Returning Armada

Ok, I've only used it once, but my initial impression wasn't that it was the best thing ever.

I quickly used up all of my fleet capabilites, meaning that it left me with nothing for Cap ships, and the ships I got were heavy cruisers and carriers, which is nice, but I had no free fleet cap for siege frigates, colony ships, or scouts!
I built additional fleet cap and would quickly build the ships I wanted before the free ships used it all up, but continually expanding the fleet cap crippled my economy.

I can't knock a continuous stream of free ships too much, but there's only so far you can go with all heavy cruisers and carriers.

It was good, but a bit annoying basically.

-double-

You can self destruct ships but you still have to hurry and build more before the slots fill up again. It would be nice to be able to disable/enable the ability at will though, but I guess that might piss off the ghost fleet or whatever

Step 1: Scuttle ships you don't need.
Step 2: Collect free resources for doing so.
Step 3: Build whatever you damn well please with the proceeds.

Under no circumstance is having a pile of free ships to be considered a 'bad' thing. It's a heaping pile of free resources, harassment, or fleet support that your opponent isn't getting.

erm, you CAN turn off the RA by toggling the ability to disable if you want to make some space for capitol ships.

Yes, but none of these strategies are good counters to RA. People know how to use it.

once RA is up and running, there is NO counter. Unless you're also vasari with RA teched.

Doesn't the Kostura cannon disable/damage structures? I guess you could get those up and try that.

Of course, if you have the resources to do that, then you should have gotten RA instead. Later on though, that might be a way to counter the other guy's RA production once you two are at a stalemate.

i believe it deals 10% damage. Players can also see the bullet coming from a mile away and move their fleet.

The problem is that phase gates are so inexpensive and easy to replace.

Played probably the best opening 45 mins as TEC I have ever done this morning - 2 development mandates, most extraction techs, trade network on 7 planets (massively out-colonised everyone), 1st level industrial juggernaut, almost all planets taken to max logistics and packed full of trade/tech, got kodiaks and repair yards and had 6 frigate factories up... probably the best 50 minute start I have ever played, though I kept the fleet cap too low and went for one too many cap ships.

Both my fleet and an allied advent fleet were held off by one vasari player with 2 planets and an asteroid, with no economic buildings or research and one military lab, who rushed straight for RA and phase gates. After half an hour of fighting we called it a GG, mostly out of boredom. Eventually it became a total chore to manage both production queuing and microing combat. Aside from - yes he was a better player and was able to micro - the whole thing of being able to totally neglect anything regarding, I don't know, colonising or setting up an economy or an empire just makes the game totally tedious. It's not the usual tense-as-shit back and forth and endless recon and back yard raids fight, it's just a boring unit grinder. Kinda sucks.

If as many people are having difficulties with this as I am. Why isnt this being looked at?

Returning Armada does seem to be too powerful when it comes to the late game on the larger maps. Whether or not you want to call RA overpowered or not, it dumps down the experience of the game, awarding players based on their choice of race, not skill. This isn't sour grapes, I've defeated RA several times, but it does seem to prolong games severely, which no other tech is able to do.

If you get beat by RA in a small to medium map, you are playing wrong.


Big map I can see, multiple star systems and all.

Because a lot of people get swollen heads when they beat a POORLY EXECUTED RA rush and think it's balanced. Then they come and spread their fairy tales of how it's easy to counter on the forums.

yeah I have to admit that as much as I like vasari, in my humble opinion RA is degenerate-ly powerful.

TEC can counter RA pretty easily. If they have a good economy running and can afford to not only build more units to fight off the RA waves and also expand they have the advantage. Just build novalisks and bomb the shit out of the vasari planets. works like a charm and once they have no more planets its GG no matter how outnumbered the TEC was.

Turn off autocast on your phase stabs.

There's something a bit off about this entire statement. Besides, I've found that the biggest problem as TEC vs. RA late game (large fleets) is the fact that fleet upkeep generally eats away your ability to easily replace your fleet, even if you've got two thirds of a star system fully maxed on eco fighting a RA Vasari occupying the rest of the system. The RA advantage gets bigger the larger the fleets, since the Vasari player is free to use his resources on select units and what is most likely a severely lacking economy. There's just something wrong fighting large fleets appearing independently of their owner's economy. It feels like I'm playing against a badly written AI.

I've seen people stuff themselves up trying to max their fleet cap to get the most out of RA - barely enough cash coming in to replace even an imperial lab let alone a phase gate if they lose one. But here's the thing, if you play TEC you have to switch around microing research, economy and unit production and micro the battles. Since you can't queue what you can't afford you're constantly switching around planets and factories, trying to remember what you have queued and built in certain places so as to form up useful fleets, bla bla. But as the vasari RA user you have almost no need to micro the economy or unit production and are free to spend almost all your time microing the battles. I don't know how you would even start balancing that part of it out.

I don't know, they cost 1500 credits and 200-400 metal and crystal I think. Not what I call inexpensive. I think the problem with increasing the cost of phase gates is that it makes them less usefull for their own purposes, which is quickly moving between planets. Perhaps after creating a phase gate, there should be an additional fee to upgrade it to support Returning Armada? What this fee would be, I don't know, it could be the cost of allowing a phase gate to work at such extreme distances(where is that fleet coming from again?).

This would leave basic phase gates usefull just being used as phase gates, but make the loss of Returning-Armada-enabled phase gates have more of an impact, because after rebuilding the phase gate itself more resources would have to be put into getting it back into the Returning Armada free-ship-network.

Never mind that the AI in single player games is unable to use RA properly. There's so many ways to exploit AI weaknesses' (black market prices, predictable attacks where you can ambush, AI inability to pinpoint attack superweapons, AI inability to even basically make a guess effects of ship skills on combat...). Its multi-player where unbalanced things show!

In the hands of an atrociously bad player, RA is already strong, but in the hand of a slightly better than beginner (can scuttle - lol) or expert (can fast-path tech and maximize ship amount / effects) its extremely overpowered.

Even more so if the expert player gets fed resources by another expert.

A Phase Gate with L2 Returning Armada generates an average of 2364 credits, 471 metal & 326 crystal worth of ships every 5 minutes.
That's 7.88 credits/s, 1.57 metal/s & 1.09 crystal/s.
That ship production ignores fleet upkeep penalities so with the maximum fleet upkeep penalities, that's equivalent to 31.52 credits/s, 6.28 metal/s & 4.36 crystal/s of income PER PHASE GATE.
A trade port generates... 2-3 credits/s for half a Phase Gate's cost?

scout the vasari.

if you see 5+ imperial labs and no, or, one wepons lab.

hes might be teching RA. If he builds gates, thats 100% evidence he is.

meaning

you will build ships.

like

TEC scouts with bomb ability,
and rain on his parade.

playing sim city in sapce and the whining in forums will not beat RA.

@CptSiddy: Maybe if you're thinking of a typical small / med galaxy 1v1, that's true.

But there's not a good counter on large maps, especially those where you are in a different star system.

Also, try to counter if the Vasari is teamed up with a TEC player that's feeding him planets and resources. Heh.


RA is not to be beaten, its to be nerfed! Scuttling has to go (how about a self-destruct with a small loss to planet happiness instead?), as well ships generated through RA should have less firepower while taking up same amount of fleet cap. It would still be an extremely powerful fleet ability, instantly being able to produce tons of reinforcements for free... but not a decisive advantage over everyone not having it.

A "good" player will naturally try to ensure that his economy somewhat matches his fleet size (in relations to the enemy's fleet size), which will truly make for an unstoppable RA. But while I might slightly disagree with the initial argument of your post, I fully agree with you on the latter.