Agreed - I only play small and medium maps. It's considerably harder (but not impossible) to pull RA off on 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 on those maps

Jinx said it best when he called Insurgency an harrasment. I normally just have one or two fleets consisting of five Kodiaks and a couple of Hoshkikos at the ready in my backyard in order to control rebels. Heck, I rarely even bother researching Insurgency (even though I've researched all the requisites in order to boost culture), unless my enemy is low on culture. This could make it sound like I prefer what ZeratulTheDT calls option B, but I've already made clear that I prefer option A. As it stands now, all other late-game techs than RA, are interesting and valid strategic choices. Choices, and not requisites for the races.

When I play Vasari, I don't even bother researching Returning Armada. It's so good that it makes me feel like I'm cheating. Unfortunately, for multiplayer games the only thing keeping a Vasari player from going for RA is his word. I just wish they had a powerful and fair late-game technology like Insurgency or the like. RA is broken.

I'm sorry, I used the wrong word to describe what I had in mind

When I wrote that a quick fix would be to have only one Phase Stabilizer per system I actually thought have having only one phase stabilizer per planet.
Right now a Vasari with 3 planets can have 9 Phase Stabilizers, giving him a basically unstoppable fleet. Limiting the PS per planet to one they would still be awesome to teleport through the system but they would not be able to mass-summon ships anymore. Having only 3-4 stabilizers on a small map with their long cooldown will take ages to fill that 2300 fleet cap and TEC / Advent have more then enough time / resources to match those ships with their superior economy.
On large maps RA will stay strong with that fix but on large maps the TEC additional logistic slots and the Advents 10% allegiance increase also give a LOT of money for those races that Vasari does not have so it may be halfway balanced.
One node per planet would at least fix the RA rushes (tanks to HuntingX for providing the replay with that well executed rush - he got like 3 planets packed with nodes to mass his forces fast without expanding much).

The phase gate ability in and of itself is op, forget those 8 jumps u need to make to hit the other side of your empire just 1 jump it with a phase gate. Oh and by the way a few more techs and they give yuo free ships! It's the most ludicrously op thing in any game i've ever played. Novaliths come in a distant second, even with nukes in supcom theres a counter. All I want is an option to diable the op crap they have in the game.

Take away gates and what are vas left with? they havr the smallest fleet size worst econ etc..

What will you give them in place to balance?

quote]Take away gates and what are vas left with? they havr the smallest fleet size worst econ etc..

What will you give them in place to balance?[/quote]

Vasari has great military.

Subverters are one of the best support units. When you micro your fleet well, you can make enemy ships bunch up at times (especially kodiaks) and a single subverter can shut a huge portion of their fleet.

Phase missiles are the best weapon upgrade in the game. Again, combined with subverters, phase missiles have a large chance of straight up killing many units before their shields even deplete (and it apparently bypasses shield mitigation as well).

Enforcers are also the strongest HC, although costing 2 more supply. When upgraded, they're really tough to take down and can self-repair.

Their cap ships are also pretty nice (IMO, better than TEC cap ships). Volatile nanites, Phase out hull, the in-grav speed up skill (always forget the name), give them a lot of versatility. Unfortunately, they don't really have a lot of nice abilities to help you if you get mobbed by a bunch of heavy cruisers, barring having more heavy cruisers + subverters yourself.

How about a 1.04 or 1.1 change with an interesting downside to RA - not just a nerf.

We know from the backstory that the Vasari are running from something. In their desperation to summon the Dark Fleet they expose themselves to the risk that the Unknown Adversary (UA) finds them.

Once phase gates become active for RA a random timer is set and starts counting down to 0. The destruction of RA ships may make it run down faster - doesn't matter if they are scuttled or in battle.

When the UA finds the gate it stops producing RA ships and becomes a broadcast center for UA culture. All races are affected but Vasari more so. The gate likely gets additional HP/Shield at this point as well and cannot be scuttled.

So the Vasari get a powerful weapon, but never quite know when it might all go bad.

Thoughts?

that is a nerf! too unpredictable. players aren't going to build expensive structures only to have them eventually turn on them. its wasting credits/metal/crystal and if it fails at an important part of the game, it may spell doom. make sure you add possible backlash effects into the other tier8(7?) techs of tec/advent.

re jinx:

yes i agree, vasari has the best military. but i hope with all these witchhunt posts about vasari in general coming around, i hope they don't "tweak" too many things at once and make them useless.

wait, what are phase gates? (n00b here)

phase gates are a vasari only tactical building that lets them jump from one gate to another, so you can jump from a planet with a gate to another planet with a gate no matter how far away it is. The gates are also used with the returning armada research, in that the ships you get from returning armada come in through the gates.

Anyway yeah, it happened again to me. I was TEC in a 3v3, and it was a pretty even game until I ended up getting a huge mass of kodiaks and random other stuff. I nearly destroyed one player, another was far away and fighting one of my allies, and I had the 3rd player holed up in a small group of 3 planets. The 3rd player was vasari. I have destroyed his fleet many times, thinking nothing of it, many times he retreated back to his other worlds so I figured I just didn't kill that many. So I'm trying to finish off the first player, when the vasari player comes in with a fleet equal to my size. I had the 1st largest fleet by far prior to this, I've been making kodiaks for a loooong time, and was at about the 6th upgrade for fleet cap. So we fight... and fight... and fight... then I realize he isn't losing ANY ships, then I found out he is, but they are being replaced the instant I kill them by returning armada. I even destroyed the phase stabilizers in the gravity well I was fighting in, and destroyed all of his research labs, and had no idea of how many he had in his other few planets. He later went on to destroying my allies making it a 2v1 against me and I lost.

It's so retarded how he can be holed up in 3 planets, have no economy, and hardly any fleet to start with, and all of a sudden input the cheat for instant build ships and win the game from such a huge disadvantage.

I don't think the Phase Stabilizers are overpowered if you remove RA from the equation. Sure, it's an incredible ability to have, but far from overpowered. But, it does add to the disadvantage players are at when battling RA, since the faster respond time greatly hampers the effect of maneuver warfare, which is pretty much the only way to take out an RA player. Attrition only works if your fleet is significantly more powerful than his.

With regards to those that have suggested that enemy fleets, culture, or even colony and worker ships (whether they be your own or neutral). I simply can't see why it should be preferable to add hassle to an overpowered technology instead of simply balancing it the old fashioned way. While I must admit I've sometimes wished for bad things to happen to RA players, I honestly can't see why you should be punished in such a frustrating way for researching a technology. It would only further detract from the fun of the game.

it is gonna take a vas player over 10k credits to get the buildings and tec up to RA not couting 2k+ metal and 2.5k+ cry for it.

Both tec and advent have better econs, so what are you doing with evem mroe credits that you can over power him while he is tecing for ra?

this is not even counting the time it takes to reasech, unless your games have tec set to fast, play with it set to slow and its even more deadly to even try and tec straight for RA.

the only problem i see with RA is the abilty to build more then 1 gate per planet, just limt that and it nerfs it enough that people should stop whining about it.

Reasons why this thread is retarded
1) Vasari's ships are way more expencive then the other factions ships
2) Teching up to RA is hard, you need a bunch of planets for it to effectivly work, and the price for the labs and research is pretty large too
3) There are a million whining about RA threads out there, go use one of those

Vasari players have to poor huge amounts of resource into RA for it to work. This is a time when they are not building ships. Attack them then, how you know its the right time? Scout. If they have a bunch of imperium labs and look like they are trying to build up to RA, then kill labs. Its not some infailable tactic, its just like spamming LRMs. It works, but it can be countered with a defined strategy known to most people.
The Vasari are also the weakest in Economy, dont forget that.

Sorry if it looks like Im flaming, but the GE has really opened my eyes about alot of this stuff.

Saying that you can prevent RA from happening by destroying labs is a moot point.

The whole point of this thread is to discuss the absolute dominating power of RA once matured. Once they have several gates up and their fleet from gates matches yours in supply, it's game over. There's no way to turn the battle around.

No other race has a tech, that when matured, is essentially an automatic win. RA can only really be countered by another RA.

Blindly saying that it can be countered by stopping it before it's executed is just foolish. Also, no one says you have to rush straight for RA. I've played a lot of games in small-medium maps where I built enough of a fleet to hold off the enemy all the while teching up to RA. Once I got RA, boom - steamrolling time.

RA is a time-bomb - a countdown clock to GG.

PS. Vasari economy wasn't the weakest pre-patch, and post-patch I think it's still better than Advent's. Vasari, due to scouts, usually are able to dominate the neutral extractors. By doing so, they get a lot of resources that they can sell for credits (pre-patch) and then exchange for whatever they want. Post patch, the only way to really do this is to put the resources up for other people to buy, since selling to the bank nets too little gains. However, it's not guaranteed you'll get anything since people may simply not buy it when you need it.

Thank you Jinx, you just saving me from having to repeat myself a lot. Now, a little will suffice. Please, Rawrsteromgomg, read the thread before posting. You may think this thread was 113 replies filled with people whining and crying about RA until you came along and banged some sense into everybody. Not so. You pretty much just reposted all the superficial "Ra isn't overpowered, get a grip" arguments made by roughly one third of the posters in this thread. Now I'm whining, but not about RA, but about people whining about whining about (perceived) whining. And finally, I'd like to whine about how I hate the word whine.

No, Advent has the worst economy. The Vasari in fact have the best resource economy. Also, their fleet cap is 16% higher than everyone else's.



1. And Vasari's ships are individually far more powerful than the others.
2. You need an ally or allies pumping you with cash/resources and defense until RA is up.
3. This one has 5 pages. I think it's the biggest one there is.



Post patch, the Vasari can sell their excess resource income for higher rates to get more cash than before. If people buy. But just putting up resources(at a possibly inflated price, that too) forces people to buy through them before they get access to lower-priced market resources.

Not only do they dominate the neutral extractors thanks to the Jikara, but they also get Matter Processors(refineries) earlier than everyone else, which are capable of boosting those extractors even further.

If RA is nerfed then the Vasari have to be seriously revamped and improved because their race is a one-trick-pony. You have to tech to RA to be able to compete against the other 2 races because the other 2 races have several strategies to cripple or win the game.

Tech capital ships are far superior to Vasari capital ships because there abilities work so well together when you have multiple capital ships together (Vasari's capital ships abilities don't work well together at all). Tech trade is better which means their resources are also better because they can buy off the black market. Tech culture is much better because they have extra logistic slots to put down broadcast stations (I've had Tech culture knock out several of my planets early on because they could out build me with broadcast stations). Finally Tech's superweapon is far better than Vasari's.

Advent capital ships are better because of the fast experience they get with their research and their abilities tend to be much better than Vasari. Advent culture spread is much better than Vasari. Advent's Deliverance Engine is much better than the Vasari's superweapon. I'm not sure about trade between the two.

Like I said, Vasari are a one-trick-pony, RA seems to be the only think they have up their sleeve. Without it Vasari will need to be seriously reworked...

Just because you like/know how to use TEC capital ships more than Vasari's doesn't mean that they are any worse. In my opinion Vasari's colonizer is the best colonizer out there. Their battleship is equal to any other races... I don't see why you think their cap ships are any worse, just because they don't have auras?




Yes, you have displayed TEC's advantages over the other races. It seems to me that you never play vasari, because you seem to think they don't have any advantages of their own. Phase stabilizers, if they need to, they can hop around killing your broadcasters. Vasari get great extraction rates, which can then in turn be sold to the TEC player who's buying resources.

My point is, if you think RA is the only thing vasari have going for them then you really haven't tried to do anything with 'em. Or you just like the other races better.

Individually the Vasari have a couple of good capital ships. However, when you get multiple capital ships together, the Tech and Advent abilities work much better together than the Vasari.

Well, I certainly do hope that TEC trade, or rather, the black market, gets fixed. Something as simple as doubling the prices and the effects of the fluctuations would go a long way towards making TEC refineries relevant again, and would give mainly the Vasari an economic boost. As I see it, RA is one of two major balances issues.

RA is fine when you have one or two of them. It's when you get 5, 10, and more that it starts to get VERY troubling, VERY fast.

So, what if RA had limits? The first 2 might pump out at full speed, but each one after that gets slower and slower. After all, it takes time to find these bits of the dark fleet. There aren't just millions and billions of ships camping out, waiting to pour through your dozens and dozens of gates... right?

Actually...

The Vasari "...once ruled over countless worlds. Beginning at the galactic core, the empire expanded uniformly, and brought hundreds of alien races under its control."

Some of those alien races might have had empires of their own that were subsumed (ie: more than one world). The lore of the Vasari hints that their empire was vast, and dominated the galactic core, which, I might add - has a much higher stellar density than the arms of the galaxy (where we Humans make our homes).

Also... if you look closely... the Vasari you are fighting now? Are the descendents of one colony that decided to flee. One colony. 10,000 years is a whole lot of time to make some babies, and keep in mind the Vasari extend their lives unnaturally via nano-technology, and can probably beat down most or all illnesses that strike them via that same technology. So... that's some hefty population. Returning Armada represents forces from other colonies (and remnants of the Dark Fleet) who have caught up to the Vasari as we know them... and who knows how many Vasari are a part of those new forces.

...so in answer to your question - perhaps there are?

I have to give credit to a guy I played against recently, it was a 4 player FFA, the other two players had been eliminated, the opponent he had been primarily faced with was a complete chump,

Anyway, I ended up with two thirds of the planets, but he got RA up, so we fought, and when it was was over (I was first in research and all economics but what does that matter?) he offered to ally so we both got the win, because he felt he didn't deserve it.

I'm not experienced enough to venture a guess on how RA should be fixed, but it needs to be.

Good post, Tarl.

I feel semi cheap because the last MP game I played was a 3v3 where I was Vasari. My opponents were proving to be a tough nut to crack, so I went full bore for RA while my remaining ally defended. About a half an hour after getting 6 phase gates setup and pumping ships, I landed on my opponents with 70+ Enforcers plus escorts.

But I guess it's not the cheapest tactic, either. You just can't let a Vasari opponent on a sizeable map live long enough to get it.