Mothership and illum, in most cases, is your best form of attack.  Really any large force of LRF and flak that considerably outnumbers its foe will be extremely deadly early on.  The Vasari starbase rush is powerful but risky.  It usually requires feed from allies, but can totally backfire if the enemy can counter-attack and punish you for putting all your resources into a single powerful installation.  This rush works best on maps where the enemy homeworld is vulnerable or there is a good choke point to go after.

I think rushing is just about as popular as always, it is just that the offensive oriented players need to attack earlier than before to avoid having high level starbases to deal with.

As for my favorite, the map plays a major part in any rush decision, but the only race I really rush with is TEC, as they can scout or Sova rush. For Advent I usually just build a massive illum fleet and use it to dominate all of the key planets and then take my time attacking once I have more than my share of the map. I don't really rush with vasari at all (though I don't play as them much either).

Ah rushing. So annoying. I wish Sins had the feature that Rise of Nations had. You could set a timer on how long until aggression could commence. Like, say, just put a 15 minute "all peaceful" mandate on the game.

Anywho, the best rushing tactic is Illums with a mothership just because of the sheer power. Starbase rushing can stop it at one planet, but unless that planet is the homeworld, the illums can just go somewhere else.

My personal favorite has gotta be using a Revalation with a mix of light frigs and scouts for support. I'm dead serious. The Revalation makes the enemy ships hold still ( just takes the enemy cap out of the fight, early on that's a pretty big blow ). The Scouts can fight off any lrf's that come out (cause that's what seekers do!). The light frigs take out the frig factory. Bam. It tends to work purely because no one expects it. It goes to hell if the guy has backup from an ally (of course, most tactics go to hell when that happens anyway) or if there are too many Assailants.

It's kinda interesting how the Caps have worked out for rushing. Wish there was a bit more flair in some of the caps. We don't see 'em enough.

@Darvin

Actually, I almost always scrap the capital ship factory, but I almost always construct another one later. It's rare I go with just 1 cap. I realize getting 300 cred, 75 metal, 50 crystal, or whatever it is (it's around there) isn't much, but considering that money can pay for upgrading the population on the asteroid and then frees a spot on the homeworld for either a lab, or if I'm advent, a culture hub (which i always get if I'm advent, and to a lesser extent Vasari too).

It's enough of a payoff early on that I really think the building needs to be scrapped. When you only make 11.4 cred per second, 1.4 metal, and .9 crystal, that's a pretty big early boost to the economy.

Well I choose the Kortul cause the Evacuator, everyone uses, and thats boring.

I also think Kortul at lvl 6 is pretty strong.

I think capital ship factory should be scuttled in the begining and better off built at somewhere near the enemy base later on cause its a pain bringing the capital ship all the way from your first planet, to where your fleet is.

If I'm rushing, i always scuttle my cap facotry just for the extra resources; it only amounts to about one ship, but if a battle is close it can help.

I think the best rush is vasari against advent, if the map is small enough that the vasari can get there before illums come out then the Egg and asssailants (with a few skirmishers for backup) will easily beat disciples and seekers.

Has anyone actually pulled off an Antorak rush with subversion? In theory it is similar to the Sova/embargo rush, but i have never seen it attempted.

Edit: The "Peace Time" option sounds cool, not sure how it would go with MP, but i liked it in Rise of Nations and Supcom... Maybe the next expansion after diplomacy

To continue the RON off topic tangent thoughts, I want assassin in this game mode. The mode where you can only attack one person and you only have one person after you. I always loved that game mode.

Being a newer player but not a newbie I would have to agree, gaining the option of NR would make alot of sense and really allow Sins to evolve the limitations of most multiplayer RTS games. being limited in game modes and type really do put a damper on the true potential of a game and really I don’t see why other RTS producing company’s don’t spend the extra 8 hours or programming to give us the options to play the games we love with a little more control over the game play.

Every gamer should be able to customize geared towards his own type of play style and I’m sure other gamers would be accepting as it allows different type of strategy’s with different type of game modes thus improving the game play and allowing your consumers to invest more of their time into all different types of strategy’s from the rushers to economic/military mighty to progressing beyond the point of the maximum achievement.

Just my 2 cents -Sanic

King of the hill would be cool, but SBs would make it damm hard to take that planet if your opponent gets a good grip.

what about a game type where one player (or team) starts with a ring of heavily defended planets with a small fleet and low resources and the other with very high resources, a good sized fleet and several factory worlds?

The problem with that in Sins (and many other games) is contested resources.  There would need to be a mechanism to ensure any conflicting claims over planets or neutrals cannot occur, since any method of conflict resolution (now that is a euphemism) is banned.  I don't see any obvious way to implement this.

Honestly, I think the best way to solve this would be to empower map-makers with an automatic download.  We can assign planet ownership in galaxyforge to allow players to start with a small empire already established.  The two problems are that galaxyforge maps don't transfer online, and that every planet starts with the basic assets (frigate factory, capital ship factory, and two scouts). 

Rushing is nothing new. The only thing new is players new-found dependency on Starbases. I actually rushed more a year ago because players were overall less skilled at defending themselves. Nowadays, most rushers are being fed by an ally in the pocket. Without feed, it is pretty suicidal to rush another skilled player.

It will be interesting to see what the Diplomacy expansion brings....we might get some sort of implementation for borders, treaties, etc. I would love it if there was an option to turn off feeding or even have a closed economy where you can't buy anything from the black market that wasn't sold into it. Of course, I might just think that because people tend to force feed my opponents. Rushing is such a pain these days because you are usually fighting 2 economies, the rusher AND his feeder.

If you TRULY want a NR style game, everyone should start with several turrets near their shipyards so it isn't easy to rush someone and shut their factories down. Rushes would still be possible, but they would be significantly harder.

I agree, and you will probably lose if you dont have a good feeder of your own. Although feeding makes team games interesting in its own way, I'd like to have the option of turning it off.

Also I feel like so much of the MP community is stuck in a Single Star Random rut. There are other options. We dont need a "No rush timer". Easiest way to play without the possibility of rushing is to play a multi star map, simple as that. But I can hear the arguement "well multistar maps take forever, so I dont play them", but you cant have it both ways, you can't have a short game with no rushing.

And Areolian sector is a great map to play if you can find at least 5 other people with some time to kill.

Probably because most don't bother with the map designer, and dont really know how to use it. There are multistars for smaller games though, I can;t remember their names atm, but Ill look for em.

With the multistars, a couple of worm holes connecting systems really helps. A lot of people hate maps like Ancient gifts (multistar but all races begin with wormhole travel via the phase drive artifact on their HW, and all sytems connected only by wormholes, ie there is no phase lane connecting to the star of any system) and their kin but the difference in the types of maps you play on can really effect the essence of a game, rather than on the single star randoms where (since the majority of MP plays them), there are many things you can assume about them: someone will get rushed, most likely someone will start off surrounded and screwed, or in the 5v5 theres a good chance someone in the game will get a bad map location, or someone will get a hugely favorable spread in the system like having great neutrals nearby. I think if the community wouldnt mind spreading the game types out there would be a lot less complaints about certain things simply because of advantages and disadvantages of the random maps, where much more well balanced maps that everyone has go relatively unplayed along the mainstream of MP. Some said that the preset maps could be to predictable since people could memorize them and gain advantage over those who havent, but I think that having more balanced maps (especially for team play) leaves the outcome less predictable since it relies more on the players skill than where they get stuck on the map. I would definitely encourage more variety in the maps played by the MP community to promote a better understanding of the balances as theyre currently made, since many peoples bias through experience have been influenced by the random variables of random maps. for 2v2 games and 3v3 games try the map Fulcrum. Very interesting and very balanced.

As for your thoughts on feeding Cykur, I like them, no feeding option = free/much reduce the cost of designating HW, that sounds great. Completely agree.