If you have to build many culture centers at all your planets instead of trade ports, then your enemy has already won with the mere threat of a kostura attack....

The average Vasari Loyalist late game fleet has more than enough capitalships (often high levels ones) that will effortlessly remove your culture from the planet. To stop a takeover, you have to have near insane ammounts of culture centers nearby.

Now, assuming you detect a Vasari jumping to your Capital... you have maybe 1 minute to:

• recall your fleet...
• scuttle every logistic structure in a considerable radius (micro nightmare)
• As our capital is your starting point, you will be forced to loose several military and civil labs in the process.
• When you have the logistic slots free (Vasari fleet is by now bombing your planet into dust
• you can now begin building culture centers. That takes time.... by now your capital is dead... and the Vasari will colonize it quite soon.
• The Vasari colonized your capital... you have mere minutes left until it is stripped.
• More and more culture centers comes online and begin to lower allegiance on your former capital.... but way to slowly.
• The Vasari initiates a Health Upgrade for your former capital and then - if you are luckly - withdraw his fleet.
• Your fleet arrives at your former capital.... they commence bombardement immediatly but before they get of more than a few shots, your planet goes BOOM.

Of course you can just spam culture centers from the beginning.... but then your economy (note that Vasari have the second best economy in the game) will be far behind..... and there is nothing stopping the Vasari from killing you the direct way.

I tend to partially disagree, It is true, the Ankylon wont do you good against Vasari, but then it is a pathetic ship to begin with in its current state. The Ragnarov on the other hand is at least capable of sniping capitalships and doing a lot of damage to your Titan. More importantly can remove those annoying Kortuls from the field, and as such regain AM. Against a Vasari late game fleet, your mighty eradica might not be mighty for long.... not only is the even limited phase weaponary of the Vasari capital ships still quite deadly against Advent, but 2 or 3 Kortuls will keep your important ships dry off AM indefinitely. No Chastic Burst... and no other abilities... have fun watching the execution.

As far Mass Disorientation, it suffers from not only being interruptable but requiring AM too..... and without it your starbase wont put up much of a fight. The Advent one is the worst in terms of raw power after all.

Repulse lost a lot of its power when the game became less frigate focused..... besides it is difficult to catch a Vorastra with anything. Did I mention that the Vorastra does outrange Repulse and that Guardians die about instantly against phase weapons?

Last but not least, it is of little comfort that the enemy Titan is temporarly out of order when the rest of the Vasari fleet is still pounding your fleet to pieces.

I have bad news for you..... culture repell rate does increase with capitalship level...... and I never ever stopped an Vasari fleet from striping anything until I really had nothing but culture centers on 10 adjacent planets.

Even then..... nothing stops him from running towards said centers and destroying them.

It should be noted, that the Vasari fleet is the FASTEST moving one, even without Kostura or Phase Gates. Gravity tolerance allows the ship to jump earlier and deeper into the new sector, and as such the Vasari can outrun any other faction, unless you have a PJI.

Your logic is sound, but flawed.

1. If you starbase all your backworlds, you will have no defense at your front line worlds..... meaning he can and will take those.

2. If you starbase all your front worlds, he will just Kostura jump in and do immensive damage to your empire.

3. If you starbase all of your worlds..... he allowed you to play SimCity. In which case you can expect a huge Vasari fleet consisting of a Titan, 14 capitalships and 500 phase missile armed bomber wings that will instagib your full health starbase in under 2 seconds.

Unfortunatly the Vasari have the best defense in the game. And Orky with support is capable of decimating huge fleets.Especially the Advent have basically nothing working against a entrenched Vasari..... and they cant happily fly by.

Even if you can grind your way forward (at the cost of a good part of your fleet) you will be still at the enemies border worlds.

The Vasari does not need to defeat your assault fleet. He merely needs to delay its progress.

In any case, he can retake any world he has lost later, while all you have is a puny asteroid instead of your once large capital.

Should you against all odds really became a threat to him... his fleet can jump back within 1 minute.

And then it is your decimated fleet against his full health fleet and against his defenses on his territory... (watch for newly builded PJIs that will ruin your retreat quite good). Goodbye to your fleet.

If you stayed on your side of the border or did not invade far.... your fleet is likely far away from your capital.... that will soon be a stripped ruin.

The all seing sensors are awesome... you do not surprise an Vasari with open eyes.

I like that idea.... it would force the Vasari to have some sort of defense at the Kostura location.

BUT, it should be noted that the Kostura is just creating a phase stabilizer at the target.

That means if

Kostura = Planet A

Vasari Fleet = Planet B (with phase gate)

Kostura Target = Planet C

it is quite possible to fly from Planet B to C.

You are wrong.... the Vasari will hit your empire with devastating power, then fly back home and crush your assault and after that he will rinse and repeat.

The bottom line is, the Vasari can do a lot more damage to your empire than you can do to his empire... because he does not need to bother with border world defenses.

Depending on the size of the map it might go a while.. but in the end he will easily outlast you. Because he does not have to grind his way towards your vital planets one by one.

 "Depending on the size of the map it might go a while.. but in the end he will easily outlast you. Because he does not have to grind his way towards your vital planets one by one."

Neither do you, really. Unless you want to pretend that you simply cant just fly through his border planets and simply HAVE TO CLEAR them out before proceeding further to his homeworld. Because it takes ages to destroy any possible PJI´s, right? As if there was anything else stopping you. No, Starbase Destabilisation is not even worth mentioning.

Anyway, you seem to assume again and again, that VL player is BOUND TO HAVE a big fleet with many caps, high level Titan, shitload of phase gates all over his empire to allow him to jump anywhere he wants...and indeed Kostura at his disposal. Now all these things are pretty expensive and require substantial research. So in fact, its you, who allowed him to play SimCity, if he has all that, not other way around.

Anyway, if he was clearly given enough time to get toward it, but in such case, so were you. In which case you shall have a substantial force of your own, right? So what were you doing all that time, if its not the case?

Lastly, the culture centers. So he is going to have a lot of caps to repel your culture fast, unless you have "insane" number of culture centers on adjacent planets. I wonder, what is the problem then? Those caps he has, are major investment, which takes some time. You want to stop them in taking over your planet. Shall you get the means to do that for free or what? Its obvious it is going to require major investment on your side to defend against it as well. Do you complain about TEC players forcing you to build SBs with AuxGov literally everywhere, if you dont want to lose your planets as well? Cause its the same with Kostura, really. You just need to build Culture Centers iinstead of SB, which BTW for Advent, are cheaper or with Global Unity not needed at all. Right?

One more thing, if he has lot of caps, they are going to level slower. So your point about culture repel improving with higher levels is irrelevant. 

Bottom line, as we discussed this before, in the thread dedicated to the next patch, i dont really dispute that Vasari are OP  and some of their stuff shall be nerfed.

I feel however, you lot wont lose one opportunity to inflate any possible advantage they might have into epic proportions. In other words, you like to exaggerate, a lot. You pick the best case scenarios for VL player to point how OP he is. How many times actually those scenarios tend to happen though? Especially in 5v5, which seems to be predominant? VL player can be on a weaker, losing team. VL player can be bad/newb player himself, he can be in a suicide spot or a frontliner. He can be doubled up by two enemy players at the beginning of the game. Is he going to rule with shitload of ships and Kostura then as well? 

There are just too many variables.

Finally, what i want to say. VLs are the best addition to the Rebellion, IMHO. OP or not, they offer unique and very entertaining playstyle and whoever from StarClad came with their design idea, should be given a medal. I do not want to see them ruined and their unique ways made pointless and ineffective to appease whining TEC and Advent players, in the name of perfect balance, which wont be achieved anyway. If you feel TEC/Advent are lacking in comparison to them, find a way to improve them, dont look for ways to make Vasari less cool to play. 

BTW, if the balance is so important, why not play just mirror matches? Just find people who think the same, decide on one faction and use it, all of you. Not ideal, obviously, but you will have the perfect balance you strive for and never ever get with multiple asymmetrical factions. I think with games like CnC or SC, mirror matches are nothing unusual.

EDIT: I am assuming balance is important to you all, thats why posting here...but i have to wonder, how much is it important to you. I am kind convinced, that people who care about the balance most are the ones who play the game mainly for competition...well, that is obvious/pretty straightforward...what i mean, cause of their focus on competing, they care more for the underlying rules and would perhaps like the game the same, even if you played with triangles and circles instead of ships and planets...or with Bronys. 

So where do you stand? 

VL if he gets eco position, you surely know where this is heading, huge amount of resources (as Vasari economy is the second best), excellent defenses easily put up everywhere if needed, brutal fleet that can take almost no losses... Phase gates spawned by the Vorastra will reinforce them in a second. And 13 level4 capital ship is good enough I think.. if they all reach higher levels at once, the more screwed are the opponents. They can upgrade capitalships to level 4.

@Timmaigh, somewhere you wrote a not Vasari can have many capital ships too, I don't think thats a so good idea if you are Advent, as those ships are extremely weak and will be killed well before reaching enemy ships (Phase Missiles)

Maybe that is true from 5v5 perspective, but that is not the only perspective to consider. 

From my perspective, the unique gameplay style of VL faction revolving around their mobility, is actually what is catching attention of people. I know for me it was a major selling point and it was from the moment i knew about it, before i got my hands on the game to see, whether it is OP or not. I am pretty sure many, many people see this the same way as i do. It is no coincidence VL faction is the one primarily mentioned in majority of reviews. 

You tone them down in some significant way and the whole mobility theme may become ineffective and useless, turning them into another run of the mill faction. 

I can see where you coming from Timmy, but do you think people who dont play 5s will care about some nerfs to the race/faction? I mean devs obviously not going to remove anything, whats required is the nerfs to the numbers to a number of abilties and researches. Its likely that those people wouldnt even notice those changes and still continue to have fun with a *different race/faction* gamestyle. In my opinion it would only help the game keeping both sets of players happy. Would you disagree with that?

Thats the whole point Turchany in your last sentence thats the problem - "advantage in almost every field". I like the diversity but some things just have to be nerfed. A nerf doesnt mean a complete removal or change in mechanics though.

No worries, i am certainly not that kind of person. 

As for the rest, see above my reply to Jingly. 

I definitely agree the direct combat stuff should be nerfed before phase gates. A highly mobile faction should have to rely on that mobility to win, but the Vasari loyalists can beat most factions in a straight fight late game. If their military advantage is not so vast I think they'll be much less of a problem.

Great ideas!  Nerf everything until each faction is exactly the same.  Or just skip the trouble and play tic-tac-toe.  Oh wait... X is OP...

Instead of nerfing, why not strengthen other factions?

Or why not nerf their economic capability rather than the qualities that make them interesting and unique?  Most balancing issues could be solved with economy tweaks.

lol the advent cannon is the most evil in the game. Osan is badass with them. 2 cannon hit capitol over and over. -10% allegiance each shot. none of ur planets last long so no the advent cannon it is not under powered. 

Yeah, so that when the Vasari ships jump from B to C, they open a temporary phase lane for everyone to use, so that Vasari can't just run away.  The Kostura has no other part in this, and doesn't jeopardize itself, unless ships jump from the gravity well that it fires from.

I just like that it potentially balances it not by nerfing, but by adding an interesting side effect. As a passive tool, it wouldn't hinder Vasari speed, but used offensively, could potentially descend into chaos for both sides.

Lol I just lost a match last night...Cap victory was on accidentally and the vasari just jumped outta no where at my cap and destroyed it when my fleet was one final jump away from helping >.<  I wish there was a way to prevent them from jumping into a certain radius...