Awesome, but a question on the Advent, I'm playing them now. Do the effects of the broadcasting centers regardless of their position in your empire stack on top of one another? Or do you build just one?

Culture spread does stack

Note, though, that allegiance is not the same as culture, and it caps at .05 (increasing or decreasing). Basically, the more culture you have the harder it will make it for the enemy to push it back, but it will still take a while for the allegiance to drop because it's capped whereas culture spread is not.

Nope, you can't anymore. They go neutral now, don't flip over anymore

They stack but I've found it's much more effective to simply build one per planet. In this game, i had one planet linked to one of the enemy's planets and one with a asteroid in the middle (the culture spread "around" the asteroid into the phase lane to the planet I wanted). That was mirrored on the other side by the other player, so we had one direct-link to culture and one through another planet. The planet was taken in about an hour and 15 minutes while we barely held off tons of ships.



I was in Beta 2

EDIT: Turns out he didn't have the other colony, after seeing the replay. Well, it's still pretty impressive

EDIT2: One allegiance point gone every 18 seconds (consistent with the 0.05 figure), so potentially if you maxed out allegiance you could flip a 100% homeworld in a half hour or a 110% in 33 minutes.

Isn't that kind of imba if the player can't do anything about it?

Oh, cool

Thanks for all the great responses guys. This will give me a needed boost to my current game.(First time playing the Advent.)   

Clearly, this is the only strategy employed by any player in a multiplayer game ever. In fact, I haven't seen a Cobalt in two months! We should rename this game "Action Movies Exported Interstellarly By A Solar Empire". You don't even want to know what the Advent are putting out these days. "Guide me" and "enemas" and all that. It's not very tasteful.

In all seriousness, this tactic is easily countered, I was lucky as were my allies. But if you think culture is not an interesting weapon, you shouldn't be playing this game, because it has more depth than just shooty laser guns. Culture is a very integral part of winning MP games, this is just a fluke exaggeration. This map tends to be one where if someone spawns in the "middle" you can surround them by taking their planets, in this case we surrounded them with culture instead because that's really what the Advent do well.



Yeah, this is the big deal for the Advent. The TEC get trade early on, you get culture. The Vasari get something I forget about. Anyway, you need to be spreading culture as quickly as possible in the early game as close as possible to your enemies if you can. Depriving them of resources (credits) slowly but surely will guarantee your dominance in the area. Combine this with hit and run attacks on resource extractors and they'll be lucky if they can build a couple scout frigates.

If anything it's way too easy to counter culture in the current version :/

I have a question everyone. I'm playing as Vasari (sp?) and want to take over a planet that has a heavy culture rating. I destroyed everything in the planet system, and the planet is empty. What do I do to colonize the planet for myself?

wow that's going to take a long time. And what do i do if there's no planets where I can put media centers?

i appreciate the help though, thanks

Bomb the living crap out of nearby media hubs in other gravity wells.

I believe that capital ships reduce the presence of hostile culture in a gravity well; so you could park one over the colony in question until enough culture was gone for you to colonize.

(Does that work, beta veterans? Or do capships only push back culture on worlds you control?)