Bama498

[quote who="ReD-RubY" reply="2" id="3227944"]Massing capitalships as Vl is decent but you should focus on just having an egg and a Titan + fleet to get the most out of the xp. The Vl titans lvl 6 abillity is the best in the game and the faster you reach it the better. Capitalships and titans share xp thus the less caps u have the more xp for your titan.[/quote] This is a good point. I'd go even further and say your first couple of battles should only b

I usually start with the Space Egg as well (unless I'm rushing a starbase to an opponents home world in which case the Skirantra with its repair ability is extremely useful). After that, I usually wait a bit before getting another capital ship. The VL have a string of techs that lead up to Stripped to the Core that give you credits per second and then both military and civilian labs for each capital ship. After researching those techs, I then start building more capita

[quote who="ZombiesRus5" reply="19" id="3226785"]Quoting Bama498, reply 17- Requiring Phase Nodes at their destination (i.e. needing a Kostura to attack) This is quite simply the best solution to the problem. Before Kosturas come online you have the ultimate mobile defense requiring far less money to defend multiple planets than any other faction can do. Each expansion into enemy territory would be immediately fortified by a fully leveled star base simply by b

[quote who="GoaFan77" reply="15" id="3226587"]It is the only thing where there is full agreement in the community that a radical change is required. Its safe to say the devs probably thought of this as getting a giant assault platform to lead an assault late game. [/quote] Given this, what could be done to bring them into balance without compromising the developer's vision for their role? Possible ideas... - Significantly increase their cost. Possibly by making

Really like the Phase Missile block idea. I would argue for only giving it to the AL though. AR, in my opinion, is already roughly in balance with the other factions with the Eradica and Wail of the Sacrifice overcoming their weaknesses (and I really don't see the developers nerfing these significantly). The AL on the other hand do really need help against the Vasari and what this does fits very well with their overall fleet synergy strategy. I'm with you on

From what I've seen, the races are pretty much in balance except for the jumping Orkies. Yes, each race has powerful abilities and/or combos that come later in the game, but these aren't blowing out the overall balance. IMO, they add a richness to the gameplay that wasn't there before. The problem with the jumping Orkies is that you can get them a lot sooner than the other race's powerful abilities. Like Greg said above, he had one going 20 minutes in

[quote who="Nightraid3r" reply="12" id="3220881"]yeah but it still does not change the fact that gas giant planets make novalith cannons overpowered[/quote] No, no, no, you have got it all wrong. It's the scattershot ability on the Novaliths that makes gas giants overpowered. Scattershot can't target gas giants.

[quote who="Seleuceia" reply="6" id="3216527"]I think requiring fleet supply is the wrong approach....I'd much rather make it more difficult to get an SB to a gravity well (ex: it must be friendly, it must have phase node, the SB gets debuffs after exiting phase space, etc) or require individual SBs to make sacrifices other than fleet supply in order to jump (ex: they require 1 or more special SB upgrades in order to phase jump)...[/quote] I'm in agreement here and part of the

The other positive thing I'd say is that we now have 5 races that are roughly balanced and each has their own reason for playing them. TEC (general) - Economy TL - Novaliths and improved defenses. (The superweapon change really made them the Novalith race) TR - Ragnarov and rapid expansion with Truce Among Rogues. Advent (general) - Fleet Power AL - Suppression Aura + Subjegating Assault (IMO this is still the strength

Rebuilding a high level titan sucks. (And this is a good thing.)

[quote who="bilun" reply="17" id="3215876"]Well perhaps stardock has a very well defined vision of they ability and are desperately seeking a way to making jumping in a full 8-upgrade starbase balance- Unfortunately I doubt that it's really possible to balance that though with how powerful fully upgraded orkies are.[/quote] I'm going to beat this drum again because I think it is a real solution to the problem. Make jumping Orkies require a Phase Gate at the destination

[quote who="bilun" reply="51" id="3212576"]But I digress- occurs to me we may be being a bit rude talking about what HASN'T yet been added 2 pages into a thread where Yarlen kindly gives us an early peek on what looks to be a beautiful patch which has been in the works for some time. Aww well, guess it's sort of our nature to focus on "what's next"[/quote] Very much in agreement. This patch looks like it will be really good and looks like it will balance

[quote who="GoaFan77" reply="18" id="3212245"]I don't know, to even build a Starbase you need two military labs, perhaps four if they go for assault deployment (Starbasing enemy homeworlds has become such a common Vasari move, though I'm not sure if its worth the extra labs to get it now). That's at least the first upgrade or two of phase missiles they'd have anyways. Also as powerful as phase missiles are, the Orkulus Rex is still extremely dangerous without any weapons resea

[quote who="Ibnpatuta" reply="14" id="3212184"]The VR are now MUCH closer to being balanced with the changes to jumping starbases[/quote] I would argue that the switch over from the Warfare tree to the Empire tree is going to be a bigger deal than it would seem on the surface. The reason is Phase Missiles. If you rushed Starbase Mobilization before 1.04, you would have 8 Military labs and could immediately begin teching up Phase Missiles. With it now in the Emp

It looks to me that the TR got a slight nerf to the practical number of Novaliths they can field - giving TL a big advantage in the Novalith department. (My guess is the superweapon nerf won't adversely affect the other races as 1-2 Kosturas is all you really need for hit and run and DE isn't used much anyways.) AL get a huge buff to their Titan with the Unity Mass change. This ability should now be very powerful. They also got a good buff to Fury of the Unit

In just now found it too...

Thanks. I've been thinking a bit more on this issue as well. What if Orkies needed phase gates to jump? This would greatly increase the research cost (and time) before allowing the Orkie to move to friendly gravity wells. It would also require that the VR have either a level 6 Marauder or Kosturas built before the Orkie could be used to attack. The overall effect here would be to push the usefulness of jumping Orkies much later in the game and force the V

[quote who="GoaFan77" reply="1" id="3211663"]The big thing that leads to trade being so widely use at the expense of other civic options is that is scales infinity.[/quote] Very true. Once you get to 3-4 trade ports, they would start to scale and out perform the culture. But if you were the Advent Loyalist and were likely to get into a nasty fight early, the approach of going this route first (and very quickly) and following up with trade later could potentially give you a

Interesting approach. Your probably right that there are too many variables to get a definitive answer, but... Let's say you have an early empire with your Homeworld, Ice planet, Asteroid, and Dwarf Planet. In total, let's also say you have 5 metal 'roids and 5 crystal 'roids. These planets would give you roughly 15 credits/sec, 3.0 metal/sec, and 3.0 crystal/sec. Once you got the temple up and all the planets culture saturated with culture, you

It's a good idea. I'd vote that the Titan gets 100% of the experience points that killing the ship would have given. And give it all to the titan instead of distributing it around. I'm not sure how much it would help though, as you really need 3 levels of Subjugating Assault to steal enough ships to really make a difference. 3 levels of Subjugating Assault means that your titan is already at least to level 5, so until you got it this far, it wouldn&

[quote who="Seleuceia" reply="34" id="3206465"]I can understand why the devs may not give a rat's ass about the competitive MP community that touts what, a whopping 100 or so players at most?[/quote] I have to disagree with you here. I think the developers care a lot about the competitive MP community for one simple reason - you guys post intelligently on the forums. I'm an SP player that has learned to play this game by reading the forums. I followed the f

[quote who="estevesbk" reply="9" id="3204101"]I see, thanks for the replies! So basically Advents have a good defense that is not really much affected by phased weapons, only their ships? Keeping that in mind, are they well balanced then, meaning a 3 advent team will probably beat the other 2 tec and 2 vasari teams? (I know that it's all about random chance, but in theory they are not "weaker" played by AI anymore?) Edit: Anot

The cruel AI is pretty tough. I've been splitting 1v1 games about 50-50 with them lately. The trick to being competitive with them is you really have to focus on using the tactical advantage(s) of the race you are playing. TR - Get Truce among Rogues immediately and blitz colonize your area of the map. Then quickly roll out the Ragnarov Titan. TL - Sprint to Novaliths and build 4 as quickly as possible. Then bomb the enemy with them while fortifying

[quote who="estevesbk" reply="5" id="3203881"] Thanks for the reply. A newbie question from someone who never played as Advent or Vasari but has read about: You talked about structures shields... What about Vasari's phased missiles?[/quote] At the highest upgrade level, Phase Missiles have a 30% chance of bypassing shields. So let's assume you have 10 Phase Missiles that do 10 points of damage each (For the sake of simplicity we will also assume that the targe

Good summary of some really good ideas. I like dropping Global unity down to level 2 a lot. This make a lot of sense to me. I also think these changes / fixes would allow Planet-for-a-Planet and Assimilated Populace work well with Repossession. Attack a world. Use Repossession to flip it and get the Assimilated Populace bonus. If the original owner bombs it back out, then you get the Planet-for-a-Planet bonus in its place. This would make all t