Raven guide - advanced

This guide will give you details on how to use abilities for great effect aswell as important management and gameplay tips.

We previously saw that you most of times want to start with EMP. That is true when your fleet includes ships that started with abilities. When you have many ships can put alot of pressure early on, you may want to start Seeker missile. EMP is the highest energy denial range in the game, and so you can put alot of pressure on enemy supports and casters and push them with only fear of being energy denied. Now if you open seeker, you don't have that power, but since you have strong allies, you can afford the extra the extra damage and kill pressure it offers. It may also help some specific sidelane matchups, especially mirror ones. For instance, 2 dreadnoughts with 5 armor battling eachother, use seeker on the enemy one and your dreadnought instantly starts winning its lane. Although you can move freely behind your oppressive frontline, do not get too cocky, and get close to cast seeker only when you know enemy support is too far to attempty and deny seeker usage.

Now you have Seeker/EMP and you need to make a choice. What do you buy next? Most likely energy. Even if enemy upgrades are numerous and varied, trying to counter everything will result in you countering nothing. You'll most likely do better getting alot of energy to spam that one useful ability, rather than buying more abilities but end up using one or the other every once in a while. Say you started Seeker, you'll probably want to get up to 400-450 energy and seeker upgrades even if enemy support has energy denial, rather than getting EMP and up having 350 energy with seeker missiles you can't use successfully due to the lack of upgrades. Now if you see that enemy fleet includes alot of well farmed frigates and arbiter, and these guys seem not to have alot of upgrades, being able to EMP this arbiter as it tries to stasis, ordeny this torpedo as arbiter channels stasis may save the game. It comes down to reading the enemy.

There are many ways to reading the enemy. Checking enemy upgrades/stats and building your ship accordingly, understanding your and enemy composition strengths and weaknesses, even lack of information is an information. "I only see 5 enemy ships on my radar... Haven't seen the 6th for some time..." should make you ask yourself "where's the worst spot it could be right now? Can we withstand the fight if their entire fleet warps on this ship?", "No, let's go back"-"Yes, make sure our tanks don't let them run over our backline".

At some point one team is under a clock and you need to figure which. If your team is, play aggressively and encourage aggressive plays with abilities like defensive matrix, blackout, lock on. If enemy team is, make sure your ship keeps up with the new threats that arise, while understanding and preparing your ship for this lategame scenario where your fleet is advantaged.

-Ability tips

Defensive Matrix (dmat):

This ability synergizes well with dreadnought protective field. If you both have 2 upgrades on those abilities, you can chain ProField-DMat-ProField-DMat and make this dreadnought unkillable. Also great on colossus in middle-lategame. If there are alot of pressure on one ship, using defensive matrix early to protect from a muke\* will make the ability ready to use again more quickly. This ability reduces Damage over Time abilities such as Bio-plasmid Discharge and Irradiate by about 90%. Nothing reduces plague damage.

Point Defense Drone:

These things are amazing in lategame as they are place and forget. Although, you want to keep an eye on their energy so that when it gets low, you place another one nearby and prevent it from getting killed. You can eventually get many of them out, making them last exponentially longer, as they regenerate energy. If you have a ton of energy upgrades, feel free to drop a PDDs every time you're about to go full energy. You keep regenerating, and this one you placed and forgot might actually save someone's life during the retreat. PDDs synergize very well with minions, make sure to follow their advance with some drones (without running too low on energy) without putting drones too much in front. Doing so will result in ally and enemy creep attacking eachother and enemy ones depleting PDDs very quickly. Ideally you want to place your PDD so that it barely has energy left when minions (or ally ships) leave its range of effect.

Irradiate:

This ability is great on leviathan. For 20s, leviathan is unable to use metamorphosis and cannot launch locusts without them taking big damage.

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