Kostura Cannon

The Kotsura does 10% damage to everything in the grav well, disables ships for 15ish seconds, and structures for 3 minutes. Basically, if you need to break through a turtle, it's your thing. So it's quite useful even though it doesn't blow up planets directly.

The Advent's Deliverance Engine causes a huge amount of friendly culture to spread from the planet, which means the enemy loses his culture bonus and you gain yours as long as you're in it. It also drops allegiance, and a few chained shots will be enough to turn any planet that's not within a few jumps of the homeworld.

Both the Kotsura and the Deliverance Engine are a bit more geared to supporting roles than the Novalith, but I actually think that gives them better utility. There are several ways to bomb a planet into oblivion, but only one way to disable 35 points worth of defenses for 3 minutes.

Thanks for the info. Its better then it seems I guess. So with 10 you could kill all defenses with one shot? lol I still think Dark Armada seems to be the best overall ability. During my game yesterday I ended up getting the marauder to 6th and Dark armada gave me something like 60+ heavy cruisers. Every time I'd hit fleet cap I'd research it again and get a bunch more ships.

Is there a way to Scuttle multiple ships? I could only do one at a time. it was obnoxious b/c dark armada kept eating my fleet cap before I could build caps or planetary assault ships. I basically had to rapidly do tab/scuttle

I'd rather go for Summoning the Dark Fleet tech.

Nope, one at a time.

Another benefit to the Kotsura is unlike the Novalith, it has absolutely no research pre-reqs. Of course, it's in the other tech tree than Returning Armada, but that's the point

Something tells me it's 10% of current HP, not max. That something is the fact that I built and fired 5 at a planet and its defenses were not at half health...yeah, I'm a total turtle .



Gotta love that ability. It seems like the TEC get the firepower, the Vasari get the ships, and Advent get the bonuses to their ships (damage mitigation and culture damage bonus) at the high levels, which is hard for someone coming from RTS



I'm not sure. It would sure be inconvienient if there wasn't (I only had 3 phase gates so my flow of ships was small enough that I could build 2-3 caps before my ships arrived at the phase gates.

raw power doesn't mean anything. Actually when you think about it the Novalik is the worst of the three super weapon.

i love the kostura because the blast does not do anything to fighters and bombers so if you have a fleet that has 50+ fighters/bombers you just send you fleet in and time Kostura firing so that they hit one after another and let you fighters and bombers pick apart thire fleet then when things start moving again the main body just picks the remaing ships apart

I hate paralysis. It is evil.
I hate dark armada, it is evil.

I am a tec fan! and they get the money, not just the firepower. It's one of their primary features.

Yes! Carriers and tons of bombers will decimate a planet's infrastructure then you can quickly phase out FTW

The Novalith cannon is good for raping capital planets, and so then dramatically lowering allegence

That seems like a disadvantage to me because hanger defenses are already better than turrets, and having the Kostura not affect them just makes defenses more effective.

Edit: I mean, it does help with offense if you chain cast Kostura, but even with that it seems silly that the superweapon is only useful if you have several of them.

once you get 2 novaliths in the same system as the capital and keep having 2 in the same systems, if the enemy is vasari/advent (might take 3 for tec), you can keep the players allegiance most of the time under 65%-70% across all planets (if you fire both at the capital). Thats why it is even better in lowering allegiance (not to 0, but to cripple the opponent) across a massive empire in certain cases than deliverance is when used strategically.

FYI, the Vasari super weapon also damages your ships in the location of where it fires (:(

Chances are, if you're firing at the Capital, you want an easy way to insta-gib it. And your units AREN'T there.

Not really, because allegiance drop after the capital is destroyed takes a long time, and it's really easy to designate another capital in that time. True, you make the player use resources, but let's face it, at that point of the game that one upgrade is a non-issue as far as resources go

The more important effect of novalith nuking is to completely cut off the enemy's tax income... Can't fight if you have no money

I was refuting his allegiance point, though And besides, at the Novalith game stages, even the 14 credit/sec income of the home planet is pretty paltry compared to the combined rest of your empire with trade ports

i love it how there is such variety... each race has significant plusses and minuses, they are balanced as a WHOLE... rather then have "balanced units" (read: Identical with different grahics).

You need to research so many prerequisite techs for the advant super weapon I never bothered with it... I OFTEN rush to build 8 research labs early on (read 3-4 planets/astroids) to get the ascendency... Ascendancy 2 (for 3000 credits with no prereqs) gives you automatic capital upgrading up to level 4... and then +50% bonus to experience rate... I just mopped a small 10 planet map with a 10 capital ship fleet that was levels 6-8 by the end of it...
And that -33% research speed is NOTHING to sneeze at... I get it right away.

The tec has armor coming out the wazoo. And their Kol capital ship is extra powerful. Two kols beat 3 enemy whatever capitals...

The vasari have unparalleled phasing tech and cheapest manufacturing.

So rather then saying "how do the various superweapons balance against each other" I think... how do the various FACTIONS balance against each other... so far I Wouldn't say that one is superior... I am happy playing with random every single time (well... except my next game will be tec, because it randomly chose the other two for my past 5 games or so.. :P)

Yea I found that out the hard way when I was assaulting their planet, kept wondering what was disbaling my ships, then I realized that my ten Kostura's were still FIRING on the planet even though it was now MINE!

In fact, I might want to bug that - it seems that even if you take out the planet and colonize it, the game for some reason still thinks the planet is enemy and will continue to fire on it. =\

TEC superweapon is just pure win i had 5 of them on gateway in an MP game the other day i just set them to auto fire enabled and sat back with a huge grin on my face

advent one is just lame a whopping 4% mitigation isnt doing much and if u build 4 of them and constantly bomb planets it would take forever for them to fall.

vasari one only seems good for pirate bases

Math is your friend.

ya, i go ADD long before the advent weapon takes out the planet

I use the advent cannon usually on a planet I am going to assault. Saves the shitty "you can not colonize the planet because the opponents culture is too strong" or something along those lines crap Not to forget that if you have a broadcast center nearby on a planet and enhance spreading your culture that way, it is fun ^^. (I really wonder if they only pack messages from the unity inside that shot... must be some more to it than just prayers :D)

Guys, the allegiance drop is not always the primary function of the Deliverance Engine It's not bad for flipping planets if they're far away from the homeworld, but its main use is that it sticks a huge chunk of your culture anywhere. Here's an example of how nice it is:

Vasari culture upgrades give them +11% damage in their culture.
Advent culture upgrades give them +6% shield mitigation in their culture.

Deliverance Engine replaces hostile culture with friendly culture, which means:

- Vasari loses their +11% damage bonus.
- You gain 6% max shield mitigation.

That 6% mitigation doesn't seem like much at first, but let's do some math. Let's say you have your shiny Radiance using Animosity, so it gets shot at for 1000 points of raw damage. I believe it has a base max mitigation of 70%, so it would've taken 300 damage at max mitigation. Now, you add your 6% and it has 76% mitigation, and takes 240 damage. That's 60 points less, or 20% less damage! Add that to the fact that the Vasari lost their culture bonus so the damage output was only 1000 instead of 1100 (another 11% difference), and you gained a 31% damage reduction for a few minutes with one shot of the Engine.

Now consider that along with Iconus Guardians and Progenitor's shield restore, and yeah..

meaning? 4% is the difference the game shows if u look at a ships info pop up when its not in your culture and when it is