Regarding the Advent Balance

I'd make a broader comment, but now I'm really tired, so I'll get to that later.

I agree with some of what you said in that post, Mayall. But I firmly believe the Kanrak is the best long range unit in the game.

Culture as it is sucks. It needs a complete overhaul.

Maybe make Advent late game less terrifying, and early game more powerful? Kinda balance it out, sorta? Not sure how you'd do that, but still.

Boost the economy. Namely the crystal mining.

Either get rid of or boost resource focus.

Oh that is pretty much what I had in mind but just curious why you think Kanrak is the best doesent it only have 1 fire port while the illuminator has 3(I could be wrong)

Also I kinda figured making the late game less powerful would result naturally but maybe it could use some tweaks.

Really, is their late game even that terrifying now? Vasari has always had the best late game and the TEC has caught up a little bit. The only truly large advantage the Advent have late game IMO is spamable high level capitalships, which is considerable but doesn't quite compare to the Kostura, phase missiles, subverters etc.

One word: phase missiles. Also they are much easier to use as if the Illuminator wants to get its maximum DPS it has to be manually positioned to be able to hit a target with its three weapons. The damage they used to deal was so high this wasn't a huge issue, but now that they need to be firing all three beams to do higher total damage than the other two LRF its weakness it clearly exposed.

Further, I advise that the Devs add custom map sharing to Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion.

Phase Missile give Kanraks the advantage over Illuminators. And I'd rather have a fleet of Javelis' then Illums, too. Requires less mm, so I can focus on other things.

Spam Seekers, as you know. Damage per cost, Advent's early-game frigates are more effective in a general fleet combat situation than the frigates of the other factions. The problem is that it's more difficult to deal with large targets like starbases and capital ships.

It's not like the other factions ever use Refineries anyway... but yeah, in competitive games, both refineries and Resource Focus need to be buffed or they'll never be used.

I personally think it would be best simply to move Illuminators down to tier 2 with no other modifications. It was a rebalancing idea I was thinking of posting a little while back but never got around to it. Just move it down to tier 2 and modify nothing else: Advent will be able to open with Illums and won't be underpowering early-game.

I'm just going to repost what I said about this earlier...

Maybe one way to buff the Deliverance Engine would be for it to raise the max allegiance of a planet by some large number (like 50%) for a long period of time, like 15 minutes. Maybe it could also reduce the max allegiance of an enemy planet by 20% or so, which (combined with a longer culture-spread rate and time) would have a decent chance of overthrowing an outlying enemy planet unless the enemy has 2 or more culture stations on the planet already. The problem is that currently, the Deliverance Engine is close to useless, even in noncompetitive games against the AI.

A slight increase "to trade, damage deatl, population growth, etc, and a slight reduction in build time" would be one way to help culture but it's a bit overly broad and general IMO. I think it would make sense if all factions received some part of their cultural advantages by default, without special research: so, TEC ships would gain .8 AM/sec or something before having to carry out the expensive cultural upgrades.

I also don't like the all-or-nothing aspect of culture wars - currently, either one empire controls a gravity well with culture and receives all of its advantages, or doesn't. Most people just deal with culture by building maybe one culture station near the center of their empire and one near or on their front lines, and then forget about it - if we want culture to be more significant, maybe it could be changed to be a gradual advantage for one faction. For instance, if there are two phase lanes from a gravity well and empire A has culture controlling the entirety of one lane and half of the other lane, ships in the gravity well would receive a combat bonus of 75% of the maximum. And if empire B has culture controlling the other half of that lane, their ships in that gravity well would receive a bonus of 25% or something. This would provide a much greater incentive for a player to build multiple culture stations for the purposes of affecting gameplay effectiveness. Combined with cultural-advantages-by-default, building culture stations could become more significant than an afterthought to be dealt with once and forgotten about.

In competitive games players rarely have the time or funds to research cultural upgrades. Often they're lucky to even have access to the logistics slots necessary to research cultural upgrades.

Boost the Solanus while you're at it.

Culture:

     Maxes allegiance, boosting income from planet population and extractors on owned planets

     Grants bonuses from researched techs while in culture; this can be significant also consider that while in your culture the enemy wont have his bounus

     Can prevent enemy colonization of planets

     If you are observant it will help you scout for enemy cap ships; and if advent you can get a tech to see planets where you have culture

     Can kill enemy planets and reduce thier income if they don't spend money on culture

Deliverance engine:

     Economic advantage: nil

     Can enable (or speed up) colonization of planets where the enemy has too much culture for you to colonize

     Can help kill planets with culture better by focus firing culture

     Boosts damage of allied ships in the well by 25% for a few min

     Helps your ships get culture bounus and removes the enemies bonus

     Can prevent the enemy from colonizing a planet by culture spamming it

Alright I think we have all come to an agreement that Culture needs to be redesigned or changed and hopefully Stardock keeps tabs on these forum post. Lets get to our next topic perhaps and that is the poor economy (and what about the Allure of the Unity research does anyone feel as though it could use a buff?

Advent's econ is all right as is IMO, it works basically the same as TEC's except for requiring 3 civic labs for trade instead of 2. (that and late-game Pervasive)

Advent needs to be made a little stronger but I think the place for that is ship improvements rather than anything else.

Well the thing is that its not that it is bad its just compared to the other races its not good. The Vasari have there Metal/Crystal extraction in one. Although they do get ports/refineries late thats not generally a problem as they have efficiency with there Metal/Crystal and credits arnt to difficult to come by.

The TEC however get to recieve Metal/Crystal at level 1 and level 2 and recieve trade ports at level 3. However, trade ports/refineries both are upgradeable. The TEC also have embargo and prevasive economy.

The Advent have to wait till tier 3 to harvest Crystals, and tier 2 to harvest ore. They do not get an upgrade for there trade ports. Instead they get Resource Focus which makes the Port turn into a refinery, which means you have to sacrifice trading for resource focusing(which doesen't even give that much in the first place).

Sure on the outside the Advent have a good set up but competatively it is leagues behind both race.

P.S: I also think that Allure of the Unity should have SOME incentive for upgrading it, it just doesent compete with Pervasive Economy. How is +10% allegience going to help you in any way?

+10% Allegiance give you +10% tax income, I think. Its useful on Terran planets that normally have a 50-60% Allegiance cap.

I actually wasnt aware of that, I have only played the game for a few weeks(well I picked it back up a few weeks ago).

I'll go check that file and see what it does...

Yeah. +.5 Allegiance per upgrade. That rounds to 10.

Wait, wait, wait.... culture already affects income. Allegiance increases or decreases your income rates and extractor rates. If you want to better the advent early game economy, I'd say that simply making culture more accessible is the way to do it. Maybe some sort of research that makes your capital planet generate culture on its own. No culture center needed. Call it "Seat of the Unity" or something.

As for illuminator... It could use a little help, but making it appear earlier is not the answer here, I think. The LRFs are in 3 different spots for the different races to be the starting divergence in fleet strategies. It should be kept where it is. I would suggest making the carrier cruisers more plentiful in the early advent fleets. These could be used to stop LRF spams and is counterable with flak. Right now, carrier cruisers are tier 2, but are priced like HCs, and generally come out in force around the same time as HCs. I think if advent differed here, it could work. This could also make starts other than the Halcyon feesible (maybe a Rapture for the aura?).

there are several reasons most people don't get light carriers early game:

your capital ships already have strikecraft and dont use antimatter to build them

everyone has access to lf which will easily counter carriers early game if you know you need them

the combat zone can easily be 2-3 non colonized planets long making speed more important then *range*

they cost alot

it takes time to build strikecraft once the carreirs are built

strikecraft are a good source of xp

advent strike craft is particularly vulnerable to aoe antistrikecraft abilities

once they run out of antimatter either from jumping alot stolen/destroyed antimatter or feeding xp they are a waste of fleet supply till they sit around for awhile

Culture doesent effect your income as it doesn't increase your allegiance, and only decreases allegiance of enemy planets if its spread to that planet. The only problem with that is that culture is easily countered and for being the 'culture' race. The advent have nothing truly special, ex. TEC's insurgency is ALWAYS active regardless of if there are culture lines or not.

And I think you underestimate the timing difference. That could be a whole minute of not building Illuminator's while your enemy is building LRM's. Don't discredit small things because they in fact do make a difference.

Huh? Yes it does. Planets start out at 10% below their max allegiance before culture is researched and stations are built... then once culture starts spreading your planet allegiance rises and you get more tax/extractor income.

A problem might be that 10% more tax/extractor income is not very significant, especially when compared to the cost of a culture station and to a trade port.

I have Vanilla only so, I don't believe it does that for me. At least its never done that for me. Or maybe i've never noticed it :/

Just started up my Vanilla.

This was what my home planet's allegiance says:

If you build a culture station there it would eventually increase to an allegiance of 110% and you would get more income from both taxes and extractors.

I think I estimate it just fine. My point was that if it was earlier in the tree, all 3 races would be going for them and we'd have more of a LRF spam issue than we currently have. I think the idea behind putting the illuminator at tier 3 was to spread out the appearance of LRF for the different races to help reduce the LRF spam by enforcing diversity.

Also, bringing Illuminators into the game early will make the Advent's economic woes much more apparent, as they are kind of expensive. And besides all that, Illuminators only really shine when massed and against a large number of forces, so they can use their sidebeams.

Besides what I mentioned my above post, could increase speed of allegence gain on planets you control. This would give you the allegiance bonus sooner.

I suppose I can see your point, in my opinion they need to do something about the LRM situation. But what could be done (perhaps nerfing ALL lrm's potency to the standard frigate(by a small amount?)

A suggestion I posted a while back was to buff the LF so that it would do a lot more damage to capital ships (70 or 75% or so instead of 50%). Decent anti-cap damage and great speed would mean that a lot more LF would be built in early-game for attacking and chasing enemy caps. At the moment people seem to build 0 LF, which is probably a design/balance flaw. Especially in 5s, players need more diversity options early-game.

This would also be a significant buff to the Advent due to their already superior and useful Disciple. It might be enough to push them into great competitive territory with the other races.

We need SOME viable multiplayer strategy other than "LRF then more LRF".

Reasonable, either that or remove LRM's im not to 100% sure on this one haha.

LRM = TEC exclusive LRF

LRF = general long-range frigate

LRF spam is the problem

Thats what I meant <_<
No really! Thanks for clearing that up though.