on my frontline, in addition to my hw with the novaliths (these sb mainly have tradeports on em). If the enemy stays and fights, thats great, I am delaying him from killing my novaliths. I will have red button ready too. If they jump for my inner worlds, the jump destabilisation will make them weakened when they reach their destination. All I need to do is delay them while I kill off their eco centers (their hw - i assume no enforced loyalty) and their production centres with all their frigate factories.
I think this works well because firstly I have scouts running around with remote sensors all the time, and can see if theyre coming ahead of time, and second I spam mines around my worlds so they are hard to bypass and annoying. As I mentioend before, all I need to do is delay them while I cripple their eco and build up forces of my own. So long as I can delay them to get off a new novalith shots and build up a reasonable defence force myself.
So, if you read this far, thanks! Can the experienced players give me some advice on this strat? Specifically I am looking for how YOU would defeat this - put everything into the attack? Or hunker down with enforced loyalty on every world? Also, I am aware that this is some serious camping and such - but it works! Or does it? Let me know, and thanks for reading!