Sigh.

1) Allegiance of the unity is not useless. It's 10-40% more income from every one of your planets.

2) Capital ships never become worthless. A Revelation Battlecruiser can shut down up to 3 enemy capships PERMANENTLY as long as it has a steady supply of antimatter (Hellooo Steal Antimatter disciples). The Halcyon Carrier can increase the rate of fire of nearby ships by 22%. The Rapture can cripple your whole damn force's damage, or dish out huge damage to anything you attempt to focus fire on. The Radiance can tank damage for your more vulnerable support ships, and convert enemy weapons fire to antimatter.

CAp ships are incredible.

3) And your idea would just cause the end-game techs to be the -only- viable tech path. It would kill strategic depth in SoSE. Want to forego teching for a little bit to focus all your resources in a powerful push to hit your enemy unprepared? Wont work. Want to explore a different part of the tech tree to employ a different strategy? NOPE! In both cases your opponent would just rush to the wtfbbq tech and win the game.

4) I can't speak for the TEC, but the advent culture tree is -not- useless. Especially with Fast Culture Spread on, you can really cripple his economy via dropping allegiance...and make it impossible for him to colonize your planets for awhile. Did I forget to mention that it gives massive shield mitigation bonuses to your forces when you're in combat?

The thing is, RA normally doesn't shorten the game, but rather increases the length of it. Unless the Vasari player (and his team) already is the most capable, I've almost exclusively seen games be prolonged by RA, since it heavily dimishes any existing advantage the other side might have. And, due to the fact that RA is almost independent of the owner's economy, makes it pretty damn difficult to give the Vasari player the fatal blow. The inflexible fleet upkeep system normally means that losing a significant chunk of your fleet is quite often fatal, since upkeep have crippled your economy and made it that much harder to rebuild. When playing against RA late-game, this also means that unless you win that end-all military battle without any heavy losses, your win will most likely be a Pyrrhic victory.



Now, I know you aren't arguing against the usefulness of the TEC and Advent late-game techs per se (I agree with Demonic Spoon when it comes to that), but against them as "Game Enders." The bigger question at hand is naturally whether or not Ironclad did intent these techs to be "Game Enders"? I'm not sure, but I do know that I hope this isn't the case. If it is, the approach Ironclad will take in order to, hopefully, fix the inbalance of RA, will be to let overpowered balance out overpowered (as TEC trade spam actually pretty much does now). This is naturally a viable way to design games, and often also results in fun games (SupCom, Empires: DoTMW etc.). But, most of these games have been designed with this in mind from the onset of their development, Sins just doesn't feel that way and it require a fundamental redesign for it to work adequately. I fear that as it stands now, making the late-game techs "Game Enders" would greatly simplify the game and remove some of the subtle complexities Sins owes to its 4X roots. Instead of being facets and sub-goals of an overall game strategy, the late-game techs would be the strategy.

With regards specifically to strengthening the Novalith etc., I think you would just end up with Sins taking the shape of trench warfare in space.

We did fly past and blow up his stabalizers, I took out 6 or 7 of them before he could stop me, but that doesn't do anything to the ships he already has. So it began to seem that sacrificing ships to kill his phase stabalizers would accomplish nothing because he'd still have the largest fleet, and now all my ships would be dead. While our team would have to rebuild our fleet, he still has his and since he hasn't been spending resources on his fleet he can afford to just build the gates back. I didn't say we didn't win eventually, but the game dragged out well past where it should have. The game lasted 3.5 hours, 2.5 hours of that was extra time added because the 3 of us couldn't figure out a way to stop RA without getting it ourselves.

THe ability itself isnt overpowering it is the antimatter/refresh cooldown is the problem. If you can rebuild a whole fleet with 6 Phase gates in no time. The cooldown needs to be tripled at least to fix this!

1) If he DA rushed, his economy should have been absolute shit compared to yours, especially if he was losing 75% of his income to upkeep.

2) Full popcap of carriers/cruisers is nothing scary. If two of you focused on getting up a large, varied fleet catered to killing such a combo and one of you focused on killing his phase stabs, you would have wiped your ass with him.

1) The expensive part is teching to dark armada. Once you have it, keep in mind you're not paying for units anymore. Phase gate stabilizers are pretty cheap compared to the units you lose assaulting him.

2) I'm not sure where you're getting this from. Dark armada also gives flak. It's known that Heavy cruiser/flak is an extremely dangerous combo. It can be made more potent with subverters but even that's not necessary. Also, since they don't need to spend money on units, they can pour all the money into research. Maxed out enforcers with regen are very very nasty. I've done 2v1 and 3v1 where I was the 1 when I had dark armada and won every game. The only game I lost was when I was 3v1 and my opponents also got dark armada.

Interesting. Returning Armada as a counter to itself.



Full cap of carriers, heavy cruisers, flaks, light frigates, and long-range frigates.

RA would be more unpredictable if it also threw out random useless spams from time like siege frigates or colonizers or scouts. Or if some ships randomly went back to where they came from after a while of serving you, back to the Empire, via the same Phase Stabilizers they entered from.

So, I assume that since we're discussing how hard it is to beat RA 3vs1 we've moved beyond discussing if RA is unbalanced, to how horribly unbalanced it exactly is.

Siege figates would actually make it even worse. With seige frigates, I'd have two fleets; main killing fleet and planet bombing fleet. I'd send my main killing fleet to their most heavily defended planets or homeworld and send the planet killing fleet to any planet that is lightly defended. If there's defenses/ships on that planet, I'd just move them to the next and so on. Considering how some people have a problem with seige frigate spam the computer does, this change would just make people cry a lot more (including me, if i'm on the receiving end )

@Jinx,

Good point. But Siege Frigates, in their current state, would severely shrink your main killing fleet.

Another freak idea is to have RA periodically flood you with Trade Ships and Refinery Ships which do negative income, since they're taking your goods and resources back home to the Empire. You could tell them to 'go home', but then a portion of your reinforcements would leave with them.
Or have out-of-control Junra Fabricators appear at your doorstep, immediately build Trade Ports and Matter Processors on your slots, and then suddenly depart while you get stuck with buildings which give you negative income, and of course, scuttling these buildings would cause a portion of your RA ships to leave and possibly delay/shrink further reinforcements.

That would not only give RA a somewhat comic downside, but would also remind you that you're working for some "boss" back at the Empire.

I think the main issues with 'fixing' the dark fleets is to keep it consistent with the lore and to make it comparable to the other end-civil abilities.

So these ships are from remnants of the scattered vasari fleet, and you can open a gate to communicate with and summon anyone listening and vector them to your planet. Why not make the RA ships occasionally 'compromised' versions of vasari ships, taken over by whatever the vasari are on the run from? It would seem to keep vaguely in check with the lore and make it more comparable to Insurgency - which is also a bunch of free ships, but under certain circumstances they're also hostile towards the player that summoned them.

Quick fix: Only one Phase Stabilizer per system (or only one can warp stuff in, a global DA cooldown for the system).
That way a vasari with 3 planets can't max his 2300 fleet supply within minutes but RA stays useful (if the empire is large enough to support many planets).

^
That fix will disable the Phase Stabilizer's normal use: rapid in-system transport between any 2 if them. Another solution to the same problem would just be to increase the cool-down or decrease the number of ships spawned.

The Vasari fleet cap is 2320.



Yep. That is what Returning Armada is.

Several wings of the Dark Fleet are still around, if scattered. Only the Veerr wing got annihilated by the "thing". And the Exodus Fleet is only one wings worth in itself.



You mean damaged, or weaker? I don't think the "thing" takes over ships, it just destroys them. If they were damaged, the player would just have to build some Regen Bays and/or research Reintegration, and wait a while longer for the ships to fix up.

I don't see why they would be inherently weaker, though.

On a partly unrelated note: I was of the impression (or guessing, I don't remember) that the "thing" was the Advent.

No. Read the lore (again).



I don't see an issue with the lore. You can even easily find reasons in it why the ships that come through the gate would have inferior capabilities as opposed to the ones that the player builds...

Also even if that were not the case, game balance is of course more important than the story in order for us to have fun with Sins.

Oh my god.. Please nerf RA... A RTS isn't good if someone decides to be a race eg: Vasari and the stratagy that is immediately put out is that we must rush them. I enjoy a long game of sins, with multiple battles, rushing can be a stratagy for those who net-play, but I play with mates, and knocking one out early isn't enjoyable as having a huge game.

I have played a game where my ally and I owned 80% of the system. Yet, the Vasari player was able to defeat both of us, with DA. Its not that we didnt have armys, it was that once we defeated his first army, with numerous casualties, he had another huge army on standby.

It has to be stopped. I don't understand how the developers have play tested this game and not had the same problem, or do they just have a gentlemans ruling of no DA.

DA should be capped to as many planets you have, eg 1 Phase gate, 1x RA ships / planet owned. additionally, if a research station is taken out, the technology stops, and super-additionally, it should be linked to your military tree, so you can't get kick ass units without upgrading both trees.

I would glady kill anyone who says that DA is a fair stratagy. In a nice way

So, according to these forums past few weeks, TEC econ is overpowered, needs nerfing? ADVENT malice is overpowered, needs nerfing? VASARI RA is overpowered, needs nerfing?


my conclusion: TEC is/was a trade order. Advent are psychics. Vasari were conquerors via military. We have a balance here people! ...

Malice might be overpowered. I dunno, but a cap ship ability and RA are not the same thing and its,.. well its kinda foolish to compare the two.

It's supposed to be a military supplement, but it ends up being the most powerful research ability (almost completely decoupling ship designs from military labs), the most powerful economic ability (decouples income from tax/trade/refinery revenues with vasari scuttle tech), and the most powerful military ability (outproduces industrial juggernaut with no cost and no micro).

The imbalance with TEC isn't their economy but that black market effectively makes credits too good and resources partly worthless.

Malice isn't overpowered.

RA is overpowered. At the late game, if the Vasari player gets RA and manages to get his fleet size up to yours (in other words, he doesn't die at the toddler stages of RA), you lose.

RA is definitely overpowered.

The other two sides have no technology that basically states "If you leave this alone, you lose".

RA does that perfectly well however. My two opponents in a FFA game (originally had 8 players, I survived down to the last 3 players) made the mistake of leaving me alone with my RA. I then wiped the floor with the TEC guy, and proceeded on to a "clash of the titans"-esque battle with the other Vasari guy. He had 6 planets or so. I had a full 1.5 galaxies.

What's interesting is that he managed to survive for a while. He loaded up his 6 planets with phase stabilizers & RA, while mine were more spread out between my massive numbers of planets.

Eventually I killed him too, but it really showed the power of RA - he had over 50 enforcers, 48 carriers and a support fleet while controlling six planets.

I, with my galaxy was of course also at the fleet cap, and for a while he hung in there quite well. Of course, seeing as how I had more phase stabilizers than him ultimately, I won the game.

But this illustrates the problem of RA. If the game goes into the super long term, is it really fair that the Vasari are the only ones with an ultimate late game technology?

I don't think so. So, either:

A. Nerf RA

or

B. Buff the other two sides' late game tech.

I prefer B., because if I survive into getting the ultimate late game tech I should be rewarded accordingly; right now I don't care what people say - the TEC & Advent late game tech is not incredible compared to Vasari's.

Capital ships, despite what many here think, aren't good when you hit your max fleet cap. With over 50 enforcers and fighter support, you can pretty much instantly kill most cap ships, even if they have annoying abilities like temporary invulnerability or w/e. And they require far more "training time" than regular ships do due to the levelling system. (To get to a respectable level, I mean.)

So RA should be one of the first things the next patch addresses, one way or the other. I love having late game annihilation abilities, I'd just prefer that all three sides had them.

Yeah RA is definitely overpowered. I was in an 8 player FFA like the dude above me and it ended up being a 3v1, I was the 1. I took out an enemy right away and grabbed his planets to the point where I had about 10 planets. I didn't initially go for RA but when I had the economy to do so without too much strain I did. I had plenty of stabilizers and fleet cap maxed out, with the fleet cap research. It came time for the 3 players to attack me, as everyone else was dead and they had all those planets. I eventually won because my fleet would ALWAYS stay at cap, no matter how many ships they destroyed they would be replaced asap. Even if they destroyed a few stabilizers I had many more on every planet. This means I could warp anywhere I want with a constant stream of ships. It really felt like I had typed in "it is a good day to die" or something.

Anyway, yeah something needs to be done.

I rate Insurgency over RA anyday.

Insurgency is mostly useless. The amount of ships that spawn aren't that threatening. Just send a couple ships to that planet to distract them, build a few turrets/repair stations and they're gone. All it is is harassment and not that great harassment at that.

RA, however, isn't harassment - it's assault.

I should also mention that to a vasari player, insurgency is less than harassment - it's free exp. Ships can warp from any phase gate to another so the insurgency gets instantly taken out before it destroys anything.

I've played a lot of long games where opponents got insurgency. There was never a time when I though "Oh crap! He has insurgency!". RA on the other hand...

as if insurgency is better than RA... can somebody please flame him... I hate these no flaming rules, i mean, who honestly just says one statement of crap.

Insurgency can't be controlled, and you have no idea if it actually affecting your enemy. and it can't be massed! and you can't get 8x insurgencys due to an extra amount of buildings.

RA is bs. My mates and I have stopped playing pretty much till it gets fixed. It hurts.