Returning Armada is a "vestigial" tech.  It used to be a game-ending technology in the original Sins v1.05, but it was severely nerfed when Entrenchment was released.  Before the nerf, the phase stabilizers could be set to operate automatically, giving you FREE ships ever couple minutes.  So, if you were Vasari, you would makes ~15 phase stabilizers (can put 2 on an asteroid, 3 on a planet) and let the free ships just pour on in.  A Vasari player could thus quickly ramp up to having 2300 fleet supply worth of ships.

In multiplayer games, people might sometimes type out: "I have Returning Armada, this game is now over."

Vasari's problem was actually being able to get to the point where you could afford to research it and build all of those phase stabilizers.  If a team in a 3v3, 4v4, or 5v5 started out having a Vasari player in a safe eco spot, the guy in the eco spot would often rush to get it up.

Few people ever use it or pay attention to it since the ability was nerfed.

Agreed.

I had fun with original sins 1.07 and RA.

it prolly could be slightly de-nerfed, but not much. if it was 2000 credits, and 400 crystal, it would prolly be ok.

What we cant have is that scuttling the ships gives you equal or more monies than it cost to generate them... which happens at 50% off... and getting 50% off ships is not bad.

Not to mention the Tier 1 Civilian tech the Vasari have that lets them reclaim 20% more resources from scuttled objects could make RA a money-MAKING technology.

ya, i tested that, it brings the scuttle percentage to exactly 50%, which is why i said 50% in my pervious post.

NOW, mind you, if you research the 'cost and resource decrease' techs, your return is diminished.  Its too bad that (i dont think) abilities can be told to honor research.

Why the hell not, actually? You've paid your mother's worth in labs and research and phase stabs to get to the fookeen RA, why the hell must it not be profitable to scuttle those ships? Sure, it might be a little weird that you summon ships just to send them to a junkyard, but it's not gonna be game-breaking at all.

And RA could be made much more worthwhile if it only didn't require the phase tunneling research 2/2 to be done. And maybe brought one tier down. Once you get it running, RA is actually well worth it. Just check it out for yourself. Make sure you have 90 supply at hand and use RA, then write down how many ships of what type you received and count how much you'd have paid for them normally. The end result is that you win quite a lot.
You have to keep in mind though that you can always get an unlucky roll and get crap ships.

RA never provides Overseers and Subverters, so its not like you can just build a bunch of Phase Stabilizers and use RA and expect a well rounded fleet (what you get instead is a highly brute-force fleet).

I agree abot the second one up to a point, but first is just ridiculous, hard to take you seriously to be honest

Well thats fine if you wanna buff it, but then I want my Insurgency not to be xp fodder. Or the Novalith upgraded to actually be useful.

If your gonna justify buffing RA just b/c it cost alot of labs and research then, why not start with already lackluster tech?

 

RA, while not as great as it once was is still great. You get ships at a reduced cost, you get them all at once. Having a few extra meaty ships join the battle at once is not a negative thing, even more so if your fighting an attrition battle. 

While you cant choose what ships you get you do know what types so you can use your frigate factories to build so you have a balanced fleet.

The price for RA definitely needs to be decreased.  I agree with N3rull that there's nothing wrong if players can scuttle the ships and profit from them since they had to buy all that crap.  The useless Level 7 research ability that stands between phase stabilizers and RA could also be eliminated.

naaah, it's not useless. When you have to jump across a system, your ships get locked down for a long time, sometimes even a few minutes. This upgrade seriously reduces the jump time and it's a really sensible bonus. I know it's not really important if your ship takes 10 seconds to jump instead of 6 or 15, but it becomes very crucial if you can reduce the time, during which your whole fleet is essentially useless, by a couple of minutes.

N3rull, are you sure you're not thinking of "Gravity Tolerance" (Level 5 Civic)?  The tech I was referring to is called "Enhanced Tunneling".  "Ships moving through phase lanes created by Phase Stabilizers travel more quickly."

I guess it might have some value if you use phase stabilizers to travel often, giving 20%, 40% speed increases.  It's pretty expensive though.

On a 1v1 map, I wouldn't touch it.  Of course, I very very rarely get this high in the tech tree in a 1v1 scenario.

In a team game, this is extremely important if you're doing phase stabilizer jumps across the solar system.  That extra speed means a lot on huge maps where a phase stabilizer short-cut (or back-world Kostura attack) could leave your fleet jumping for several minutes.

^^ What he said.
Sanchezz, there are things about this game that I don't know, but when it comes to Vasari - I can honestly say I know almost everything there is to know about them . I've never played anything else more than a dozen times. There is no way I can mistake a Vasari research .

This research is very good, but it is only good when you a] have a fleet to jump and b] have a large empire with outskirts connected by phase stabilizers.

Obviously, point a] is in outright conflict with the point of Returning Armada - you want to get RA to have moar fleet, but you need to make a double, very expensive research that is not useful for you until AFTER you've finished RA. That's why this chain should be broken.

OK, thanks for clearing that up, guys.  Next time I play Vasari in a game where I end up being very rich and have lots of phase stabilizers, I'll consider researching that.  I can see how it could be very useful.