Returning Armada overpowered

Well, Vasari does have a very hard time early on, so it's reasonable to expect they'll have something to turn the tide in the late game. But I'd agree that returning armada is a bit much - just that any nerf would have to come at a buff for their early game.

It is not overpowered. Please see attached. 3 returning armadas! Not one, not two but 3!!!! Vs 2 Advent and one TEC.

REPLAY

Nerf of Returning Armada is pointless. It sucks! You still need to research to upgrade everything, and you need to build support cruisers or you die! It only overpowers noobs.

Haven't seen the replay yet, but...

...what's to stop them building support cruisers (not that Vasari ones are worth much)? They have the bulk of their force built from free ships, doesn't that make research and building *easier*? My point stands, that Vasari are poor enough early game that returning armada needs to be pretty damn good, but having their only hope right at the end of a tech tree is a bit harsh. I'm amazed 3 Vasari got to RA against 2 Advent and a TEC - and if they did, I'd expect them to be so far behind that they were already doomed.

Is that what happened?

...but if you buffed the Vasari early game then RA would roll over the top of people. Hence it is overpowered (IMO), but it doesn't look it in most games because it's tied to an underpowered early game.

the only ship i noticed it not building was siege frigates

It doesn't build anti-fighter either. Knock out their capships and any siege frigates they've already built and they can destroy your structures but no way to take your planets, and fighter/bomber fleets will raptastically rape them.

Thats a huge problem too since if you leave it on auto, it uses up all your fleet cap, so if you ever NEED TO ADAPT, or just build one new capital ship, that support is NEVER there.

RA is not OP, the building it needs? TEN FUCKING TACTICAL SLOTS. If you can't raze those planets double-quick, you are doing something WRONG. lol. RA means they sacrifice any sort of static defenses basically as at LEAST a third, and usually more of their tactical slots are tied up with that. And it takes SO LONG for those ships to come.

The TEC can - literally - build 5-20x the amount of ships RA gives you in the same amount of time - at ONE planet. They have to pay for it, but since when has the TEC had a problem with that?

Pervasive economy is just as strong as RA, and Anyone whose ever had a skilled advent player combo his high-ass-lvl endgame cap ships abilities against your fleet knows just how ridiculous that can be. (3rd level Reverie is ridiculously wrong for instance. (Can literally 'stun' 3 capships semi-permanently for just one ship auto-casting that during the course of the battle. With all the researches it literally gets antimatter faster than it can use it - and the recharge is NOT slow either)

They're different strategies, admittedly, RA requires the least amount of micro and attention (As an end-game strat) - but the rest of the Vasari (most micro intensive behind Advent IMO) and the lack of diversity in RA make up for that - ALL the endgame strats have their weaknesses. (Except Pervasive economy, but you have to make that work for you No sitting back and getting anything for free you just get kickbacks)

You must never use Overseers or Subverters



With Industrial Juggernaut no less!

Heh, no offense, but that replay just shows just how strong RA is if nubs play it.

At 50 minutes only two of the three Vasari had researched phase gates and one was still far away from RA and two hadn't even build a single gate yet!
At 1 hour there is still only one Vasari using RA, and he made the mistake of only building a single gate per planet so far.
A fast RA tech with 6+ gates is doable in 40-45 minutes, and they had a whole system for themselfs without any early pressure...
Emporermedlab took 1 hour just to research gates, and he spammed cannons all the while... resources wasted.
If it was a 3v2 the Vasari were the side with only 1 and a half player.

A well planned and flawlessly executed RA by three players could have had at least 3000 fleet supply ready at the one hour mark storming your system...
No amount of support cruisers would have helped.

Also Conan: trade ports dont give dimishing returns.
6 Trade ports on one planet give exactly 6 times the amount of a single trade port.

They can if your longest trade lane isn't big enough - or you don't have enough trade port's at other planets to trade with. Which is usually not a problem if you have the capital and can afford to put 6 around one planet. If you own like 3 planets in the corner of the map and you decide to get rich quick and build 6 trade ports on one planet... won't work, no.

Longest trade lane length gives your trade port's a cap - and you need 6 trade ports on your other planets to get the benefit of that. 6 trade port's on one planet, 0 on others means NO TRADING. No benefit. 3 on one and 3 at an another... thats viable though.



I'm very sorry but if your opponents have gone un-harassed with enough time and money to get up to Dark Armada in the first hour, especially as Vasari who are lacking in logistics slots to begin with, sacrificing all those slots for trade ports, refieries and factories for nine empire research buildings... Which is a huge financial investment too. Then you suck, theres no other way around it. No 'flawlessly executed' or 'properly planned' on their part about it. You just suck. End of story.

Even just getting Insurgency tends to REALLY hurt a RA based Vasari player, since 10 of his tactical slots at every planet are taken up by phase gates. RA is FAR FAR FAR from being a 'end all, be all' strategy.

It doesn't build anti-fighter, siege frigates OR subverters or overseers. It uses up ALL your supply cap. It is an ungodly whore to replace capital ships or adapt your fleet with RA on autocast. HAve to go, scuttle your ships for supply cap, hope no RA comes while your going back to your planet and queuing up your capships... and to top it all off, for ENDGAME they don't even BUILD ships very quickly. On small maps, your better off sticking to factories. MUCH better off. You need a certain critical mass # of planets WITH Phase Stabilizers (expensive and takes 10 tac slots) to even make RA viable to begin with.

Whereas the TEC and Advent help proportionally well - on any map. Each strategy and research has a different positive and negative.

Not to argue any points, but Dark Fleet does in fact summon Sentinel (Anti Fighter) Frigates.

Yes, it does summon sentinels. And carriers (which can build fighters). So the anti fighter component is more then fulfilled.

And it does not need to be set on autocast. 10 phase gates on the 1 to 0 hotkeys and you can phase in supplies anytime you want if a part of your fleet dies. And it still leaves room to rebuild eventually lost capital ships an to add supply cruisers to the mix.

Oh and phase gates can do a lot more then warp in stuff. They are more then just useful on their own. The mobility advantage is just great in large solar systems - you don't need 20 defensive fleets as Vasari, just a few phase gates. That alone makes the 10 tactical slot investment worth it. And what else do you want to buy for these slots? Hangars until all planets are full? That would be an even bigger waste of cash.

I think u miss the point of this replay.

It was for sure no perfect game on both sides but it should be mentionted that "our" team had with mexxa a pretty new player and despite this we were still able to hold off 3 returning armadas.
And 10 more or less minutes for Returning Armada wouldnt have changed anything.
Their "mistake" was in other areas like having no support and not enough military tech.
But thats exactly the reason why Returning armada is no "pwns everything tool" cause it doesnt win u a game when u get it.
I mean u can talk a lot about all the "mistakes" the vasari team made but our team was far away from being 100% effective either, so in the end it was a game in which there was more skill on the vasari team (no offence to mexxa but it was just his 3rd game and while he played really good for this he doesnt know the in and outs) and the superior advent fleet abilities were enough to make RA totaly useless.

I watched this in great detail, and I have to admit it was really fascinating. Mexxa was new, but so was RedLab, at least with Vasari (he didn't know how RA worked, and only researched 1 level of it). As stated, the Vasari players could have gotten a lot more bang for their buck if they had properly researched up the military tree.

Without going down a line by line of what types of mistakes were made, I think we can safely say this proves that extremely high quality fleets, combined with excellent micro, can handle waves of low tech Vasari.

I'm actually really happy to see this, never seen it in any of my games. I still think RA is incredibly powerful (ONCE it gets going), but I'm happy to see that skilled players can stand up to it.

Thanks to the guys who made this available. It was a blast to watch, and the initial clashes at the star systems almost choked my computer.

About trade ports: Even if they don't have other planets to trade with you get the money. Try it out: Only 1 trade port in your home system, no other port. It will have trade ships sitting idle but still generating money. No diminishing returns - ever.

the diminishing returns are on the EXTRA trade income from the ships having somewhere to go. the base income does not have diminishing returns...

Pervasive Economy+Industrial Juggernaut+Desert planet with 9 Frigate Factories= Win.

Returning armada definatly is overpowerd


no matter how many replays you show me i'vee seen what I can do with it


the problem here is that .. like any other empire, the vasari need economy.
they do this relatively slow since of the slow trade ports

after they succeed in getting a network established... which happens pretty fast.. the game is nearly over,
al they need is 10 min of time to prepare a few gates and get returning armada tech,

now the heel breaks lose,
rules are changed
the vasari now have a decent economy (if done right) and they can spend that on either ship cap, capital ships, weaopon upgrades, or economy. whilest other empires wil need te preserve some econ for their ships


if done correctly you wil have a harder time fighting a Vasari instead of a TEC lrm rusher

now what happens if the vasari do lose a battle?
nothing really, the returning armada tech sees to it that new ships are always ready.

should you fight the nemy and lose. al you have to do is retreat the capitals ships and wait 5 min for your next fleet




now what i think my be a solution to this:
the fact that once researched returning armada is ALWAYS there, it'll keep resupplying ships with no fee

instead... every phase gate calling a returning armada ship should constantly cost credits, metal and crystal.

now 1 gate shouldnt cost alot, think about 0.3 cr 0.1 metal 0.1 crystal loss per gate
the vasari now have a constant shipbuild rate which does cos tresources like the other races (only cheaper... but thats where RA = for... right?)

and you wil always be able to scuttle a gate should you have a negative income



any thoughts on this??
(people that do know RA has 2 be nerfed)

I too play vasari and while ra is like this I wont use it its too easy. I think the solution is to limit the ships ra generates to those a player can already buildand to tone down either the amount or frequency of the reinforcements just a little.

The real problem I see with Ra right now is the excessive generation of heavy cruisers and transports. the last game I used it in at the 1 hour 20 minute mark I had over 60 heavy cruisers and 40 transports. Last night just playing a pure eco game at the same point with almost no interference I had 25 heavies 20 transports and 5 caps.

There is really no comparison, I know a lot of people say well you dont get any military upgrades but they are easy enough to get when you dont have to worry about building ships anymore.

If the Vasari player tech-rushes to get Returning Armada into action ASAP, s/he'd probably end up drained of cash and resources once the free ships start rolling out. It would take a while to set up a stable economy and then research for support cruisers and extra capital ships, and to get the extra fleet supply so as to actually build those cruisers without RA intervening and shoving a ton of Enforcers and Sentinels down your throat. The Vasari also has huge potential for improvement through military research, which is denied to an RA rusher.

IMO, the Vasari support cruisers are more useful than their TEC counterparts and the Advent's Subjugator(although the Guardian is quite useful).

Stilakus Subverters' Defeat Shields lowers it's target's shield mitigation by 10% and increases the chance of all friendly weapons to negate it's shields by 25%. Used in tandem with Phase Missile weapons systems like Assailants and Bombers, this can wreak havoc, especially on Advent ships. The Subverter's second ability, Distortion Field, disables a target enemy ship's abilities and phase jumping capability for 30 seconds and has a relatively short cool-down time.
Serevun Overseers have 3 abilities. The first is Reactive Nanite Armor which increases the hitpoints of a target friendly ship by 250 and increases it's armor for a while too. It's first upgrade ability is Mobile Phase Detection passive buff, which allows it to see all ships phase jumping into or out of the gravity well in which the Overseer is. The final ability is Jump Degradation, which slows hostile ships moving through phase space by 50% as long as the ability is active.

If your opponent's enough of an idiot to let you get RA, then you should be able to
use the first set of ships you get as your fleet, scuttle the next set to help econ,
then turn off dark armada and build siege/support/cap ships with your new jump started economy. If your opponent lets you.

It is overpowered! On small maps you rush, and you gt fastest LRM, on large maps there isn't even a point, you rush to RA and win :-/ They aren't harder to play than the other races so on any map you can reasonably stall, get RA and win.

On a large map (I'm assuming with lots of room for everyone to expand without fighting), RA isn't as effective. TEC opponents will have many planets and a smoking economy which is also deadly (I would argue more so as fund can become virtually unlimited....RA is limited by your gate timers). Advent I am not a huge fan of but time to build up a overpowering culture might combat RA well.....I can't speak for that side of things but I know it works for those who use it well.

Editted out.

Wow

Asshole rezzed a dead thread. Good job troll.