Agreeing with the above. 35% (with your own culture prevalent) is the highest it gets. There's definite diminishing returns for large empires vs. small empires. Build trade routes and refineries to keep credits and resources flowing in at a half-decent rate.
When I play Vasari, I don't even bother researching Returning Armada. It's so good that it makes me feel like I'm cheating. Unfortunately, for multiplayer games the only thing keeping a Vasari player from going for RA is his word. I just wish they had a powerful and fair late-game technology like Insurgency or the like. RA is broken.
I honestly think that siege frigates shouldn't run more than 8 supply or so apiece. They easily outcost even heavy cruisers at this point, which is flat-out stupid. I'd be perfectly happy with one of two immediate solutions: 1) eliminate all of their anti-planet damage entirely and boost their damage, making them effective anti-heavy frigates, make basic frigates anti-medium and LRMs anti-light, creating a niche for siege frigates in clearing cruisers and planet defenses. 2) cut their an
I never really bother with Akkan's colonize past level 1. It's simply a lot more durable, completely free (except the capital ship factory, of course), and has a lot more antimatter than colony ships, which makes early-game colonizing easy. Further, it's got great support abilities. Target uplink can really make a huge difference, and ion bolt is amazing in the right circumstances (oops, your capital ship is down. oops, your capital ship is down. oops, your capital ship is down...). Armistice wa
Agreed. I need to scroll past a screen full of largely worthless stickies to get to the meat of the forum. No good.
Fighters are only better against light craft (siege frigates, LRMS, fighters, bombers) - bombers do a lot more damage and they do heavy damage, which is better against cruisers, flak frigates, and capital ships.
I'm still seeing the AI running from me in 1.03 when they should stand and fight, and it's very frustrating. Chasing them down is a pain, but more importantly, they could have seriously given me a run for my money if they would have stayed and fought while reinforcing themselves (whereas my reinforcements would have to come from further away). As it is, they just keep running until they're so weak (militarily and economically) that I just roll over them.
Bombers and fighters move nice and quickly, faster than any other ship type in the game. It makes them great for chasing down fleeing enemies or sneaky frigates. The "alpha strike" damage has already been mentioned, and that's good. So long as you can keep your carriers out of the fight (keep them in their own group outside of the gravity well good for quickly fleeing), a carrier can effectively attack without being attacked in return - flak frigates might take out your bombers or fighters, but
Subversion still isn't that great. Against the right types of planets (recently-established outposts or ship-production planets) it can be amazing due to its build rate penalties, but against a trade/resource planet, it's basically a glorified eye in the sky, as they've already built everything that they intended to build anyways.
I just wanted to voice my agreement with the original poster - changes to the black market and the decrease in resource asteroids all about effectively screwed over Vasari and furthered TEC dominance in the game. Early to mid game Vasari strategy revolves around getting those excess resources out the door through the black market, but the sell-off price at the moment is roughly half of what it used to be, which hobbles the Vasari pretty badly. This isn't to say that lowered resource ast
[quote]I wonder if anyone likes the desolator as a main/first cap (not just one of the many if you make quite a few caps) or if its one of the most unpopular caps in the game and if so how could it be improved without making it OP or changing completely how it works (if the devs don't want to change the role of the abilities and its own role).[/quote] Desolator is my second favorite, and I used to use it as my first capital ship. The phase missile swarm is great for clearing out a lot o
Embargo only stops trade vessels from getting away. An interdictor cruiser (or capital ship, or whatever) would be a wonderful way to keep enemies from running away all the time. Of course, if the AI ever stood and fought, this wouldn't be that big of a problem.
It's a catch-all for strike craft, but I really wish they'd use a different term because of the distinction between fighters and bombers.
As Vasari, the black market is your friend. You will almost always have more metal and crystal than anyone else, so make use of it. It also means that upgrading planets is usually easier than with anyone else. Get to the wreckage auto-salvage ability as quickly as possible. With that (and optionally expert bounty hunters), you can generate a lot of money and resources by going after enemy targets, especially those with bounties on them.
Well my next two ships are usually a Devestator and a Desolator. They combine nicely. The volatile nanites works very nicely with the Desolator's disintegration ray and the nano-disassembler (doing tons more damage to large targets) and the volatile nanites also works very nicely with the phase missile swarm (hitting lots of targets for increased damage and then they all pop).
Scouts have light armor and do anti-light damage. They're a great and unexpected way to fight off early LRM spam (because you can get an awful lot of scout vessels of any sort) but they're absolutely toasted if they go up against flak or regular light frigates or carriers with fighters (basically anything with medium or heavy armor that can do a good amount of damage to lightly armored craft). The suicide ability isn't bad, but it requires a lot of micromanagement and it expects that your oppone
Don't use them like LRMs and you'll be fine. The secret is that they have 3 different guns, one of which faces forward, one to port, and one to starboard. Get them into the thick of the fight and they'll fire all three at separate targets, which does an awful lot of damage.
The Evacuator is the best starting ship, in my opinion, and I play Vasari a lot (as they're my favorite faction). The colonize ability is nice, as you can use it more often than a colonizer frigate (due to much higher antimatter reserves on the capital ship) and it grants a 20% increase in structure build time for a while, which means more money/defenses/factories for your time. It's other abilities are all hands-down amazing, so only put your starting point into colonize. The armor-che
I usually use heavy cruisers in a support role in the middle-late game and in the late game itself, I replace my light frigates with heavy cruisers entirely (by then I've researched their special ability upgrades and the like). The only case in which I don't do this is when Advent are involved - if I'm fighting them, then the TEC and Vasari light frigate special abilities help counter the steal antimatter ability and if I'm playing Advent, I want to get a good amount of use out of stealing antim
Before I get started, I just wanted to say I really enjoy the game. I've played it enough to get a feel for what I believe could be even better. A (more or less) complete wish list for myself: [U]AI fixes[/U] -decrease how "chicken" the AI is. It runs from practically everything, which might make immediate sense, but means that all you need to do is show up at a planet, spook off the AI, and then fortify your new planet. Move on to the next planet when you're ready and
Not interested in the least. It's like making the barbarians from Civilization a playable race. If you're looking for more factions, I'd just wait for the expansion...
That's why I tend to play with locked alliances. If the AI doesn't team up on me, resulting in a generally unfair game, then I can usually manage to team up with another AI and easily destroy the remaining ones who often can't form satisfactory alliances with one another.
Is there anything wrong with colonizing asteroids? They usually have several resource asteroids orbiting them and while they don't provide a lot of credits even once upgraded to maximum habitation, they're easy to take in the early game and provide the metal and crystal you need to build fleets to conquer more habitable planets as well as buy the upgrades for those planets.
Any faction can spam carriers - considering all the light carriers use up 8 supply no matter what and that every faction gets access to a capital ship carrier for 50 supply, there's really not a CLEARLY superior faction for lots of carriers. For what it's worth, though, I'd recommend Advent for the early game and Vasari for late-game carrier actions. Advent get access to earlier carriers and large swarms of fighters/bombers. They all do less damage individually than other fighter option
Considering that you can train a crew up to level 4 in the late game, later game capital ships remain useful. In particular, those with "auras" or more universal effects can be quite useful, especially as the rest of your fleet grows in size.
