Twin fortresses are a legit way of increasing income. By investing in 2 starbases with both tradeport upgrades along your traderoute, you are ensuring you will have a massive (and I mean massive) eco advantage over your opponent in the late game and you turn each world into a place capable of defending itself. Each SB provides 6 income/sec before upgrades. With Huge cargo holds and the like, it probably goes above 8. With trade routes, it goes above 10 credits/sec. Twin fortresses: 20 income per planet. You get like 5 or 6 of these, it gives +100 income per second before upkeep. Excludes homeworld income/regular tradeports/pervasive economy. And the best thing is, they have NO IDEA that you have the most insane eco ever, and there is very little they can DO about it even if they want to, becasue it means fighting TEC starbases. Going Twin fortress eco will win you the game. I guarantee it

Wow, does Vorastra really line in behind i suppose Ragnarov and now "banned" Eradica? Is this purely because of the Maw, or even without it? I was under impression its the weakest Titan alongside Coronata. Or was this only before the last few patches?

surprisingly enough the coronata isn't that weak anymore with it's recent buffs, it's still weaker and less usefull than most other titans but it's hyperbeam attack isn't that useless anymore(that being one of the few things useful about it)

Try this.

VL loyal titan 

10 carriers with fighters

1 egg

10 overseers

This will be able to hold against most up to 45 min game time fleets and it is sufficient that your titan wont die and it will lvl up very quickly

It the combo of Micro-Phase Jump and The Maw.  Enter a system, jump to the enemy fleet, activate Maw.  There really is no defense.

In addition to this, Desperation is a really good ability due to its splash damage.  The splash range is decent and it affects every weapon shot the Vorastra fires.  Considering the Vorastra fires 3-4 time a second on average and the splash damage tops out at 40 per shot with unlimited targets, it is possible to have this titan doing over 10,000 dps in large battles.

I setup a test a while back with a Vorastra with only the Desperation upgrades verses 50 Enforcers.  The Vorastra wiped out the Enforcers before they even scratched its hull.  Because the Enforcers were in a close pack, the Vorastra did (40 x ~3 x 50) ~6000 dps in splash damage.

Just to be clear, this is not every single shot. This applies once per volley per bank per weapon. While any unlimited AoE could in theory do that much damage, from this ability that is highly unlikely.

I actually happened to have recorded that game. I hope you don't mind that I put it on YouTube. I know it's not as good as replays, but at least these don't become out of date with game updates. And you can see just how bad my management is!

I went back and ran the test again to double check this.  50 Enforcers (in a tight bunch) verses the Vorastra with 4 levels of Desperation.  Each Enforcer had 1180 hull points and 700 shield points at the start of the battle.  The Vorastra destroyed the Enforcers in 60 seconds using only its normal weapons and the splash damage from Desperation.

The total hull and shield points for all 50 Enforcers was 94,000  ((1180 + 700) * 50).  For a 60 second battle, this works out to 1567 real dps.  If you further back out armor (level 4) and shield mitigation effects (57%) you get 4370 dps (1567 * ((1 + (.05 * 4)) / 1) * (100 / (100 - 57))).

To be fair, when the Enforcers were spaced out a bit, it took the Vorastra a lot longer to kill them all (120 - 150 seconds) in this manner.  Even then, that is a pretty amazing amount of firepower that doesn't require antimatter and is always on.

4 levels of Desperation and then what? I mean weapon upgrades, were these upgraded? I tend to level all abilities to their max levels and remaining points divide between hull-shield-armor / weapons / antimatter upgrades in a 2-2-2 ratio...but i always wonder, whether it would not be wiser to "invest" one point usually given into Desperation  into lets say weapon upgrades instead... i suppose both things increase weapon output, although Desperation is more situational (only when under fire?). still not sure, which increase is actually bigger...

Thanks for posting Goa. It was interesting to see the game from your perspective. Looking at the end game stats, your eco actually kept up with mine until i went twin fortresses (probably due to your long trade line)

My friend and I got Rebellion on release, and had been Sins players since the original.  We played about 3-4 games together, and neither of us have looked at it since.  Titans as implemented are the death of the game, and there are far too many 'win buttons' in the game now.  And of course Ironclad's gigantic lie about implementing ladder and proper matchmaking instead of having to deal with nothing but 5v5 customs.  I check up on things now and again to see if there's any signs of fixing this trainwreck, but at this point I think it's just best to wait several months for the modders to save the game.  There were a few things done right such as improving envoy and pact balance, and implementing corvettes as an early LRF spam hard counter (though it took numerous patches to balance them).  But the everything else?  Horrible.  Titans, moving starbases, fleet nuking abilities with no warning, godawful pirate ebay system still not changed, still loads of techs never worth researching, still many caps not worth using, etc.

Lol, I had the exact opposite with all the other sins, rebellion is the first one I actually like and have played a shit ton of hours on.

Altho I am more of the SP than of the MP(And when I MP, i try to play against people that aren't "pro" yet since I'm not either) I find this game way better. And I've found that I have been using all the capitals in my fleets, sure, some are not as good as others in general, but none of them are useless. Same with titans, they aren't the end of a game, sure they are a challange to kill, but not the end And about those "win" buttons, every sins version had its own win buttons... 

And this game has had barely any patches yet to balance, and it's not easy to implement changes to balance since you might shift the tide completly and make a faction pretty much completly useless. And pirates are fine IMHO, and nobody uses them anyway in MP, so why care?

And in SP(Co-op) the game got WAY better with all the changes. Atleast in my opinion, and I've actually made some friends on ICO who I play quite regulary with.

just my 2 cents

If you don't like Vanilla, there are many mods in the works.  Get Trinity, there are tons of mods for it too.