Ahhh... so perhaps I was doing it correctly, it just seemed to me that would take too long and not arrive in time to help. I had decided at one point before placing 2 or 3 units on each planet to leave an open supply of around 75 and just not create any RA until I was attacked, then open the gate where the attack was taking place and let the "instant" RA appear... it was pretty cool, but then I had to scrap them after the battle in order to do it again... (this might not be a bad thing)

I think I will just leave it as it is, unless perhaps the travel time via the direct phase is alot faster than it first appeared. I will have to test this out tonight!!! I guess it is doubtful this would ever be fast enough if you control several galaxies...

Thanks for your help!

Do the Phase Gates work between stars? If so, then you have another way to quickly move between stars, and without using the star itself. Something to keep in mind, if they do work this way.

I believe they do, the game I am playing now I control my starting galaxy and have a stronghold presents in both other galaxies. Getting to each of the others was via the conventional phase lanes, and I notice my trade & refinery shipping using these lanes as well. I can only assume I would move my RA from one to the other via planet to star, star to star and then star to planet on the other end. How fast this is actually accomplished is what is in question right now and will determine if implemented at all.

I have a feeling it wont, and what will be needed is to keep all gates closed with no defensive fleet created until an attack is made. Once this occurs, open the gate where the attack is and as I have noticed before +/- 6 ships will almost "instantly" appear on the edge of the gravity well. If you keep this up and have 100 or so supply held back, you will quickly loose your supply and no more RA will be created. So, scraping the RA after defending the planet will be required then closing the gate. Not really a bad thing as you recoup some of the resources that were used to create the ships you didn't spend to build them in the first place!

I do think that all the free ships, added to the ability to move them to any planet in your empire with a phase gate in one jump is a huge advantage and somewhat unbalancing. If a Vasari player is left alone long enough (and it really does not take that long to get the tech if you beeline for it and ignore your military techs until RA is finished). They can really dominate a multiplayer game with their huge fleets. I am about to win a game with 8 hard AI's and it was really easy once the dark fleet started coming on.

The only drawback I see is some added micromanagement, because ships keep showing up at scattered planets, and as far as I know, RA ships do not move to waypoints the same as produced ships (I think I built six assailants and a handful of support ships the whole game, the rest is DA's with a few cap ships). The other problem is that since my logistics ability is always filled, I cannot get things like destructors or colony ships to actually get built, as the Dark fleet ships do not die fast enough.

Maybe this ability should be scaled back a bit in 1.03, like only two or three phase gates can actually summon at once. It gets goofily powerful when you get half a dozen and more gates all summoning four or five ships every several minutes...

Actually, I think that if a person chooses to have all of their gates running like that, then they should be allowed to do so, however, they would be subject to the increased micromanagment needs as well as the loss of control over their fleet composition.

Basically, comes down to "How do you want to play it?" And accepting the needs of that style. Myself, I turned off the Dark Fleet Autocast. But when I needed a number of ships rapidly, I would key a number of them one right after another, then jump them to the needed location. Yeah, fleet's were spread out until they had gathered. But, I was willing to accept that drawback.

Hotkey the Phase Gates and disable Autocast if you need to build something else (support cruisers, colonizers, etc.). Likewise, you might be able to select a phase gate (not the planet) and set a rally point for it (not sure).

Actually, strikecraft cruisers are available.

It appears the only way to get "instant" RA to help defend a planet is to have an available supply and all gates off autocast until needed. I currently control 16 planets in a game and when a planet is attacked I activate the gate and within seconds get 5 or 6 ships. While this is great for defending against pirates and rebels, I cannot see how advantages or unbalancing this would be against a human player attacking my outer worlds.

I have seen posts where some players say they can get a total fleet limit around 2300 using RA but I have not been able to duplicate this.

Yes, RA is completely imbalanced at the moment. I'm enjoying abusing it though.

Currently I can get RA resarched about 30 minutes into a game and a fleet of over 1000 by the one hour mark. This is without help from other people. However, teching hard like this means I'm absolutely undefended during this time. It's quite a gamble.
In roughly 1.5 hours, I have about 2000-2300 fleet. Once I get this, I really start researching ship upgrades, but it's usually GG by then, as the opponent is still on their 2nd or 3rd fleet upgrade.

edit: I forgot to add, this largely depends on my resource situation. I got RA and a fleet of 1k at this speed when I had 2 asteroids closeby, both with 2 metals and 2 crystals and I also took an ice planet for 4 crystals. Obviously the planet layout and your luck would really vary the circumstance. The more asteroids you're surrounded by, the faster you can race to RA

How is it possible that a fleet(s) size like that will not cause your PC to start slowing down to a 'crawl' when two feets start to battle? I have a Nvidia (PNY) 8800 GTS 526mb ram and it is the newer 2.0 PCIe specification (5GB/s transfer). I also have a 3.0ghz dual core (.65nm), and a 2.0 PCIe bus motherboard (Asus Maxumis Formula) with 4GB of ram.

I just upgraded my system, specifically one of my goals was going to be with using SoaSE as a benchmark, I haven't tested it out due to lack of signficant free-time and work yet, but when I had my P5K Asus board with the same processor and a Nvidia(PNY)8600 GTS and when I engaged a Visari Fleet with my TEC fleet... it started to crawl! Hence why I upgraded graphics cards and motherboard.