I just played a game as TEC rebel player and tested out the revised ship backup researches, namely pirates and rebel forces. Before I mostly played Advent, so this was pretty much my fist contact with the revised system.

Pirate reinforcements:

First off: Being able to call in the pirates from your culture centers seems a lot more reliable and controllable. I like the mechanic.

Unfortunately the ability is anything but useful. The number of ships is too small, the ability is too costly considering that the pirate ships are often weaker than your own alternatives, it takes longer to create a sizeable fleet cause you have to select every single planet, use the ability and collect your forces. It is more economic to use a desert planet and fill it with frigate factories. Because of this the ability is lacking in both offensive and defensive capability.

I would suggest either turning it into an offensive ability or into a purely defensive one. Maybe it would even be possible to create both of them at once.

Offensive ability: The ability has a toggle that enables a steady stream of ships (1 ship every 10 seconds) to be produced from your culture centers. For every tradeport that has this ability enabled you have to "pay" the pirates, meaning your resource income will be reduced by a fixed number (10.0/1.5/0.8 per second, numbers just a suggestion). If any of your income rates start producing negative numbers the ability will be disabled on all culture centers.  If your fleet supply cannot support another ship this ability will be disabled at all culture centers. Also culture centers will cease culture production while this ability is toggled. You culture centers will send any ships "produced" by them to the rally point of the planet they reside on.

The idea behind this is to let the player put steady pressure on an opponent and being able to automatically refill your fleet, even if the ships you gain are inferiour to your own. Kind of fire-and-forget. The fact that you considerably reduce your income rate and have to deactivate your culture centers make the decision to use this a little harder to the player.

Defensive ability: You are able to call in a large fleet of pirate ships (something between 300 and 600 fleet supply seems sensible) to defend your gravitywell with. This ability is very costly, but the ships do not take up any fleet cap in exchange. The pirate ships gain additional attack power whenever you are bombing enemy worlds. Those ships can also jump to other gravitywells, however those ships scuttle themselves after 240 seconds unless the enemy takes them over (in which cas they take up fleet supply again, if this is possible). The ability timer has a cooldown of 270 seconds, and using the ability on one culture center activates the cooldown on all of them.

The idea behind this is to free up ships that would usually be needed for defending to attack by giving you the means to temporarly halt enemy movements with this "instafleet". The limit of 1 cast at a time is supposed to stop spam and limit the offensive possibilities of the ability (and give other players a chance to still attack you).

If both abilities were to become available the offensive ability probably should be shut down temporarly while the timer of the defensive one runs out.

Rebels:

Erm... I gues they should work like that advent ressurection ability, but with you having to kill enemy ships in order to get those rebels... Not much to say there, but the fact it's bound to your homeworld ticks me off with both the TEC and Advent abilites. I'm usually so far away with my main fleet it's just easier to scuttle those and rebuild them at the front lines.

If all factions get such an ability in some way I would suggest the ability to select a "beacon" in one of the structures, preferrably the starbase, to automatically ressurect the ships there. This beacon would be a toggle, activating it on one building will disable it on all other buildings.

On related terms, maybe that Vasari tech returning armada could get a similar overhaul. Maybe not in the same way as my suggested TEC rebel changes, but something to make it more worthwhile.

Erm... dicuss?