After a recent update, the unity ability "Proselytize" isn't working. It only work if the planet already has my culture, which is the purpose of the ability in the first place....
It got nerfed because Advent was crazy strong.
Nerfing isn’t the same as making pointless though.
The ability is meant to spread culture at a target gravity well. Except now, because it can only be used in wells where your culture is already dominant, it is essentially useless.
The only use of it I can see is where the gravity well is losing culture to an invader, and the ability will either slow this or reverse it. But that will only work for a matter of minutes, so it’s highly situational / edge case.
Seriously, as it stands it might as well be removed because it’s just a waste of points compared to other abilities.
I thought it worked like temporary culture generation at the target gravity well. When I used it last night, I believed it made my culture push on the adjacent planet faster.
EDIT: I just loaded an autosave to test: it definitely made the culture push faster.
I agree with you. Post-nerf, most of the Advent Unity abilities are borderline useless unless you get culture which is kinda impossible to do if manage to colonize a planet in a different sol system which is inhabited by your opponents and their culture is stronger than yours because they have multiple planets spreading culture vs your single planet that you manage to encroach upon once arriving in their home turf.
You can't even use the Advent superweapon Deliverance Engine between solar systems because it's limited to being used within a system rather than outside of it, which wasn't the case with Sins Rebellion where you could have 7-8 engines in your own solar system shooting across solar systems to another system and start spreading culture.
At best, Clairvoyance and Sanctify the only useful unity abilities, with the rest of the unity abilities being somewhat situational and niche. I stopped relying on Unity abilities altogether with the exception of Clairvoyance and Sanctify. Clairvoyance for intelligence and Sanctify as a defensive tool to stop AI from bombarding your planet, which frees up a slot in the Starbase upgrade Planetary Shield to upgrade something else instead.
That's not the only nerf that happened to Advent since Rebellion though. There's also the very substantial nerf to Advent defense beam platforms which lost Synergy that made it so good, and prevented AI or players from doing early rushes at a weak Advent player at beginning to mid game. Synergy gave an extra 1,000 shield hit points to each beam platform and Hanger Defense upgrade Shield Bestowal gave nearby structures 750 shield hit points which gave the defense beam platforms a whopping 1,750 shields per beam platform which is basically a equivalent to level one capital ship per beam platform. 5 platforms could stop any early rushes, with the exception if a player spammed hanger squadrons instead of ships.
If you combined that with Protection of the Unity upgrade which boosted shield regeneration 150% while within your own culture, and Temple of Renewal with Recharge Shields upgrade, it pretty much kept your beam platforms shields from ever being depleted, making Advent defense platforms the strongest in the game. This all got removed, so the Advent platforms are incredibly weak now. Especially since in Rebellion, they shot 4x blue beam weapon at a target whereas in Sins 2, the beam weapon only registers according to the tooltip as 1x beam damage rather than 4x beams.
@Yarlen @RammaStardock
If I may make a suggestion, I've thought about this and may have a solution that balances Advent Unity abilities in a way that works.
In its current form post-nerf, half the Advent Unity abilities are borderline useless unless you push with culture which in your changelog update quote "early game Proselytize/Conversion rush strategies that were proving dominant and difficult to counter".
My idea is, maybe undo the nerf and revert the changes back to before but increase the cost of Focus by 300% so it can't be used often. With great power comes with great responsibility right? At a cost of higher power requirements and can also be risky, if a player puts a huge investment into an early rush Proselytize/Conversion rush strategy they would have ended up diverting a substantial chunk of resources into this that leaves them vulnerable and having not built enough ships for counter offensives if the early rush fails and also takes away from upgrading their credit/ crystal / crystal economy.
For example, Tier 3 Proselytize can cost 200 Focus instead of 50 and Tier 3 Conversion can cost 500 Focus instead of 300. So this rush strategy wouldn't be used often and rarely if at that because of the risk factor of diverting too much resources if the rush gamble fails. This would stop players abusing it early game. If a player manages to successfully pull of a Proselytize/Conversion rush early game, then they rightfully deserve to win the game because if the risk gamble failed could mean they lose the game otherwise with no resources invested into building a bigger fleet or economy putting them about 20-30 minutes behind their opponents scrambling to catch up.
And late game, players can just upgrade their starbases with the Planetary Shield Array upgrade to prevent Conversion from being spammed on enemy player's planets. The idea is, Unity abilities can be most useful during mid-game when a player has to decide what strategy they want to go with, predict what they opponent's strategy would go with whether they invest all in Unity abilities when their opponent doesn't have enough resources to upgrade all the starbases with planetary shield yet until late game, or build a bigger fleet and forego investing Unity and just brute force it with a fleet. Their opponents would be thinking the same thing.
As it is now, half the Advent unity abilities are semi-useless and not worth investing into, because pushing culture means you have to invest not only in Unity upgrades in the Harmony tree, but also Culture upgrades which doubles the cost and resources, and on top of that there's no guarantee that your culture will dominate or overpower an opponents culture if their culture resistance is too high. And by late game, even AI opponents have all their planets covered with the starbase Planetary Shield Array upgrade, effectively rendering Conversion completely useless.
Sorry for the wall of post above. It wasn't easy explaining this in as few words as possible lol.
No worries, I believe there is internal work being done on Advent that isn't quite ready for test yet, but its always worth passing along suggestions and ideas, I just can't promise anything at this time
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