Dark Fleet

The free ships tend to suck if you compose your fleets correctly. They overemphasize certain ships (like carriers). Often a RA player will just lump together what he has and send it at you when the fleet is blatantly lacking in balance.

You could probably use antimatter burns on the phase stabilizers or bomb their planets to disable the stabilizers.

RA (returning armada) was weakened in Patch 1.04, so if you haven't updated yet, then take comfort in that. But I doubt it changed much considering how insanely powerful RA was.

Income doesen't matter with RA, because the Vasari player gets plenty of free ships, which he can scuttle if he needs money. However, if you are two to one you could try to attack from different direction and destroy the rings of death. The rings produce all the ships and the Vasari can use them to travel quickly, so every ring he loses makes him weaker.

Ah yeah, you also should build as many Novalith cannons as possible and use them to destroy his planets. If I am not completely mistaken, the rings don't work as long as the planet is not colonised, which should severely cut his ship supply (usually three rings per planet producing about 120 supply worth of ships every 8 minutes or so).

Having said all that though, the general consensus is that the only real counter to RA is to not let the Vasari get it. I agree with you, this is kind of silly, especially in longer games, but that's life.

Yeah great, refresh double post. Delete please.

Last I tested in 1.03, the gates continue to function even if you destroy the planet, or target the Imperial Labs. The only way to stop it is to destroy those gates.

From my experience, the TEC economy is strong enough to combat Returning Armada in it's opening stages, before the Vasari goes all out and maximizes their fleet cap and gets Phasic Transmissions. When they have a limited number of gates you can get to them before they can overwhelm you, but against a full Returning Armada, especially one that mixes in some Support ships and Capitals is nearly impossible to compete with on an equal field for very long.

Not the answer you want, but you generally can't compete with the full force of Returning Armada for very long if your opponent knows what they're doing, it's huge resources and ships it can provide are unending and any ships you destroy in battle will be almost immediately replaced, while you have to pay for all your losses. Stop it before it happens, or stop it in it's early phases or you won't be able to without a lot of luck or allies.

Ok, I think you are right RedMaw, even in 1.04 tactical structures don't stop working if the planet is gone.

How were they weakened in 1.04?

And how should I structure my fleet, what I used (and was defeated with) were:
60 JRM frigates
30 heavy cruisers
25 repair ships
10 light carriers
2 level 9 cap ships (Destroyer and Battlecruiser)

All were 100% upgraded.

1. No flak. You'll get destroyed by the carriers that often show up in RA fleets.
2. No light frigs for sappan antimatter from everything else

If what you say is true, that is, he was in the negative, then there is this wonderful ability the TEC scouts have. It's the bomb ability. It's a level 3 research, but if you're against Novaliths or RA, it's mighty handy. Basically a scout can do 1200 damage to a building. Get 6 together, send them to attack a phase gate, and boom, no more phase gate.

Once you kill off a Vasari's phase gates, it's a matter of slowly picking off his fleet. It may be huge in comparison to yours, but you can slowly wittle it away with hit and run tactics.

Yes definatly Raging Amish, the scout ability is nuts.

At this point in the game, your TEC tech tree should have granted you lots of producton speed bonuses. Make sure that you have at least 1 frigate factory for every 4 or 5 planets, more or less depending on the game size.


Use the hotkey in game to select all factories (not sure of the default anymore, mine is bound to my mouse), and pump out streams of scouts.

You'll need at least 15-20 per planet to make a giant dent into well protected space, and each scout ability is on a cooldown timer after its set, first 10 seconds (for the detonation), and then the final cooldown for reuse is about 1 minute. Also, they get the "Infallable Jump-Drive" ability, so you can do this all the way to the back of the Vasari planet range, and they probabbly cant stop all of them.


Unless the planet is heavily defended from attacks with lots of troops (defenses will not be able to stop that large swarm), you can shut down his buildings pretty quickly.



Also note that it is important when playing as TEC to have a very strong economy. Maximize your trade income, keep an eye on the trade route itself, max out your planetary improvements for population (no negative penalties!), and ensure that you are using the market to its fullest effectivness. (see some other posts in the strategy section for more info on that).



Because of patch 1.04, Vasari are no longer able to spawn RA past their fleet maximum, you should have no trouble with having a stronger economy that DOESNT just go away once a single type of structure is down. They also lack the ability with their super-weapon to outright destroy your planets, but they will be able to damage buildings and units with enough super-weapons. Shut them down with the Novalith.


As another note, RA is on a somewhat long cooldown, its about 3 minutes. The enemy will have to have quite a large planet base to call in so many reinforcements so quickly. Since they will have a lot of their tactical slots filled with phase gates, you need to boost your Novalith production, and hold your postion until you can completely wipe them out with heavy bombardment.



Since the Vasari are terrorisim-tactics figthers, the best way to deal with them is to find out where they are at all times, destroy their economy, and assault the enemy with long-lasting forces. The TEC are good at all 3, with our remote sensor ability from scouts, Novalith Cannon, and Command/Repair cruisers. I really reccomend the latter in large numbers, in conjunction with some flak frigates to keep the enemy strikecraft off of you. Also, the TEC Battleship ability "Flak Burst" set to autocast.


Light Frigates are also key late game, to disable enemy anti-matter reserves, and since its Vasari, no anti-matter = no game. However, they regenerate quickly with their technologies.

Remember, Vasari fight with terrorisim tactics, TEC fight with long lasting troops. I see a lot of combat oriented troops in your makeup, try to throw in a lot more support craft into your mix to protect your investments, or to just make them outright unkillable.


- Sure they have lots of troops, but if they kill 1 every 15-20 seconds insted of 8 or 10, it doesnt really matter how many they have! Make sure you emphasize that.


Edit1: Another important fact that I just remembered, is the tech "Insurgency". The higher your culture with the opposing forces planet, the more insurgents they recieve. With your economy, the only way to stop an planet filled with culture is to build lots of anti-culture towers themselves, which leaves those forward planets ripe for a Novalith blast and scouts. Continue to leap frog until the enemy loses enough position for you to move in and colonize. Dig in, and do it again ad nauseam.

In 1.03, bombing the planet out or taking out the labs doesn't stop the stablizer from bringing in more ships. You have to destroy the stabilizer itself.

Hmm, I've never seen bomb in action. How does it compare to Advent's martyrdom?

I do not think it is overpowered.

I have just played a few games and non versus human players (well its the second day i play this game), but i already tried to get some friends "into".

I am pretty picky when it comes to multiplayer space strategy games. The first thing i do is reading the forums, looking if there is some sort of gamebreaker.

From all the heated debates here i thought i would better check into it myself.

All previos games i played Advent solely with the exception of the first wich as TEC because they are supposed to be easy (or rather straightforward) for starters.

I planned to play trough all reaces in order but i have to say the Advent are very much my style techtree-wise. But back to topic...

So i have not played human opponents. The basis for my assumption is simply a comparision between how the different races unfold when playing.

The first thing you notice when you wenture for fleet summoning phase-stabilizers that they are indeed in the empire tree.

Going ship AND empire research is possible, but it kinda takes forever and gets NEITER really acomplished (your fleat will be weaker and it takes longer to get those free ships).

Also you need lots of logistics for BOTH roads. Slots that are rare indeed. But more of that later.

So i decided concentrating on resource mining, doing solely empire research and instead creating a swarm of unupgraded ships, frigates and a few capitals thrown in, to buy me time to pull this of. The computer makes this not REALLY neccesary, but i guess versus humans it is, so i included it.

I got a really solid economy soon as you might have guessed.

The first problem i was confronted with was obviously getting those eight labs up.

The empire grew to spawning four planets wich is pretty much the minimum infrastructure you need to reach this points due logistics slots need and of course aquiring the resources to do so.

The next problem i noticed was... those gates take up 10 (!) logistics slots. To give you a rough estimate what this means... two of those gates equal FIVE capital ship yards.

After upgrading the planets to the max i could put up TWO, more would mean additional systems. But those odds can be overcome.

What really interested me was the speed of the summoned fleets and the size.

And well... they summon kinda 9 ships every 5 Minutes.

Thats not very good if you look what a ship yard is spewing out, but at least you get those ships at no cost.

My comparision shows that at the same time i get it barely rolling i can field about 8 carrier capital ships (fighters) with a multitude of upgraded frigates and cruisers (i like to specialize in laser weapons solely at first) being well on my way to start production on crusaders and shift focus to plasma research.

The catch is this:

With Vasaari i get free ships (with a solid economy, allowing me to advance quickly in things like weapons research) at some point in the far future, leaving me vulnerabel for quite a while (depending on how many resources you want to invest in the fleet, wich of course, delays the whole strategy).

With Advent i need not to catch up. Actually its pretty sure you get a good headstart with the research speed upgrade, and they also have certainly less trouble in economic regards (i usually divert between resource/ship techs). From the first step on my strength builds up and it will allow me to agressively expand (wich is difficult as Vasaari, because its counter-productive to the overall goal of getting the phase-stabilizers running), allowing me to acquire vast resources and operate shipyards spewing out vessels at a very hig rate (i remember chquing up frigates in sequences of 20-50, carriers in groups of tree). So, yes, i have to pay for it, but i CAN do so, and it seems i can build ships faster and they are superior in performance.

If you ask me who is quicker in maxing the fleet cap i would bet on Advent. Of course, replenishing will be seem quicker for the Vasaari because he can too build ships AND gets the extras warped in. But keep in mind: he will have a LOT less space for structures, such as shipyards (wich is a very good point, remeber the 5 capital ship yards example above, not to mention things like trade ports, defences, etc).

All in all i expected more from the phase-stabilizers with all this heated debates. They are by no doubt good. But its a long way till you can set them up and you make huge sacrifices to accomplish it and even AFTER you accomplished to get it running.

Still, i certainly need some more experince versus human players and this impression may totally misguided, see you out there ^^

Returning Armada shines the most in larger multiplayer games, where its easy to have a small handful of core worlds with the stabilizers, and maybe a forward base with one where they can all meet up. You get all the major ship types for free(heavy cruisers, carriers, flaks, LRMs, light frigates), on top of anything else that you build. You could just build Subverters if you wanted, to shut down the enemy's more dangerous units. Also, phase stabilizers take up Tactical slots, not Logistic slots. One upgrade gets you 10 additional slots, enough for the stabilizer.

Actually, I use RA in my big single player games every now and then pretty sure I'v only gotten light frigates once, and LRMS are occasionally popping up, it mainly just Jansurak Sentinels (flak) the carriers in ones or twos, and HC's.

I love this thread. Instead of people bitching about RA screaming that it's OP, they are actually sitting down and discussing how to beat it. Rock on guys, you just renewed my faith in the people here.

Kill phase stabilizers.


And tec eco-spam is pretty much equal to RA.

Get tec up, make lots of frigate factories close by your enemys planets, and set rally point there, pump out units. Just build them faster than they get killed. =]

Speaking from a game I just finished a little while ago, RA is much easier to get up and running without gimping other development if you control the neutral extractors. I controlled every neutral extractor on a 3v3, and my opponents let me keep them. I had RA up by 50 min without rushing straight for it and with no help from my allies.

In short, don't let the Vasari keep control of the neutral extractors. At least try to contest them.

A important note. Yes thats right. It was a mistake taking system defences into consideration. Phase stabilizers take no tactical slots. A beginners mistake.

However, shipyards and economic buildings (trade ports) are logistics. That means fleet production capabilities AND income. And ultimately, this is what really counts.

I just read through the thread and personally I think that it only really gets bad in large games. The update to max it out with Fleet size is a huge help for a TEC player however, because even though Vasari are getting free ships, TEC should have a strong enough economy to wait it out in the short run and continue producing. Once they max their fleet capacity you are arguably on semi-equal ground since Vasari ships cost more to produce (so they will be falling back on RA) but TEC has strong economy and can crank out more ships. Also RA gives random ship choices that don't always balance well, while other players will be able to produce exactly the ships they want.

As a side note however I do agree that the best strategy is to take them out early. I find that the Vasari tech and ships tend to be more costly overall than TEC or Advent. As such RA is a way of rewarding a Vasari player for actually staying alive. The main strategy behind Vasari I find is to have a tougher early game and get some really good tech for late game. As such I think players should def team up early against Vasari players to take them out.

All of this is of course my personal opinion and I am fairly new to Sins so feel free to rip it apart.

Thanks to this thread im going to make some Bomber Scouts for hit and run tactics for TEC.