Quoting Vatticson, reply 12I still don´t undestand that mysterious 5% bonus damage in culture
I don't understand you're confusion. The tech is supposed to make anything you own that has weapons and is under the influence of your culture deal X% more damage. Lvl 1 X= 5, Lvl 2 X= 10.
That's pretty straightforward. what is unclear about it?
Bilun: I agree about moving up Fury... And about your reservations for doing so. The other factor is that Ancient Retribution is a similar tech that Loyalists have.
Here's the problem with trying to optimize the layout of the Advent Loyalists: they have no focus. There is nothing that screams "this is what this faction is about"... So you could argue all kinds of layout reconfigurations.
What my current thought process is: a complete re-ordering of the abilities and 1 redesign.
Planet for a Planet is.... dumb. useless. Unless this is made into some mega-buff (read: triple damage), I don't think this ability is going to ever be a good mechanic. There's other mechanics that could be done by say adding a DoT to beam weapons or even something along the lines of 'multi-bank weapons do extra damage' or ships affected by more than 1 of your abilities have boosted AM regen.
Yeah, Planet for a Planet is kind of lackluster. I think the idea is supposed to be that teh advent loyals stay on the offensive rather then actively defending a border asteroid/moon being attacked, yielding a fleetwide bonus when the asteroid/moonf alls- but then the enemy can't actually colonize their prize anyway because of the advent loyal's culture.
The problem is that it's too situational- what if the enemy attacks an actual important planet?
More to the point it's a fairly large research investment that may or may not pay off if the enemy happens to attack an unimportant world at a convenient time. Short of that it just becomes wasted credits.
I liked the original idea of this tech, but it just seems too situational to me, especially being that it doesn't boost your entire fleet- which is to say if you have a carrier fleet, the tech barely does anything for you as it does not buff strikecraft.
Also on the topic on alternative reworks of Planet for a Planet, As I implied in my first post I think a tech that improveves how fast the advent loyals can kill structures would fit into the advent loyal strategy perfectly-a very large part of waging an effective culture-war is launching raids to knock out enemy culture buildings and retreating before any real opposition shows up to defend.
I actually have 2 new layout designs: Start the harmony tree with Fury (possibly affected by the strength of your culture), move the faction culture techs up a bit, make the every-planet-generates-culture tech (believe it's Mass Unity) the penultimate in harmony (believe it's T6 now... I would say make it T7, a little bit stronger, but completely separate from the other culture tech). This layout would have culture be like a train gaining momentum... and just leave it up to you when to weave in military upgrades
I was actually playing with a similar idea the other day. Though one other possibility I considered was moving Coward's submission back to the harmony tree from defense, putting at high tier(maybe 7 or so) and givving it a bit of a buff. Coward's submission was a really cool idea, but at 5% it's barely noticable. Having it be a higher tier then the current T5 could give some wiggle-room for a buff(after all military T5 isn't much of a requirement for the advent).
Well in all honesty it just struck me as one of the easiest pieces to move to late harmony as it is in it's current form completely unimportant to the advent loyal strategy(moving it won't really hrut their early game) and conversely with a buff it could actually become useful.
That said I like the direction you're going with this layout- as I said I think the Advent loyals early on should be mounting a two-pronged assault, culture to weaken their opponent and an physical attack to keep their target under pressure so they can't devote resources to countering the culture-threat.
Having Fury of the unity ealy would lend it's self well to this sort of play.
The other possible layout that i see: Start the military tree with Ancient Retribution, move Fury up to T4/T5. This would promote more of a military start (which is honestly the way I think loyalists should go), and then at some point weaving in culture. most likely, your military would be ahead of your culture in this layout, so you dont get the Fury bonus, however, trying to take one of your planets is going to pretty rough.
Not as crazy about this one- the advent have always had abundant incentive to go into the military tree, so I'm hesistant to add another new faction-specific tech to the military tree, rather then making it incentive to go harmony.
Not to mention to actually use this tech you need 2 harmony temples, so 4-5 hostility temples really means you need to build 6-7 temples before it would be worth researching.
That said It's still WAY better then the current state of things. Though I'd kind of like it if the advent loyals were more suited to investing more heavily in the harmony tree early. The Advent rebels already are well suited to focusing on hostility temples through the early game(since they basically get all their early harmony techs by harmony T2-T3 then get nothing else for harmony until T6 or so, encouraging them to grab 2 harmony, focus on hostility for most of the early game, then late game if the game hasn't ended go for their deep harmony techs).