Leaving the titan aside, the main reason for Advent Loyalists underlying weakness is

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.

Couldn't you buff AL culture by giving them a research (tier 5 or so) that makes capital ships into temples of communion (say 0.5 times as strong). This would allow advent to push their culture into an enemy gravity well, or take it along with the ships into the enemy well if he doesn't build enough of his temple of communion equivalent.

The coronatas lvl 6 ability could do something similar with the planets it takes over for some period of time, allowing advent culture to spread and would allow the fleet to keep moving.

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. 

Its funny how the devs consider an extra 1% shield mitigation as a viable OP ability.  All the shield mitigation techs together are so damn expensive you could build a whole fleet out of the costs.

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

-Twi

AL was clearly designed to be like TL; turtle up and win via alternate means.  The problem is while TL are meant to win via superweapons, AL is supposed to win via culture.  Culture has never been a good gameplan as it is too easy to repel.  Throw up a few culture buildings and you can generally ignore it unless your opponent dedicates half his total logistical slots to it.  The upgrades are also all on the civilian side, whereas Sins really wants to get military to tier 5-6 before you seriously consider going beyond 2-3 in civilian.  This means Advent have to win via military means in the end, but everyone is basically better at that than AL. TL at least have a pretty decent Titan, AL really doesn't have much of anything another faction/race couldn't have done better.

IMO the devs need to look at culture and the impact of culture upgrades.  Right now they are generally useless beyond giving you the 10% allegiance increase and some defencive buffs.  Advent in general has always been weak beyond cheese/OP throughout Sins various patches.  Culture is their strength, but culture has always sucked.

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.

Well, if you're playing as the TEC, you just get Development Mandate and that mitigates it some. And I think that part of the problem is that the defensive bonuses aren't always enough, plus the fact that a lot of them come from culture is potentially bad, as culture is easy to counter. So the AL would only really have reliable benefits from culture if either A) Culture was made harder to repel, or B ) AL got some boost to culture spread rate or culture repel rate that makes it more difficulf for other factions to mitigate the theme of the AL. 

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

Also there's one very simple optimization of an advent Loyalist tech I'm sort of amazed hasn't happened yet:

Assimilated Populace really should activate when a new world is acquired via Repossessions.  At present the assimilated Populace buff only activates on traditionally colonized worlds and is lost when the ship bearing it phase jumps- the result is that the the damage buff on assimilated populace is way too situational- it's pretty much only useful if there happens to be an enemy fleet present in the gravity well as you colonize.

Allowing Repossession to apply assimilated populace would allow the late game advent loyal fleet a reliable way of applying one of their combat buffs.

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

Wow Assimilated Populace is even worse than I imagined.

The whole point of Repossession is that in captures a world without bombing, so this ability should capture planets with all health, population and planetary upgrades intact.

The simplest way to make Advent more competitive with the other factions would be to strengthen their economy. If AL got eco bonuses instead of useless damage ones, they would be in far better shape. Confluence should give a +10% tax income per level. Global Unity should give +15% in-culture trade income per level. This would benefit AL all throughout the game.

With military techs, Coward's Submission needs to be reworked so that there is a 5%-10% that enemy ships ordered to phase jump away from your gravity wells will switch allegiance to your side instead of phase jumping. This way you can keep the ships. Fury of the Unity is so bad, I am amazed that it hasn't been reworked yet. Needs to be a military tech and moved down to tier 5 at least or make it give a 10% damage buff.

Advent Rebels don't really need changes but on the subject of bad techs, Mass Communion really needs to be looked at. It makes media centers 40% cheaper but has so many prerequisites that a player will have built all of their media centers well before being able to research it. It should allow media centers to generate 2.5 credits per second. Otherwise, AR would be left with the worst economy.

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.

Personally, I would prefer the Advent get eco bonuses from their culture and higher allegiance.  This spreads the income rates across all resource types and differentiates them from TEC. They have some techs that do this but Allure of the Unity and stabases with Induced Reverence are expensive and come late.  It might be nice if earlier techs gave a little boost too.  I remember Goa's 4x mod did this.

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.

Capital ship income for VL is not an ability, not sure if its taxed though. Mass Communion income could be implemented like that, or alternatively it could just increase the amount of taxed income within said gravity well.

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

Ah, OK right. I know nothing about modding, forgive me.

Since Vasari get trade upgrades and easy access to neutrals and combined metal/crystal research, 50% population gain rate buff is a little low, 75% would be fine for AL.

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

This is by Far the most Underestimated Race in the Game

Maybe you should open with 1 rapture to amplify the corvettes abilities, add disciple for the AM, Guardians for the defensive shielding and a Coranata for the Suppression and Unity Mass. The trick is your guardian macro.. I usually have them in their own fleet spamming projections while disciples refuel there AM. This fleet combination does work for them and there the type that should opt for a 1 cap start to rush for suppression on the coranata. 

How you play there eco is complicated..you will find out one way or another what works for you because given the room you can research the extra culture techs but without room you research the basic after making the longest possible trade network and roll out your titan. 

There a complex race yet i can never loose a game with them and destroy every titan with Unity Mass and its fast recharge drawing power from my large fleet support.

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

The issue isn't the underpoweredness of the AL fleet (AL fleet is fine) but the blandness and weakness (for their tier) of so many of their techs. The 5% damage buff of Fury of the Unity would be fine if it were a military tech in an appropriate tier.

Winning as a particular race says nothing about their balance.

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.

Let's say we moved Temple of Communion down to T1 for the AL and in its place in T2, give them a 5%/10% allegiance buff.  Then make Fury of the Unity add some mitigation in culture lets say.  That combined with some balance changes to abilities on capitals (Animosity, Guidance, Clairvoyance, etc) I think would make the AL much better off and on equal footing with the others.

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.