Honestly the weakness of culture is only part of the problem.

They also lack any real high impact techs such as other factions(tech rebels get truce among rogues, tec loyals 2 starbases, vasari rebels jumping starbases, advent rebels wail and so on).  Their only really high tier tech, Fury of the Unity, sucks(only 5% bonus conditional damage at T8 really?)

This combined with the fact that NONE of their combat boosts affect strikecraft(carriers are bar-none the most important late game frigate with Titans rolling around) makes for a weak late game.  Of course as you mentioned their titan also needs some work done.

Also on the topic of culture there are a few problems:

1).  Advent Loyals are no better at causing allegiance loss then anyone else- Aggregation of Wills is useless if you can't cause the opponent to start losing allegiance in the first place.  Contrary to popular belief, Confluence of the Unity increases the rate culture moves down phase lanes by 50%, it does not increase how much culture you generate.  Consequently Confluence doesn't actually help push through enemy culture(it only makes you expand into neutral space faster.

2).  Confluence of the Unity costs too many resources to get running.  it increase culture spread RATE, so it's main use should be claiming a wide area with culture early in the game.  The problem is getting that extra 50% spread rate costs 220 credits- for which cost you could have just built 2 more temples of harmony or a much stronger fleet.

3).  GLobal unity while cool, isn't really all that useful.  It's too little culture to make  much difference in offensive culture, and frankly defending against culture is already trivially easy without it(so why waste the money on researching it?

honestly, the advent loyal culture techs need a buff pretty much accross the board- culture really isn't any more viable for them then it is for any faction.

WHen it comes down to it I suspect the three things necessary to make the Advent Loyals competitive are: make culture strong for the, make the Coronata stronger, and enhance their late game by buffing Fury of the Unity or expanding some of their combat boosting techs to strikecraft.

I agree Advent Loyalists need some love. They do have Ancient Retribution as a unique tech as well though - level 6 military tech - gives 10% increased damage, 5% increased range, and 2% increased shield mitigation and doesn't require being in culture. Fury of the Unity is pretty weak for being tier8 and so expensive and requiring being in culture though. 

Aren't those 2% and 4% increases to mitigation with those techs?  I'm not saying that's much better, but still...

-Twi

As a long time Advent player, I would say that you are thinking too early game offensive to really get the most out of the AL abilities, and if you want to play like that, I recomend that you play a faction that is better suited for that such as TR.  The offensive strategy for the AL is not to win with culture, but to build a powerful wall on your outer planets while you research and build a very expensave, but powerful, fleet.  Becasue you are playing defensave for the mid game, the culture bonuses in your gavity wells help your defensave fleet destroy any attackers more easily.  This is very important because, as mentioned, the Advent economy is not up to TEC standards, so we rely on holding onto planets long enough for our meager credit rate to build up enough.  Basically, the more culture, the easier the defensive stage becomes and the more likely we are to getting into the powerful late game when the Advent ships outclass any other faction (not credit for credit, but ship for ship).  At least that is how I use these techs.

Another point that a friend of mine made, he plays TL, is that the increased culture forces the enemy hand.  Yes, culture is easily countered, but to do so causes the enemy to react to you, and the more they are reacting to you, the less active they are being in the other parts of the galaxy.  So if my two temples of communion force my enemy to build three media hubs, I have robbed them of resources and logistic slots that they could be using to grow their economy or expand their empire.

You know what's a better "defensive wall" than a small culture bonus? Two starbases.

 I thought that the whole point of it was to combo with Repossession..

Also it would be nice if Assimilated Populace actually increase population gain rate like the description says rather then just giving +10 population at the time of colonization(technically it tries to add 5000, but newly colonized planet shave a population cap of 10)- at present it merely allows a planet to max out it's population 80 seconds faster.

Considering the vasari have a non-faction specific tech 2 tiers lower then assimilated populace which passively increases population generation rate by 40%, it should be perfectly fine for assimilated populace to give a 10 minute 50% population gain rate buff to newly colonized planets.  This would essentially result in an extra 37.5 population generated over the first 10 minutes after colonization or put another way cause planets to reach their population cap 5 minutes earlier(or simply 50% faster for any world with less then 112 population).

Heck, it would kill two birds with one stone by making Planet-for-a-planet stronger as strategically allowing a world to fall is a more sensible decision if population can be replenished more quickly when you reconolonize.

On that note though I definitely agree the easiest way to bring the advent loyalists to par would be via their economy.  Improving their combat boosts a bit would also be easy.

 Truly fixing culture, especially culture warfare however would be much more difficult- which to me says it may be prudent to focus on giving the advent loyalists some other redeeming qualities.

Maximum allegiance buffs would be nice changes for the AL and if they came early enough would help them out of the gate.

Ironically I too have been thinking about Mass Communion acting as a source of income.  Unfortunately there is no way to do it via an ability without it being untaxed which would be severely OP and is what has stopped me from doing it in RR.

Right.  I'm saying that I couldn't do it in RR because I can't make new researchModifiers.

Perhaps as is oft the case I erred too far on that side.

Double Post ( sorry)

The reason they don't have significant damage boosts and opt for the 5% and 10% values is what they do to other races:

40% damage reduction

Corvettes stacking weapon disruptions on targeting systems can go up to each 50%

Therefore there 10% boost in damage etc is reasonable to keep the game competitive

Hpnestly I never thought the issues the advent loyalists have had much to do with their damage boosts being too small(well fury of the unity is underwhelming, but +10-15% is plenty strong for all the lower tier techs).

That said you forget a few important things: none of the damage reductions you list affect strikecraft(aka bombers) or AoE ability damage.  those are two of the most significant damage types in the game late game.  not to mention Corvette survival rates late game are abyssmal, and even if they do survive they take quite some time to apply their debuffs.  Heck, in general the Ankylon's group shield isbetter for mitigating damage then the coronata's suppression Aura and the advent loyal's corvettes combined.

Fun fact:  On average a given advent corvette applies it's debuff once every 150 seconds.  That's once for every 717 damage they deal(this value is increased by all % damage boosts).  Which means it's only ever really going to be stacked high on capitalships and titans anyway.

So yes, the advent loyals are very good at mitigating titan weapons damage.  But when it comes down to it that's just a single facet of enemy fleet damage.  Not really enough to justify weaker combat techs.

That said, many of the advent loyal problems spring not from numbers being too small but rather from techs being too deep i nthe tree, too costly to research, or simply bugged or poorly implemented.

Vertigo will always affect fighters and i believe bombers will always be a threat to every race. The loyalist play fine and their weapon techs are arguably just ad-dons.