I have the read the forums here rather often, but never bothered to post. However, I think something needs to be said about returning armada; the nerf was unnecessary. What is truly mind-boggling is the fact that people still believe it should be toned down. The simple fact of the matter is that each race needs to be strong in different phases of the game. I'm sure that while we can all agree on the well-defined strengths of the TEC and Advent, a case can be made for where the Vasari fit into this Sins picture. Their ships are very expensive (skirmishers make early-mid game fighting very difficult) and the economy is pretty bad. These factors do not mix well.

Where am I going with this? The Vasari should be, imho, the strongest late game faction via RA. It was near impossible, playing against a semi-intelligent player before 1.04 to fend off the TEC early game. If you managed to survive a little longer, the Advent would crush the Vasari with its very powerful special abilities. However, if you played the early-mid game perfectly, and did just enough to rush your RA tech, you could win. Note that this was VERY difficult and had no margin for error.

Now, after the patch, the Illums crush the Vasari aswell. Where does the Vasari fit in? While RA is still powerful, it is only powerful when you have a large number of gates, which means it takes ever longer to become a force than it did before. Now a player requires more gates for RA to be effective, further negatively impacting the player with the Vasari's weak economy. Do not forget that a player cannot choose what units come through the gates, so in the event that a player is faced with a specific ship en masse (e.g. illums), countering them effectively on a ship-to-ship basis is very difficult. This was offset by the number of ships you would get for free, and the rate at which they became available. Now such a balance does not exist.

The other, less obvious issue is that countering RA is very, very easy. I am reluctant to give away these strategies (despite how simplistic and obvious they are...), but it is very easy to rush each gate with a large fleet, and destroy the tech labs. Since the Vasari economy is poor, and the ships now irreplacable, the result of the game becomes a formality. I have heard arguements that RA is too powerful, and that it requires no skill. This is in direct contradiction with the reality of the situation; RA is a fragile strategy, easily countered (destroy gates), easily prevented (early game), and requires, by far, the most skill to execute (you need to fool each of your opponents into not attacking you for 15-30 minutes).

Please return RA to its former glory, where a skilled and cunning player was rewarded for their risky and perfectly executed strategy. Or, at the very least, do not* nerf it again.