I picked up the Vasari after a break for a while from the game, and I think the changes to RA are great for a few reasons.
First id like to talk about how the Vasari work great in the field.
The best control of fleet movement and presense of all the races, denying the enemy actions in combat or out of combat (in the same planet or not), Medium/Heavy standard combat ships with self-repair (best if micromanaged) which can give you an edge in fleet spamming at any point in the game, powerful LRM (and their ability), incredible strike-craft, and by far the best multi-front capable fleets and ships.
So remembering all of that, and the two most important Sun Tzu concepts for this race :
"Be mysterious rather than obvious. Pretend to be here when you are there. Be close when he thinks you're far, and far when he thinks you are close.
Be unpredictable. Be frightnening. Be daring."
"Always Expect attack. Be ready to respond. Know your enemy. Know yourself. Stay high on the plain. Act quickly. Never be vulnerable. Never expose your weakness. Focus on your strength and power."
Ok, we got that right?
So lets use the environment, or in this case, the tech tree of the Vasari, to our advantage. Lets make the decision for the RA tech.
Situation A) The game has progressed to a point where we are in need of more defenses, we have many open spots that the enemy can attack from, and we need to be prepared for recooping minimal losses, or defending against strong opposition.
Situation
The game is nearing its end, the enemy(s) are boxed in, there is no need for defenses.
So situation A is the case here, we tech up to Phase Stabilizers, the speed improvements for Phase Stabilizers, hopefully grabbing our tech to see all phase space jumps in the universe, and grab Returning Armada if the situation requires even more defense.
Ok - so now we have Returning Armada in patch version 1.10 . What do we do with it?
Well, a few things:
One of the key uses for Phase Stabilizers is to move troops quickly from defense point to defense point, and if you are able to and have the right capital ship & level, you can move troops directly to the battlefield as well.
Imagine the look on an enemys face when they see a small raiding group, and a larger fleet attacking a prime world.
The enemy commander sends his fleet to defend against the larger threat, and may or may not send a smaller fleet to defend against the raiding group, or just let the local defenses hammer it out.
- wait a bit, and if you have the tech, wait for their main forces to be several jumps away. Trigger the Capital Ship Phase Stabilizer ability, warp in a much larger fleet, and move to a more important objective, while his fleet is still far far away. A very unhappy foe you have made.
As Vasari, our solutions to problems are usually solved with speed and presense. Faster jumping, faster capital ships, faster to defend with a fleet, faster to build defenses on a planet or buildings, faster to kill with Phase Missiles and Culture bonuses.
The only thing we havent been able to do is quickly build a fleet in an emergency situation, or to press the attack and become more "fearsome" - by that I mean, "oh, yeah you killed 130 ships a second ago, but I just made 130 more in a few seconds, come and take me if you can."
So now thats exactly what we can do, we can build a defensive fleet should all our forces be away on the assault, or we can quickly build troops to reinforce the assault, or we can quickly summon ships to stay in the game if we fail the assault.
Infact if you take into account the cost per fleet for each unit, you can end up with the possibility of the same cost, but in most cases, less cost in all resouces for that many units. Very very cool.
This is win-win here, Returning Armada has been very imbalanced the last few patches, and the fact that we got this little change is great - that means they took their time in deciding how to make an end tech tree change benificial, but not so extradordinally powerful.
If this is how Returning Armada worked in the first place, none of these discussions would be taking place, and other than someone asking "how do I use this seemingly useless tech?", we'd never hear about it.
Not to say the game will not need future patches for balance, but to really win in combat you have to take what you've got, and make a victory out of it. Sometimes it is a lot worse than this situation, but because of the large number of Phase Stabilizer nodes you/we should have near the late game (you do have that right?), and our tremendous resource income by that point, and since the recall is DOUBLE what we got before at each location, this is a great change, and a much better situation than it could be.
