why? what a tease!

i havent messed with the media hubs yet.......so they dont take-over planets anymore?

No they just turn them 'neutral', which completely destroys the point of culture in my opinion. Not to mention that culture is a complete secondary force since even turning a planet neutral takes like 10 minutes.

This makes the super weapons definetly unballanced.

aho, "neutral" you say?

*hops in his colonizer*

I'm off to yellow's homeworld, cya!

yeah, I'm more worried that someone will clump them and then unleash several of them at once   
that would be DISASTEROUS

unbalanced...how so? (ive only messed with the vasari SW so far)

While I agree that superweapons are unbalanced (and would like to see them as a toggle-able option when setting up a game), I think culture is perfect now. You can't just turtle behind defenses and expand through culture.

It's still very important though, giving you higher resource and income rates, more damage done by ships and the ability to flip an enemy colony over to neutral. It's a big deal.

-Neb

Well seeing as the Novalith does a set amount of damage and is guaranteed to obliterate the planets populace. While the Avent one works completly with culture and makes it weaker. This makes the Advent overall a bit weaker then the rest of the factions.

i loved how the culture worked before. take a key world, build broadcasters and wait for the minor worlds to come over to your side. i thought it was a great way to make mopping up a dying empire less tedious. it was a bit too easy to do but they should have left it in.

the concern isnt that they're unbalanced with respect to the game, its with respect to one another.

quite the opposite, the novalith has limited uses where the advent one might be used to say, buff your ships during an assault into enemy territory

and seriously, the culture from the advent one is AMAZING, garunteed to take most any planets.

well...I didn't realize that...no more take overs

You can still take out worlds with culture but there are two fundamental changes. First, they turn neutral, you don't take them over. Next, culture reaches full culture indepedant of how fast it takes down allegiance. This allows it to spread out and you receive the benefits of it well before the planet is lost (which was too punish previously).

the vasari's can be used to disable everything in a system you might be going to attack..or are already attacking...so say you are mopping up an enemy fleet and they are about to possibly try to jump their last remaining ships...fire it into the system and they cant jump...they are forced to fight....till they get their systems back online that is

"and seriously, the culture from the advent one is AMAZING, garunteed to take most any planets."

For it's duration at least, takes 10-15 shots to turn a semi-distant planet neutral. I must say that I do like how they altered culture in some ways (making it so you have to force allegience to 0 rather than a chance at any allegance < a certain value) but the whole neutral concept just plain doesn't make sense ('Hey guys! That empire's so culturely superior! Why don't we just completely abandon our planet, all at once, and go nowhere!') either realistically or tactically. If culture could turn planets that would pretty fairly balance the superweapons, the TEC one would damage prior to invasion, the Vasari would do whatever it does now (haven't had a chance to mess around with it yet) and the Advent would, after repeated shots, allow you to take a planet without any ships. It wouldn't be unbalanced because it already takes a number of shots to neutralize the planet and you'd either have to have ships nearby (in which case you could have invaded regurally) or hope that no one invades you.

I agree that the beta culture was bad (especially the old 'capture planet, planet goes enemy' cycles, but also the chance of rebellion) but this new culture is a little underpowered.