interesting idea, but I sort of have a problem with vasari getting such a powerful structure just for free, even though it doesn't do anything for a while. maybe give tec a free trade port to start with and advent a culture centre with both only working after the appropriate tech has been researched. those come a lot earlier though which might cause new problems. or maybe the races' specific defense structures shield generator and am regenerator with the same deal. they are, after all, all defense oriented after a fashion, even the phase gates.

Defense structures would ... defend the homeworld from rushes. Bad idea, since it is already kinda hard to eliminate those 4500 hit points on the planet.

Trade port generates income as it stands (just like that, without a second trade port to trade with, trade ships doing nothing but farting at each other).  Also, it wouldn't be too long till TEC goes tier 2.

Culture centre spreads culture, which is a notable boost too. Tax and extractor income is boosted, plus the homeworld and the nearest planets (most likely an asteroid) become uncolonizable for enemies - which is a very serious defensive advantage.

Phase Stabilizer does nothing until one of the following is done:

• Kostura is researched, built and fired. This is so end game, that one phase stabilizer is a tiny bonus compared to having 8-mil labs, conducting tier-8 research and building an 8000credit cannon.
• A phase stabilizer is researched and built. Look: trade ports, refineries, culture centres, all that stuff works alone, when you have just one piece. You don't need two culture hubs, two refineries or two trade ports (!!). But you need two expensive phase stabilizers.
• A Marauder hits level 6. Without a phase stabilizer, it is useless. Yes Amish, you heard me. Without a gate or kostura (tier5 civ and tier8 mil respectively!, that's tons of credits dumped) this ability is USELESS.
  You have a problem with calling things useless, so here you go, something useless for you to admire

Is there any other cap ability in this game that is useless if you don't do a tier 5/8 research and build something for 1800/8000 credits?

I really cannot see any problem with having a phase stabilizer node on a Vasari homeworld.

If anything, it will:

• Make the Marauder's Ultimate useful once it is bought, not after you pay another lolthousand credits on labs, research and structures.
• Make Kostura more than a three minute structure stun after you pay those 8k credits on it. If you wanna spam those 8-k-credit lolmao-tactical-slot kosturas then you'd likely have the money for a phase gate anyway.
• Make phase stabilizer a useful structure when you do that tier5 research and build one for 1800 credits that occupies 10 tactical slots (meaning that it requires tactical research just so you can place it alone on most planets).

There is no other cap ship ability in this game that requires an expensive research to even have a point.

There is no other structure in the game that requires you to place two to even function.

I see no problem here, seriously. Vasari are meant to be mobile, right?
They ain't any more mobile than other races until most games are done.
This might make it more as it should be, in my opinion.

You build your fleet around your caps. Alone it is useless, yet would you ever bother to get this ability and not use it properly? I had to go digging around to find a good example of what I'm getting at, and I found what I was looking for.

I know Jam Weapons is an ability that you and Volt have backed before. Personally, I think the ability is utter crap. Alone it is completely useless, yet would you ever use it alone would you? You would go and buy either fighters or flak. You have to buy a pretty significant amount of them though, am I right?

I don't consider a stalling tactic alone a valid tactic. The cost of 2 phase gates? 3000 cred, 1000 minerals. That translates to 7500 creds. Cost of one sentinel? 400 cred and 80 minerals, or 760 cred. So that's the cost of 10 flak. Sounds about ball park right for what you'd want to accompany an evacuator early on. Obvoiusly you'd probalby have more in a late game.

I'm leaving a lot out there with those numbers. There's the cost of the techs (phase gate tech costs WAY more than sentinel tech). There's the number of needed labs. 2 weapons labs vs. 5 logistics labs.My opinion of the ability remains unchanged. In the rare moments I've ever been able to get it against a human, I use an Egg and a Desolator to knock out a planet behind enemy lines and use the marauder to keep reinforcements coming more directly to the fight. No other race can do this.

My point is that it's unfair to call an ability useless if you're not going to use it properly. What the ability does itself may not tilt the scales alone, but coupled/synergized with something else can and will.

actually, this was not quite what I meant. both a working trade port or culture centre right off the start would in fact be very unbalanced. I thought more that is was just there doing nothing until the research criteria was met. alternatively, you could do something similar to capships and grant the first of those structures for free. even that I don't regard as a particularly good alternative, I just wanted to point out that the races should get something to make up for a free 1800 cred. structure. alternatively, it could just be a nod without phase gate, but then, RA isn't all that attractive anyway since the resource cost was introduced, so they'd still have the main benefit of the thing for free. if you have a better idea, go ahead, but just giving something like that away also doesn't seem right.

Well, to go on the "change the homeworld" theme, I've always despised that all of the races start on a Terran. Advent should start on a desert!

Vasari should start on a lava! (to do this a homeworld lava would have to either be given the third pop upgrade [which i prefer] or give it 1-2 more mines since a alava doesn't give as much as a terran). Make it more like the ice planets and give it a third level of pop upgrade. The Vasari tech tree supports this, and I would like to submit that the lava and ice pop upgrades are beyond useless. You have to be playing a huge multistar map with like 5 planets of a type oin ur empire for the pop upgrade investment to be worth it.

If I had control of the lore section, I would somehow have it make sense for the TEC to start on ice planets (earth had an iceage, they lost earth, earth is too polluted so they migrated to an ice, something like that). I don't have that control, so I'd leave TEC as is.

Dear Amish:

Jam Weapons can save a whole fleet of heavy cruisers that is caught off guard without fighter/flak support against bombers. Just like that. You chain jam and the bombers do shit. It WORKS. You can wipe the floor with the carriers or get the f... outta there, but you saved your ass to fight another day, better prepared.

Stabilize Phase Space does NOTHING unless you really spent a shitload of credits on some offroad techs in order to let it do something. You spent a gold mine on that phase stabilizer, he has 15 more LRFs/6 more carriers. All just to make the ability do something.

Call me mad, but I DO see a difference.

As for all else:

That IS stalling. I realize you don't play against humans, but I do. I am almost always #1 for mouse clicks by a long shot. Why? I spend so much time purely watching what the scouts can telll me about my enemy. I send them to vital spots. I send them everwhere.

Point here is "surprise attacks", while they do exist in this game, are rare and aren't likely to happen between two people locked in their own 1v1 attack on their side of the map.

Even then, that Kortul doesn't have infinite antimatter stores. If I'm the guy with bombers, I'm just going to bypass whatever defenses the Kortul is attempting to hide around. I'll either attack something that the Kortul isn't near (which isn't always possible, the AOE is pretty large)

Me? I just jump to the next planet. Go straight by the Kortul. Find a planet that's easier to take. Maket the Kortul use antimatter to jump to the next planet.

Better yet, here's how I tend to do my capital ship selection:

1. TEC: 1st Marza, 2nd Akkan (i've switched the order). Ion bolt disables said channelling ability. 

2. Advent: Mothership and then a Radiance. Antimatter bomb. Is. My. Friend.

3. Vasari: Here is where I'm probably fucked. My cap selection tends to be Egg then a Desolator. If I see an opponent who's going to lean on a channelling ability though, I get a marauder like I've said before. Phase Out Hull is a pathetic ability for stopping a channelling, but it does work, and is the best option Vasari have.

My point is that directly, Jam Weapons does nothing but stall without flak. If I have fighters/bombers, this is what I fear. Flak Burst. I fear. Telikinetic Push. I fear even more. Magnetize. I don't fear, but then again, TEC has flak burst, and the killing of fighters is more of a creative perk to Magnetize than the actual point of magnetize.

Jam Weapons. I laugh. If this ability has been leved up, that means my opponent either picked it 1st, which in turn crippled his early game economy, or it's very late game, where micro-targeting caps is just ridiculously easy.IF he has flak, then yes, I respect the ability, but the only time I've ever invested heavily in strikecraft is against HC rushers or when I'm on the offensive and need to take out heavily entrenched starbases.

I hate Jam Weapons. I want it to be adjusted.

Jam Weapons is at best a stall. I stand by that. Stalling can pay dividents in some matches, but if you're stalling against me, that means I've got you on the ropes, and I'm not letting you off them. If Vasari had an ability that did direct damage to strikecraft, I'd be happy, but they don't, so I'm not.

As for RA, well, I guess it isn't as attractive as it used to be, but the old RA rushing ultimately was pretty lame...it was also a crutch for some players who didn't know how to win without it. The current RA is still quite powerful, enough so that you don't want to give out a free Phase Stabilizer.

There is another thread in the strategy section that suggested that the "repulse" ability be moved to a capital ship.  Perhaps that's worth discussion here?  The guidance ability on the Revelation is probably the best candidate to be replaced by repulse.

TBH I agree that repulse is currently OP, but I've been perplexed by how radically people want to change it. Sorry if what I'm about to say comes off as off-topic, but you just triggered my repulse speech.

IT IS A COOL ABILITY. It's just been abysmally balanced. If you take a look, there is an activaiton antimatter charge and the ability eats a pretty decent amount of antimatter per second, so in theory it sounds balanced.

Problem is it's a "channelling" ability to quote Stardock. You can break the ability mid-channel, get the full effect of displacing the enemy fleet, and still have antimatter stores to do it again in like 15 seconds or set off a shield bubble.

That's the problem. The ability is powerful, and the source of it's power is currently exploited so you take next to nothing out of it. Occam's Razor says the simplest answer is the correct one. Since antimatter stores are currently being exploited this means either:

A. Make it so that the guardian cannot break the ability mid-use (no other ability does this in the game so i don't think this is practical)

B. Increase ( i propose doubling) antimatter costs, consumption rates, activation costs, and delay between uses. You could make this ability cost 25 antimatter per second and people would still abuse it. You can micro it for power. Make it so that a person can't just do this ability non-stop.

If the AOE is made too small, this ability is useless.

One proposal I have liked is the idea of adjusting the light frigate ability range up and lowering the repulse aoe range. Current range of lf ability, somewhere around 4500. Repluse is around 7000. Happy middle is 6000 or so. I worry about doing this purely because I don't know what kind of impact this will have on the other support cruisers and carriers. Common sense would suggest it should be ok, but tbh I just don't know.

It might also make sense to fix the game with simple solutions instead of complex ones that require coding or massive design changes, but this doesn't have anything to do with Occam's Razor. It has to do with not wanting to radically change the way the game is played, which makes perfect sense.

I brought it up, not like you're the one who opened the discussion.  And yes, we know how you feel about repulse.  You're not the only who feels that way.

I'm not suggesting changing it radically at all, just putting it (more or less as is) on a capital ship in place of one of the relatively useless abilities.  As it is right now repulse sticks out like a sore thumb when compared with other cruiser abilities.  The two big issues here is that it's extraordinarily difficult (if not outright impossible if used correctly) to counter while the cruiser has antimatter, and it affects enemy capital ships.

Putting it on a capital ship wouldn't take away the "cool" of this ability at all, it would justify being difficult (even situationally impossible) to counter because of the limitations of capital ships, and if added to the right capital ship could greatly improve the balance between them. 

You have to notice the difference here. You may be better than most kids out there and thus you may be seeing the Kortul only on the losing side, cause you don't build it yourself instead of spamming that goddamn egg or vulk.
I am sure you could find a hundred and one clever uses of Jam Weapons if it was you left with this ability on the field of battle.

Back to the point - Weapon Jam may not be teh embodiment of pure awesumness, but does SOMETHING without having to research tier5/8 techs and building 1800/8000 cred structures. Phase Gating does totally NOTHING.
Nil.
You make a phase stabilizer node - SO WHAT? Will you scare the enemy away with a green tag on his planet?
Instead of building two factories and pumping out ships from a nearby planet to aid you in battle, you have to pump resources into research and structures that just don't help at all on their own.
And after you build that phase stabilizer, you still have to build a factory and those ships you want to send to the fight.