While I agree with your gripes regarding quick start, I do think it's a step in the right direction.  The problems you're talking about can be fixed without reverting back to having ten or fifteen minutes where everyone is dirt poor.  I'd rather see some tweaking to the cost balance between labs, units, and upgrades rather than reverting to the days when everyone spent their starting cash exactly the same way: putting up extractors, a capital shipyard, and at least one military lab.

Sorry, I should have said at least one lab.  Most of the time you at least needed to have repair bays available, and if you weren't going military chances are you'd want to grab volcanic or ice planets early.

Frankly, I found the start-up phase pre-quickstart to be boring; too slow-paced even by Sins standards.  When a game is boring, that qualifies as "broken" in my view.

I'd agree that quick-start was favourable to Advent and unfavourable to Vasari, and that needs to be addressed.  Doesn't mean quick-start should be rolled back.  You don't need to convince me that illuminators (and any tier 3 unit) greatly benefitted from quick start, as I can plainly see that. 

You could also attack the cost of logistics slots, or combination of labs and logistics. 

Frankly I don't see a problem with Vasari losing their decisive early-game advantage, so long as they lose their late-game disadvantages as well.

The other factor to look at here is trade. TEC can throw up 2 civic labs, get trade up and have a 3-4 port chain going and then switch to fully military and be in a good position as 1) they have econ already going (extractors, full planet upgrade) etc.. and 2) they can get it earlier and cheaper. From this point of view Vassari is screwed, especially if they can't hold onto the neutrals they have grabbed - the cost for them is 1000C,150M,250C PLUS 4 civic labs PLUS any planet upgrades needed to get the labs PLUS andplanet upgrades needed to make room for those ports after 4 civic (and 1 military) lab has been obtained. Meanwhile TEC are using the credits to pump out a million scouts and are scout rushing you and killing your assailants which you can't do anything about as you can't afford to upgrade to carriers. So you have to pump out LF and hope they don't bring LRM in too soon.

Yes, it is DEFINATELY a lot harder playing Vassari early game with quick start on in my opinion then without it...

In vanilla, I never thought of the 2-lab trade port as a huge advantage.  By the time you could seriously afford trade, one extra lab swing isn't a big deal when comparing TEC and Advent, and two extra labs is only a minor disadvantage for Vasari.  With quickstart, that has definitely changed.

Yeah, but I gotta say, I do like the challenge. In team games it'll make you focus more on the long game with Vasari. If you think about it quickstart actually tends to make team games longer, since players are less likely to be destroyed early by a Vasari rush, which is kind of backwards.

Nope I didn't forget. But remember how it was 2 patches ago? Wasn't so bad then. We should definitely be heading back towards that in the future.

I kind of like Quickstart because it speeds up the game....Entrenchment games can go really long....  but I agree, it almost removes the "early phase" of the game that allowed Vasari their early advantage.  Before Quickstart, Vasari countered their "most expensive" ship costs with an early neutral economy a full 5-10 minutes before anyone else could have trade up.  As we know, mid game is a tough time for Vasari until they can start to implement late game technologies like Phase Gates, RA, Subverters, and Kostura...at which point, they have a good fighting chance, assuming they have survived that long.  I think Vasari still have a very brief early advantage.....but only if they start with an Evacuator and get some neutrals quickly.

Pre-Quickstart used to be hardest for Advent, because they had to make a hard choice whether to get colonization techs or trade before they got Illuminators.  I used to play mostly Vasari or TEC, but some of the last games I played I switched over to Advent because I could pretty much go straight military and counter anything that was thrown at me and then get my civics.  Currently, the only weakness Advent has is their susceptibility to phase missiles, and that is pretty manageable if you are careful.  Their econ is a little weaker, but it is also more streamlined in that you can function pretty well with 3-4 civic labs and just spam tradeports everywhere else, so I never saw much disadvantage there.  Sorry, getting off topic.

I agree with Amish, the other thing that sucks about Quickstart is feeding.  There is a lot more leeway to feed someone right at the start without hurting yourself too much now.  It was a really big decision to feed someone before because you would have nothing if you did.  Now it is very common for someone to get fed 5-10K very quickly and completely crush their neighboring opponent.  Good team strategy, but it makes the game less interesting for the both the guy getting crushed and for the "econ slot" player who sometimes doesn't see combat for 2 hours, they just keep pumping tradeports and feeding. 

I think there should be an option to turn feeding off--with one CRUCIAL change-- designating a new homeworld would have to be free (but maybe take a few minutes) if a player has lost his HW.  That way players who are not completely knocked out could crawl back into the game without a feed.  Another idea would be to have a delay of 2 minutes for a feed to arrive.  You could still feed to help people out, but it would help cut down on rushing or "instant starbases" for people who didn't plan ahead.  I swear "feed for starbase!!!!" is something you see all the time in games now.  I have had games where people were fed to aggressively rush SB on both my starting worlds right at the beginning of the game....it is kind of annoying.

It builds really slowly....you have to make sure you see it in time and get your fleet killing it before it is finished.  If you wait until it is done, yeah, you have serious problems.  If you think 1 is bad, just wait until someone feeds your enemy and they are building two on you at one time in two different places.

Just to throw another wrench in the system. Game plays a lot differently when you turn off quick start and set resource income to normal.