Aye. Think of them as Rapid Response Teams

It is bs.  Phase gates are terrific, RA and DA are not worth it,  Sentinels come.  There are great ships that come like enforcers, overseers, subverters but sentinels suck, The research costs a fortune for the unlikely chance that it will be used.  Maps favouring the building of a lot of phasegates do make the research to RA and DA somewhat worthwhile as the likelyhood of those phase noded planets getting raided is high and your ships may be elsewhere and unable to phase gate to the raided planet in a timely maner but the ships recieved are only a stop gap, and not a strong one as subverters go down quick, an overseer is marginally usefull in a fleet of 3-4 ships when it is likely the second ship to be attacked. And if your strategy is to research fleet supply and max out your fleet by purchasing what ships you want and where and thus leaving no room for RA let alone DA then it is absolutely useless unless you suffer a catastrophic fleat engagement defeat and you have a shit load of cash that can't be spent in all the frig factories you built that can be phase gated pretty quickly to a fleet assembly point. RunonRantOver

Bottom line:

It is useless.

In a short game on a small map RA/DA is not worth researching at all. However on huge maps, and in long protracted battles then DA comes in handy. In games like that your fleet caps will more than likely be maxed out anyway. Along with all of your researches. You probably will have tons of credits, and resources to spare. Especially if you control a star system.

Obviously if you built up enough ships to where you have little to no fleet cap left then there is no point in using DA. Just divide your fleet up and phase gate them where needed. However in a big battle it can be useful to re-enforce your fleets if they are taking heavy losses, and you need to replace those ships right now. Instead of waiting for your factorys to build them. Which by the time the newly built ships arrive it may be too late. They can be used stop gap until your main fleets can arrive, but you are correct in that the forces are not enough to hold untill your fleets get there. Unless you use DA on multiple gates on adjacent planets.

With the advent strike craft increases in 1.1, I dont think a few extra sentinals would hurt. Granted i do agree they shouldnt spawn in DA. Sentinals are easy to replace without needing DA. I have seen mostly cruisers with a few rare instances of an all sentinal spawn.

I agree that the cost needs to come down a some. I do like the suggestion that the summoned ships should leave after x amount of time, and return to phase space. The units shouldnt cost any fleet cap at all being that they are NOT part of your fleets. The same thing bothers me about the iluminators deceptive illusion. The fake ships use fleet cap. This would make for some interesting fights if someone forgets about the dark fleet ships in your group, and they dissapear in the middle of a fight because their time expired

Returning Armada is not totally useless. It just needs some more work, and tweaking.

With my idea above the ships would not have a time limit but would leave when the enemy leaves the gravity well.  Also they would not be able to leave the gravity will they were summoned in and not be able to be scuttled. I would also eliminate the cost completely.   RA would also be only be cast once for each time youare attacked.

Ok, fine, dont use it then, but dont try to discourage others from using it. This is a beta after all. The Dev's need better feedback than "This sucks". Why does it suck? and what do you think can be done to fix it? They need detailed answers.

Most agree that RA needs some serious tweaking. Some naysayers not just on this thread sound like they want it removed. If RA is to be removed, Then remove TEC's Insurgency along with it. Insurgency is basically the same thing as RA. It costs damn near the same. The only exceptions are that the TEC player has no control over the units, units spawn randomly, and use no fleet cap. That IMO is how RA "should" be except they can be controlled, and you chose where they spawn from. If you are going to dump all of your resources researching phase gates, phase tunneling, RA, Then building the gate network. Then the units spawned should be "Free" as far as fleet cap. Returning Armada needs to BE an Armada.

You make that sound like a bad thing. If I need to scramble ships to a certain planet it's usually to hold the opponent up while the real cavalry arrives. Getting them to phase out, then phase back, seems to fit that bill.

Even better if it's free (except for AM cost).

What if:

Each phase gate could support 5 ships.  The 5 ships would live forever, and move wherever they were commanded, but an individual gate couldn't support more than 5 ships.  You get 6 or 7 gates, and thats a good 30 ships, not to bad.  If one of the ships died, then it would be replaced by it's gate 5 mins later.

You could also give the option to let players choose what would spawn from the gates.  If you did this you could also choose to limit the spawnable ships to those which are actually buildable from normal shipyards.

You could also simply go back to the way it was in 1.05, but double the time (or whatever is appropriate) it takes for a fleet to arive.  TEC get free resources forever without earning them, which can be used to build ships; nobody complains.  Vasari get free ships, and it's a huge imbalance.  So, you could leave it alone, but just increase the time between ariving fleets enough that things stay managable.  Things still may get out of hand is someone has 20 gates, but if they've managed to build 20 gates, I think they diserve the win.

Free ships for tactical slots are always a problem to be balanced. I think the best way is really to change the slot type of the gates. So it can be a really nice no-cost random shipyard without doubling production capabilities on planets.

Having RA and shipyards on all planets is just too much if you want a powerful effect for the stabilizers. Especially on large maps in teamgames.

I really like this idea.  The 5 could be balanced more easily... or maybe instead of 5 ships, each gate supports a certain tactical limit... thus if you get cheap ships from the gate you can get more.

I'd also drastically reduce the cost.  The whole RA idea is supposed to be that these ships are already built, they shouldn't cost a fortune. 

If you use RA for just to get "free ships" you are wasting your time and resources. RA is meant for re-enforcing. Not building a new fleet. Like what was said before why waste all that resource researching then building the gate network only to get a dark fleet of Sentinals. I only use it when one of my key worlds is getting ganked, and i need ships to draw fire to give time for my main fleet to arrive.

If I need reinforcements NOW, what I probably should have done is instead of using resources on getting RA, I could have simply spent them on a fleet which I leave sitting at home.  The enemy shows up, my "would have been spent on RA, but was better spent on ships" fleet will be waiting.  I don't even have to wait for them to pop out of a gate, they're already there and waiting.

The BETA RA is useless IMO.  But then most other level 8 techs arn't worth the cost either.  Now that RA is nerfed, I guess well have to fall back onto the Kostra Cannon, lol.

In general, I feel they have "balanced" the game by taking away much of the variety between the different races.  If they want to get serious about this form of balancing, then they could make all races the same, but they just use different ship meshes.

If you take into consideration that this Fleet is constantly replaced at no cost in comparision to your one shot fleet, then this is quite useful. You have to replace and pay for reinforcements where RA kinda supports itself - plus you can still produce reinforcements. The gave RA a big nerf, i agree but it has its advantages over just making one fleet.