How is RA overpowered?

RA (Returning Armada) is not very useful unless you have an empire of at least 5-10 planets that all have Phase Stabilizers.

This is a good example of how complicated (but awesome) this game is:
Yes, it does not seem like the number of ships you get is really worth the time/resource cost, but you have to look at it in a larger context.

Look at it like this:
4-5 ships every 4 minutes
Multiply this by the number of planets that have Phase Stabilizers
this gives you (with 5 planets) 20-25 ships every 4 minutes.
Not only are you getting ships, but you are also able to get ships that you have NOT researched yet.

Now the thing that really ties all of this together, you have free ships appearing at your planets, and all of those planets are ONE phase jump away from eachother.

You are getting lots of ships that you can very quickly maneuver throughout your empire for defensive or offensive reasons.

Hope that helps you there...

the better question may be: how does one defeat RA in full swing? I haven't played against anyone who has used this strategy, thankfully. However, so far the only thing I've come up with is to make sure they can't build enough research centers (whatever Vasari's are). Yet, what if you don't know they are going to use that strategy and you find out too late? What then?

Well, for defeating Ra, one must first idenitify the RA weakness. The RA requires lots of fleet logistics to be really useful which translate into high maintenance costs, and as stated, phase jumps.

So deafeating RA in full swing will surely requires targeting specifically the phase jumps and the various ressources extractors to cripple its economy: you can't win a direct confrontation with someone that have unlimited supply for ships. So you need to play a cat and mouse game, especially since all its planets are only phase jump away from the other for him.

And it should be also noted that there is no control on the kind of ship that will come from the gates. You can perharps use this to  make him to have a mis balanced fleet: don't target flak and carriers, and it will surely ends up with a fleet with only those. And YOU can adapt your fleet composition

 

RA allows you to completely ignore all maintenance costs entirely, because you no longer need to make money via taxes or trade. RA itself finances your entire empire and salvage is not affected by your maintenance level.



Phase Gates are not that vulnerable. There's no need to put them out on planets out in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, killing them will reduce the power of RA, just like killing trade ports will reduce trade income. If the player has the power to kill the gates then he probably has the power to take the entire planet so it's moot.

You yourself note why it's extremely difficult to harass a Vasari in this manner - all his planets are connected by a single phase lane effectively. Your harrassing fleet may have to make several jumps, only to find his entire defense fleet waiting for it at every turn. This is magnified by Vasari's superior phase jump tracking.

Targetting resource/economy structures against a player with RA is all but worthless. The vast bulk of their income comes from RA itself once it's in full swing.



There is a control on the type of ship you get. It's Salvage. Salvage the ship types you don't want, gather up the ones you do. Takes a bit of micromanagement, but done properly a Vasari player with 3-4 planets can produce more ships than an empire with 20+ and have so much money produced from salvage on the side they won't be able to research fast enough to spend it.

Last time I managed to get around 9 gates up, I hit max fleet supply faster than I could research each next level, and had tens of thousands of credits, minerals and crystal left over. What am I gonna spend it on? You don't have to pay for any ships, you get heavy cruisers and LRMS and anything but support cruisers, colony ships and caps free of charge. You don't need to research ship prototypes. You don't need to capture planets except to deny them to the enemy, since 3 planets give more than enough gates to steamroll the galaxy and 5 becomes ludicrous overkill where you can lose every ship you own and replace the entire fleet in a few minutes. Really, the only thing you need once you have RA up and running is to salvage the unwanted ship types and use that to queue up weapon/damage upgrades, and try to time producing capital ships/support cruisers in the short window where you have that supply free before it fills back up again.

Rushing RA is not always a good idea depending on map, but it's still the juggernaught of sins once it does come out. And if you can rush it (team, and FFA scenarios)... well, I got a fully maxed fleet supply of heavy cruisers, flaks and LRMS in about 50 minutes. I haven't been able to come anywhere NEAR close to that actually researching heavy cruisers and trying to produce them. The maintenance cost gets too crippling to try and max it out that fast for anything but RA-strategies, let alone actually paying for the research to get heavy cruisers AND an economy.

I see that I have overlooked the combo RA + Salvage as a way to get freely credits and ressources.

You die. Spectacularly. Been there, done that, got the scars to prove it.

If you suspect your opponent is rushing RA, you'd better pile on him hard and fast.

if you are advent, use malice/cleansing brilliance to wipe their fleet, and then knock out their civics labs where you can find them.. this will leave them with a severely crippled economy and no more free ships..

That's not actually true. If you blast his Civics labs, he can't build any more Phase Gates, but the existing ones will still fire off Returning Armada. And you have to kill 4 labs, because Phase Gates only require 5 labs to build.

I just discovered this first-hand while playing RA against 4 hard AIs. They managed to knock out a couple of civics labs, which I thought was going to kill me, but the gates still kept giving me free ships.

- Gus

Gus, that doesn't seem right. If you lose enough Civic labs so that Returning Armada tech is no longer available to you, you won't get any more ships. That's how it is with every other tech....

I went RA today in a 3v3 online. 30 minutes later, RA was researched and I was building gates. When I had 6 gates up, 2 opponents came after me. They lost and it was game over.

If you don't scout Vasari and hit him before he's got a bunch of gates up, it will be extremely difficult to stop him after. He's getting a ton of ships for FREE every few minutes.....you won't be able to keep up.

I can see how you'd think that, but that's not actually how lab loss works.

It's obvious that if you have a ship that you don't have the tech for, it continues to work. Many scenarios start you with HC's and no weapon labs, and of course you get advanced ships from RA without doing any weapons research.

You keep researched abilities even if you lose all your labs. So if you research Reintegration, your HCs will still be able to use Reintegration even if you lose all your weapon labs.

However, if you lose enough labs, you do lose the ability to build. So lose your eighth weapon lab as TEC, and you can't build any more Novalith cannons.

Thus, Returning Armada is just like all the other techs. Returning Armada is an ability, so it stays available on existing phase gates even if you lose all your civics labs. I know this from first hand experience. But if you lost enough civics labs, you wouldn't be able to build any more gates.

- Gus

RA done right cant be beat.

Done right means they have 20+ phase with subs

2 things:
1) what is salvage, and how does one use it? (i'm sort of a newbie)
2) I find that the TEC, maxed out on refineries and trade ports, can earn enough money to keep up with all research and fleet output. why is your way better? (I actually want to know, again, I am relatively new to the game, and could use some help.)

RA done right is very powerful, no question. But it does cost a lot in research stations and phase research. If you don't have any scouts checking for large quantities of civie research stations, knowing full well that you are playing against Vasari, then you are setting yourself up to lose. Just scout, and build a heavy capital ship. (ex. marza or kol fro TEC). If you find that they are "rushing RA" then simply go after their civie research stations. Returning Armada is like a huge ax: it has momentum. That is to say, they are vulnerable in the windup (early game), and devastating in the late game (inevitable face smashing - assuming you didn't kill them early in).



JamesP81 and I agree, but he says it more succinctly. I have been on both ends of the inevitable face smashing. By the Vasari. (I was TEC the other time - and I didn't understand trade ports/refineries.)

Repulsion + Malice or Cleansing Brilliance. If you micro right you hardly lose ships in your fleet. As for tech, havent had the pleasure.

bombers and subs will stop repulse

malice+cleansing brilliance wipes a whole fleet if it is clustered in less than 10 seconds

You get back a percentage of the resources that went into any structure or ship when you scuttle. Vasari have some research upgrades that increase this amount.

So, by going RA and then scuttling the ships that come in, your economy gets a boost for free. This boost can pay for fleet supply upgrades and other research.

-- Retro

Perharps that part, ability to get free resources from salvaging RA ships, needs some tweakings.

Note that scuttling the ships will involves a large amount of micromanagement as well as scouring different gravity wells for incoming ships. I wish there were a way to have it just automatically send incoming ships to a certain location.

Some of the info hasn't been presented very clearly.

Once you've researched Returning Armada, you get 4 to 5 ships (Heavy cruisers, carriers, long range etc) PER phase stabilizer.

So 2 phase stabilizer's = 10ish ships every 5 minutes. 5 gates = 25ish ships every 5 minutes.

FOR FREE. There is NO COST for these ships.

You don't need 10 planets, you don't need 20 gates.

I went RA with 4 planets, and built 9 gates. My opponents didn't scout, so when they sent their TWO fleets over, I had more ships from RA and owned them. It was game over. They couldn't match my fleet output at that point....

I didn't even need any more gates. Within 5 minutes, I had 45 more ships. 5 minutes more, another 45 ships, within 20 minutes of that battle, I had 200 FREE SHIPS at my disposal. As TEC or Advent, you'd need a humungous economy to keep up.

Once someone has 6 phase stabilizers up and running, it's almost impossible to beat him. Lots of free ships every 5 minutes is pretty much > then anything anyone else you can do.

If you have RA in full swing, you can easily take out 3 opponents.....

So in order to beat RA you have to destroy their phase stabilizers and civic centers?

In order to beat RA, you need to scout your Vasari opponents, and if they are going RA, stop them. If they tech all the way, start building gates, and have a little time to get a fleet going, it's too late.

RA really isn't as invincible as Aghostone makes it sound. There are ways of dealing with Vasari opponents that have RA up and running. I know. I've had RA with my 15 gates up and good opponents can muck up the RA works.

That won't be true for 1.05 any longer if you read how the malice ability will handled in the 1.05 preview thread.

Not necessarily. It will affect fewer targets, the only "real" nerf so far, as presumably even though its mechanics changed to lower duration/cooldown/AM cost to be easier on the CPU its overall effectiveness remains the same. But if those 24 targets get caught in the Cleansing Brilliance beam, the effect will be quite the same as if the whole fleet was Maliced. It will just require to be more careful with Malice targeting so you get just the right group affected and spreading damage.

Basically it looks like Malice is changing from how it currently works:

- Ship is Maliced, is attacked by 50 other ships, and the game calculates damage spread from each shot.

To:

- Ship is maliced, is attacked by 50 other ships. Malice duration is shorter, at the end it sums up all the damage that ship has taken (the "end" also includes when the ship is destroyed), and then spreads it.

Basically, the way it's being changed requires fewer calculations, and the cooldown had to be reduced (I imagine it will not last longer than 20 seconds or so now) so that the damage dealing is frequent.