how so?

there are no inconsistancies whatsoever. in fact, the game goes beyond the lore within the same vein

they feel PLENTY alien, just not what you were expecting. if you think the way they collected resources is a form of diversification, or the way they construct buildings, or even the ratio of resources to money is "more alien" ... haven't I said this before?

would it hurt so much? btw those resource balances matter very well, in that it would change the importance of planets for different races. after all, if you see an ice planet in a typical tec game, you would really try to get it. but not if you didnt have such a large need for crystal, you would concentrate/ attack elsewhere. result: it affects where you plan to expand and where you plan to attack an enemy for maximum benefit for yourself. strange to think of that as a cosmetical difference.

when i read about the vasari i was thinking umm they would have like 1 ship that can take on 4 tec ships and the tec ships would out number them 4:1 = an even fightish. but this is not the case. Anyway the vasari are still more powerfull 1v1 against the tec but i was expecting them to be more expensive and more powerful. Maby double shields and double price or somthin

Jperzio that expectation has always been unrealistic, Shadowhal YES it would be damaging! it takes forever to completely balance two races like that, for completely minimal benefit.

oh dont give me that bs, the black market takes care of it through and through

you know it wouldnt be of much effect.

The mandate upgrade is not overpowered. Yes, it's a massive boost, it's 12 civ labs massive. You do actually have to build all that shit after you get the building space, it's not like you all of a sudden added 20k credits and several thousand resources in infrastructure. You spent a fortune and invested heavily in civic research to get a heavy boost to your production power. Vasari get a 20% fleet increase and phase gates at 9, both more powerful additions.

Hmm, how best to respond to this.... Basically Schod is correct in his arguments (though I grant that I've not read them all in detail).  

The Vasari are powerful, but not in a hammer-headed brute force approach ala the TEC. Playing the Vasari successfully requires finesse and different tactics than the TEC do (this is intentional, btw). Those who argue that the Vasari are the exact same as the TEC really haven't played them enough or just haven't unravelled them yet. In much the same way as someone wouldn't be successful in Dawn of War playing the Eldar the same way as they would the Space Marines, the same holds true between the TEC, Vasari and Advent in Sins. Obviously many gameplay concepts remain standard - we've never had the inclination to make the factions entirely different and force players to learn 3 different games, nor would this fit into the Sins universe.

Schod - You really need to chill out and stop being so insulting to others, however.

Yarlen, thank you for chiming in, despite giving validation for Schod's beliefs.

My problem is that the TEC are listed as "primitive" and even the Beta when you play the Vasari shows a screen saying that the TEC have no organization or military technology.

So for the TEC to be presented as a "brute force" while the Vasari are made some finesse race really blows myself and many other players away as to what we expected and wanted from the game.

In the end, it's your game to design. It's our dollars to spend as we see fit. For those who pre-ordered, like myself, it's a disappointment. But I guess we've all grown used to having to get mods to make many games enjoyable lately.

So I'll look at this as purchasing a nice gaming engine and pickup various mods to play it the way I want.

Yeah and i agree with you 110%

What a sad sad day
Sins just lost points with me

Well atleast we can mod it..

Yarlen, you broke my heart, and now SINS is going to lose a member of its community...










































*stabs Schod threw the heart with the mighty spork of doom*

I guess I can add my 2c again.

I understand the design decision. All in all, there are very few games where all the playable factions are entirely different. It's very difficult to do, and while it can be fun it can also be a little frustrating.

I will admit, I didn't know how the other races were going to be implemented, and initially I did assume the gameplay was going to be somewhat drastically different between the races (and I mean the core gameplay like resource gathering/etc). So initially I was surprised, and as I said earlier a little put off at the core similarity.

However, I've been playing Vasari pretty much exclusively since the release of Beta 4, and even early on I posted that they do play quite differently from the TEC, and to be honest I really haven't been kicked in the butt in the early game by a TEC player to believe that they suck early. You need to be more careful, yes, and it can be a little slow because their initial fleet cap is used up faster, and usually your first colony is an asteroid that doesn't give any fleet points until you upgrade. But thankfully, their capitals have more diferse abilities that can compensate for the lower number of ships initially. The scout cap can just phase out the enemy cap while you kill its escorts, the missile cap can spit out phase missile swarms to wreck multiple frigates quickly, the carrier can repair..

I think, in the end, there is also some miscommunication as to what people are debating. Me, I've never thought the Vasari would be a 'steamroller' race, but I did expect an extremely ancient race to be able to do more damage than a trading faction that is just now starting to churn out a respectable military. I think that would satisfy quite a lot of people, to be honest. To balance the Vasari in such a way that you could keep their more finesse method (after all, fewer ships means being careful not to waste them) and bumping up their damage output a bit to give them more of a technologically superior feel. While it's true that the TEC can put out more ships than the Vasari, I just don't feel the difference is very pronounced. That's about it, I really have no gripe about basic Vasari gameplay.

Yarlen, thanks for weighing in on this issue; one of the things that's always impressed me about Sins is the general availability of the devs.

With regard to the issue at hand, it seems that a lot of people expected the Vasari to be extremely powerful individually, balanced by a lack of numbers: specifically, much increased resource and fleet capacity costs. I don't really see that this is incompatible with them being a more finesse-oriented race, in the manner that you've stated. I think that most people would agree (though clearly I can't speak for them) that what they want is a balance where one-on-one a Vasari warship will decisively defeat its approximate TEC counterpart -- but the TEC will always have superior numbers of ships, such that resource-to-resource the Vasari can't quite stand head to head with their enemies. The Vasari are technologically superior, but their population is very limited, and losses should hurt them far more than they hurt the entrenched, numerically-superior TEC.

For example, imagine that the Vasari Devastator could reliably bring down a Kol battleship and a small-to-moderate fleet of escorts in a straight-up fight, and survive to run and repair itself. But that Devastator would cost 60-80 fleet cap (probably 60, since you need to be able to build a flagship at game start) and significantly more resources than the Kol, such that the TEC need never send a single Kol against a Devastator -- unless their Vasari opponent outsmarted them and struck where they were weak. Perhaps training upgrades also become more expensive for the Vasari, so that losing a warship with an experienced crew becomes even more painful. This balance can also come down to the frigate level -- perhaps the Transporter carries two squadrons, but costs twice as much in resources and fleet capacity as it does now, for example. (Note that all numbers are pulled out of thin air, and not indicative of actual balance calculations. )

I think this sort of solution would satisfy both sides of the argument and, as one of the devs has pointed out elsewhere, be relatively easy to implement. LordKosc has more or less already done so in his Vasari mod, in fact. I do have to say that I'm extremely impressed with the way the game has been shaping up so far; it's eating up far too much of my free time (and sleep time) even as a beta.

You pretty much said what I meant, Ysadrel.

Ability wise, and research wise, it's very easy to see that the Vasari are superior. Their techs are much more varied, ship abilities are more defined and elaborate.

It's the very basics that don't quite feel as defined. Things like a Skirmisher doing the exact same damage as a Cobalt. A missile platform doing the exact same damage of a gauss platform. Just a bit more disparity in that regard would go a long way towards making people *feel* like the Vasari truly are an ancient and technologically superior race.

Heh, thanks, Annatar11. I have to admit, I was pretty surprised when the Vasari capships cost the same as their TEC counterparts -- I expected a straight-up 50% increase in resource and fleet capacity cost. I was definitely expecting few, powerful units, and I think that's the root cause of discontent here: the Vasari don't FEEL like an ancient, powerful race. It's the sort of thing that probably won't change their playstyle much, if at all, to fix -- they'll still have to use finesse to evade the vast, primitive fleets of their TEC enemies, they'll just seem stronger while they do it.

*blood spews out of mouth*

...

if only I had one kosc, if only I had one
*throws kosc off a cliff*

I am obese, I bounce when I hit the bottom and survive

and I still get the satisfaction of throwing you off a cliff
everyone wins!
  

you know what is sorely needed? a "wipe out all grav wells between here and there" button, also a patrol button would be cool.

additionally I would like there to be a visual shield accompanying the phasic barrier

finally the ability to switch some abilities between "spam when not in battle" "spam in battle" "dont spam" and "spam continuously"
by spam I of course mean autocast, a great example is the kol level 6 thing (forget its name) would allow continuous antimatter regen.

... How so? If the Vasarin are masters of warfare, you'd expect a finesse based approach from them! And since brute force is the easiest (as well as costliest) approach to combat, its perfectly suited to the untrained, unskilled TEC. Eventually I'm sure they'll learn to understand the advantages to subtlety... if nothing else, having to face down both Advent and Vasari with out any increase in fleet size should do it.



What? They changed my beloved TEC without telling me? Gah, and I was just learning the Vasari!

the bonus is a bit op, but then again the Vasari need to be brought down a notch at later tech levels to, so I'm not too concerned about it.

Yes I did get a minidump. No I didn't have anything left. It was definitely over. Having that volcanic planet gave you a huge advantage. I had fleet support upgraded to the max on all of my planets and my fleet was still way too small. Remember the fleet that hit your volcanic towards the end of the game? That was my ENTIRE maxed out fleet. Your fleet's pip cloud was 2.5-3x as big. Too bad your culture wouldn't let me keep that planet. Had I had been able to take that I may well have turned the game around. Oh well, maybe next time

Clearly the Vasari are not what people expected them to be... That doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with them. I admit that I was somewhat disappointed when I first tried the Vasari and discovered that the basically had all the same ship and building types as the TEC. Then I realized that there are certain roles that need to be filled for either faction to have any real chance on winning and there's really no good reason to be have radical differences. Also, there are significant differences between the factions once you get into tech trees a bit.

I really think people are over-reacting to this whole thing, it's space combat, there really only so many ways to go about it. That being said, it wouldn't hurt to differentiate the frigates and structures a little more. I'm not worried about it though, the devs have done a great job so far in reacting to player input and improving the game. So just be patient, try to make constructive suggestions for the devs and quit arguing like six year olds on the playground.

Then you should play Dawn of War again. The Eldar play different from the Marines because they are different. They have the very thing that people want from the Vasari - a different economy, different way to build their buildings and completely different units. Unforunately, instead of basing the game on the example you chose, you based it on the less diverse one - Space Marines and Chaos Space Marines. As it stands now the Vasari are the "spiky" TEC. Same race, minimal differences, different paintjob.

Bombers are the bane of vasari.

TEC can almost combat massed bombers, but vasari capital ships are relegated to back seat driving and defense. No shield regen, weak repair capabilities in general, and no instant boosters. They also have no anti-fighter mechanisms like the akkan. The jamming ability doesn't seem to have much range at all if it works. Fighters need to actually accomplish something instead of just killing them. Even if you have twice as many fighters and flak frigates on top of it, 20 bombers will drop a level 10 capship just fine. It kinda sucks. Maybe make them evade fire or something when engaged by fighters and stop bombing? They aren't really countered, just slowly killed, so nothing can be safeguarded as vasari unless it's just not used to start with.

Sorry, but you're incorrect. With few differences (i.e., Orcs, Necrons) the economies in Dawn of War are exactly the same - they all gather requisition and energy, and they spend it the same way. What differentiates the them is their style of play.  The Space Marines are brute force with overpowering weapons, but small numbers. The Eldar are advanced, but their strengths lie in being swift and making quick hit & run attacks. If an Eldar player ever tried to make a direct frontal assault against another race, they would lose (barring having an Avatar on the field or some huge numbers advantage).

The differences are in the details.

I'm sorry if everyone got the wrong impression for how the game was going to be, but it wasn't ever planned to be designed as some of you thought. This isn't to say that the Vasari are completely balanced yet, and they may be tweaked as we move forward (but not radically changed).

Here is my conlcusion about the Vasari-

Its clear now that the Devs don't want to produce the unique and varied model for balance, thats fine, its a rarity, I think it is vastly superior to what they are doing, but its fine, most games don't do it, and I don't expect the extra (more like Gigantic) effort from a new and small company.

So, fine, no true nomadic race, I even don't care too too much about making the ships more powerful...

But what would make them feel much more advanced would be to reorganize their tech tree... if they are so advanced why is phase gates level 9? I think instead their best techs should be early on, allowing them to seem very powerful in the early phase of the game, but having less ships hurts them enough that it wont be too imballanced. The TEC would 'catch up' technologically throughout the game, while the Vasari advantage from technologies would drop off significantly...

Phase Gates should be level 3, but make more mundane things like Hangars, 4 or 5... and so forth. That will give them a very advanced feel, and reducing their early game vulnerabillity, but without really making them the 'protoss'.