For Sins of a Solar Empire on the PC, a GameFAQs message board topic titled 'tips for the advent player?'

• Sins Of A Solar Empire Mods

Join The Cult

The Advent, being the most mystical and the most dependent on special abilities, have a varied and wide array of capital ships. Combined with their strong support cruisers, an well outfitted Advent fleet – complete with high-level capital ships – can keep an enemy fleet off balance for the duration of the battle, making sure the initiative is never lost.

Crusader kings 1 mods. Despite their dependence on support abilities however, the Advent’s support battlecruisers are actually not the only interesting capital ships in the Advent fleet. The Advent’s Carrier and Battleship are also very strong. But no matter which one you pick, remember to watch your shielding and be wary of Phase Missiles and abilities that discharge shields, as all of your capital ships rely more heavily on shielding than armor.

Radiance Battleship

Despite the Advent’s reputation as being less adept at slug-fests than the other races, the Radiance is a good battleship. It performs well in slug-fests with enemy ships, and like any battleship-class capital, it is very good at clearing pirates out of planets in the early game. In fact, it may even be more efficient than the TEC’s great Kol in this regard, because the shielding regenerates better than the Kol’s hull, allowing the Radiance to repeatedly take on pirates without having its actual hull damaged.

Offensively, the Radiance has two solid abilities. One is called Detonate Antimatter, and it does what it says. This is a channeling ability, which means that you must have the Radiance focus on it and not use other abilities during its duration. Fully upgraded, it can do up to 600 points of damage (bypassing shields) and drain up to 180 points of anti-matter. This is great against capital ships. The Radiance also has an outstanding Ultimate Ability called Cleansing Brilliance, which is another channeling ability that does damage to all ships caught in the beam. Any ship caught in the beam for the duration of the ability will receive 2000 points of pre-mitigation damage. This is one of the better direct-damage ultimate abilities in the game.

Defensively, the Radiance has Energy Absorptive armor, which converts damage taken into anti-matter and increasing the ship’s armor. This is good largely because it is a permanent ability, so it costs no anti-matter and is always in effect. Finally, the Radiance has Animosity. It works just like a taunt in an MMORPG. All enemy vessels in range will immediately turn their attention to the Radiance. This is a very situational ability that isn’t great if the Radiance is your only capital, but becomes much better if you’re using the Radiance along with other capitals.

Halycon Carrier

The Advent are known for their fighters, so it isn’t a big surprise that the Halycon is one of the better carriers in the game. Like all carriers, it fails in straight toe-to-toe fights, but it excels as a support ship. Advent strike-craft are very strong as well, giving the ship good striking distance from afar. Still, the Halycon’s special abilities are a tad bit lackluster, so most players will not want to build this as their first capital.

The Halycon is somewhat unique in that half of its abilities are passive, permanent buffs. This first of these is Adept Drone Anima, which increases the number of strike craft the Halycon can field by adding one strikecraft to each squadron of fighters. The second buff is Ampilfy Energy Aura, which decreases the cool-down of all friendly energy weapons in its area of effect, and since all Advent weapons are energy weapons, this reduces the cool-down of all ships in the Advent fleet. The area of effect is fairly large, as well. Both of these passive abilities are nice to have, but they are not as strong as the active abilities on some other Advent ships.

Sins Of A Solar Empire Mods

Offensively, the Halycon gets Telekenetic Push and Anima Tempest. Telekenetic Push slows down and damages enemy strike-craft. This ability can be very nasty against enemy strikecraft, but since you’ll probably already dominate in that area, it does seem redundant. The other ability, Anima Tempest, is an Ultimate Ability. This adds 30 strikecraft by adding more strikecraft to your existing squads. It can be insanely damaging against enemy fleets that are poorly guarded against strikecraft, but it’s otherwise lackluster for an Ultimate Ability.

Progenitor Mothership

The Progenitor Mothership is the Advent’s colonizing capital ship, and unlike the colonizing capital ships of other races, it is also one of the best capital ships the Advent can field. This makes the Advent very, very good at early-game colony rushes, as the Progenitor serves equally well in battles against enemy fleets, battles against pirates, and colonization operations. This strength mainly comes from the Mothership’s very good abilities, as its actual weaponry is certainly inferior to what you’ll find on a battleship. Almost all Advent players build the Mothership as their first capital.

Not all Colonization abilities are equal; the Mothership’s Colonization makes your little cultists more efficient. As a result, a planet colonized by the Mothership will have a reduction in planetary development costs, which can lead to a serious early-game economic edge.

The Mothership also has two good support abilities, which are useful even in the early game. The first is Malice, a area of effect ability that cause 30% of friendly damage done to be propagated to nearby enemy vessels. The number of enemy vessels that can be effected is capped, but this is still a good combat buff which causes the total damage put out by your fleet to increase. Malice is also great because it has a decent duration, low cool-down, and low anti-matter cost, which means you can use it repeatedly. The second ability is Shield Regeneration, which increases the rate at which shields on friendly ships regenerate. During the course of its duration, this ability will 'heal' 500 points of shield damage to all friendly ships in its area of effect. Since the Advent rely on shields, this is an amazing ability.

Finally, the Mothership’s ultimate ability is Resurrect, which transfers the level of a recently destroyed capital ship to a new capital ship. This is good if you’ve lost a high-level capital ship, but useless otherwise.

Rapture Battlecruiser

A straight-up support Battlecruiser, the Rapture is a good support ship, and not a bad choice for a second capital. It’s combat abilities are certainly of support capital class, and because it lacks the high-power offensive and defensive abilities of the Mothership, the Rapture is not as good as a lead capital. A micro-managed Rapture however, can turn the tide of a skirmish.

The Rapture has two buffs, both of which are good. The first is Vengeance, which causes a targeted friendly ship to deal damage back to a ship that attacks it. Fully upgraded, this ability actually deals back twice as much damage as is received. By itself, this is a good ability to use on any friendly capital ship. It can be used in combination with the Radiance’s Animosity (which causes forces all nearby enemies to attack the Radiance) for a combo that can wipe out unsuspecting fleets. The Rapture also has Concentration Aura, which gives friendly carriers a buff to strikecraft damage. As you’d exepct, this is very useful if you have a lot of strikecraft, and not useful at all if you don’t.

The Rapture also has one debuff, known as Vertigo, which usually is not given much respect. This is for good reason. Vertigo decrease the accuracy of enemy vessels, which in effect decreases the damage they do. It is a good area of effect debuff, but should usually be passed on because Vengeance and Concentration Aura are so much better.

Finally, there is Domination, a Ultimate Ability which lets you take over an enemy non-capital ship. Since individual non-capital ships are typically not very fearsome in terms of damage, this is best used on support cruisers, as you will rob the enemy of any ability that support cruiser was using and add that ability to your own arsenal. Remember to use the ability quickly however, as the duration of Domination is short.

Revelation Battlecruiser

The sister to the Rapture, the Revelation is also a support capital, and has all the combat characteristics you’d expect. Overall, the Revelation is the middle child, largely ignored by players. The Mothership can colonize and has better support abilities, and the offensive potential of the Rapture is also better than anything the Revelation can offer.

In fact, the only thing the Revelation has worth noting is its Ultimate Ability, known as Provoke Hysteria. This is used against planets, and it decreases planet health by 40% and population by 30% over its duration, no questions asked. This can be used to hit-and-run poorly defended secondary colonies, or it can be used in support of siege frigates, making their job much easier.

The Revelation’s other three abilities are a grab bag. Offensively, it has Reverie, which disables a target ship for a long duration. This is great for stunning an enemy capital ship or support cruiser, as it lasts long enough to actually put the target out of the fight. Reverie will be broken however, if enough damage is focused on the target, so this is not good for disabling vessels you are actively trying to destroy.

The other two support abilities are Guidance and Clairvoyance, both of which are forgettable. Guidance is a buff that can be targeted on any friendly ship with an anti-matter pool. It reduces ability cooldown by 40%. This is substantial, but the downside is that since abilities cost anti-matter, using this will quickly drain a vessel’s anti-matter pool. Clairvoyance is an ability that grants you vision of a planetary system for a long duration, allowing you to see what is happening in real time. It is a good scouting tool, but since scout ships are so cheap, it is far from a must-have.

This post is part of the series: Sins of a Solar Empire Ship Guides

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/SinsOfASolarEmpire

Go To

Sins of a Solar Empire is an RT4X game, fusing both Real-Time Strategy and 4X gameplay into one package. It was released on February 2008 to wide acclaim.

There are three factions in the game. There's the Trader Emergency Coalition, a semi-cohesive organization of human worlds who have banded together to try to defend their worlds from aggression, using Kinetic Weapons, heavy armor and Macross Missile Massacres. There's the Advent, transhumans who were exiled by the traders' ancestors many years ago for tampering with Psychic Powers, Crystal Spires and Togas and Frickin' Laser Beams, and are now back for Revenge. And there's the Vasari, Scary Dogmatic Aliens who once ruled a huge interstellar empire, but whose worlds have been gradually swallowed by.. something. Every ship sent to investigate this menace has disappeared, except for one ship which returned with its crew driven mad. The remnants of a Vasari colony, now surviving as nomadic Planet Looters, have fled to this corner of the galaxy, leaving warning buoys behind them.. and watching in dismay as those buoys wink out, one by one. All while the humans, who they initially thought would be easy targets, dragged them down into a Hopeless War.

Sounds like an interesting potential plot, right?—Gray and Grey Morality, possible Eldritch Abominations, who knows what else. Unfortunately, the story basically ends there. You can set up a multiplayer match vs. AI or a multiplayer match vs other people, but there's no single-player campaign. However, there is abundant backstory, very dedicated to showing that each of the 3 main races has committed sins of their own and are now paying for them (hence the title).

The game was designed from the ground up to be playable on a wide spectrum of hardware configurations, including ones most of its contemporaries would write off as 'obsolete'; this didn't hurt sales by any means. It was also free of Copy Protection, making headlines at a time when invasive, unnecessary DRM was turning people off Spore. A pirated copy was essentially a fully-functional demo, allowing you to skirmish against AI but not to play over the Internet; you needed to buy the game for that. Those who held pro-DRM attitudes predicted failure, but as of September 2008 Sins had sold 500,000 copies, recouping its $1M development costs months before any of the $10 Expansion Packs came out. (There's no hard data as to how and why this game managed to be financially successful, but you can guess what most tropers think. Having said that, Ironclad Games eventually switched to Steam, and more pertinently Valve Anti-Cheat, as their distribution method.)

Speaking of expansion packs, there were two 'micro-expansions' released: 'Entrenchment' added new ships and starbases; 'Diplomacy' added more diplomatic options, including a (theoretically) non-military win condition. A third was supposedly going to contain a single-player campaign.. but quietly evaporated before being Un-Cancelled (without a campaign) in March 2011 as 'Rebellion,' a full-sized expansion in which players of each faction can choose loyalty or rebellion, and gain access to new tech trees and ship classes in doing so. Rebellion is a standalone expansion, with a discount for those who owned the original installment. Finally, for those who don't care to fork out more money, there is a robust and thriving Game Mod scene, dedicated to doing anything from providing factions from pre-existing sci-fi franchises to graphical updates to full game overhauls to code optimization so that the game doesn't crash as much. That's right, fans love their Sins so much that they are voluntarily debugging it.

This game provides examples of:

• The Alliance: The TEC are an interesting example. They started off as this after replacing the reeling federation of the Trade Order, slowly centralised towards a second Federation / Hegemonic Empire, then fractured again as of Rebellion as individual systems disagreed on war policy.
• Aliens are Bastards: The Vasari, especially their ancestors 10,000 years ago, the Vasari Empire in proper.
  • Exaggerated with the Vasari Loyalists since they have no compunction about destroying planets whole. Averted with the Vasari Rebels, who wish to cooperate with other factions for survival.
• Amazon Brigade: The Advent appear to have most of their ships commanded by women, since they rely heavily on Psychic Powers and female Advent tend to have a greater aptitude for this than males.
• Anti-Hero / Anti-Villain: All three sides, really. The Traders, united as the TEC, are fighting the Vasari for their home and their survival, and the Vasari are only attacking the TEC in the first place for resources to ensure their survival against the unknown threat. The Advent meanwhile are fighting the TEC in order to seek revenge for the wrongs the Trade Order had inflicted upon them a millennium ago, and the TEC are again fighting back in self-defense. The Advent and Vasari are only fighting one another because the whole mess got started in the same region of space.
  • In Rebellion it gets even more complicated: The TEC Loyalists are still fighting everybody out of self-defense, which they've taken to the extremes in fortification and isolationism. The TEC Rebels on the other hand are fighting offensively against both the Vasari and Advent to seek revenge for the wrongs they both inflicted on the Traders during the war, as well against as the TEC Loyalists for the crime of seeking peace with the unforgivable aliens and deviants. The Advent Loyalists are still on their crusade against the TEC for the same reasons they always were and are still defending against the Vasari, while the Advent Rebels considered the Loyalists to have been made impure by the war, and hence want to cleanse them..violently, apart from defending themselves against everyone else. The Vasari Loyalists still have their original goal of acquiring resources and continuing to flee from the advancing unknown threat, and have only gotten more desperate and extreme in their resource-stripping measures. Now they are beginning to desert and destroy planets, becoming a fully mobilized Exodus Fleet once more, and trampling over anyone who stands in their way. The Vasari Rebels meanwhile have seen potential in the humans, and want to try and unite them by diplomacy (or intimidation) to make a coherent response against the unknown threat, whatever that may entail. Though, understandably, the humans don't completely trust them.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Each faction uses a different flavor of phlebotinum - the TEC use Tim Taylor Technology, the Vasari use Nanomachines, and the Advent use Psychic Powers.
• The Atoner: The Advent Rebels.
• Attack Drone: Advent strike craft are piloted remotely, by telekinetic specialists called 'Anima'. The highest level Anima are formidable psychics respected even by the ruling Coalescences, and their strikecraft, while individually very light, outnumber those of the other factions and have very high total firepower. Anima serve aboard all Advent carriers, titans and starbases, and as such these units can field more strikecraft squadrons than their equivalents in other factions.
• Awakening the Sleeping Giant: The TEC in the backstory. With their formidable industrial base (they can start trading earlier than the others, giving them a higher cash flow) they are quite capable of pulling this off in-game as well.
• Badass Beard: The TEC narrator / Kol battleship captain sports one
• Badass Normal: In a World.. of nanomachine-wielding aliens and psychic transhumans, the un-augmented, baseline humans of the TEC hold their own.
• Black Box: None of the three sides really know how Phase Inhibitors work. The TEC and Advent just steal them, while the Vasari use nanomachines to copy them.
• Blue and Orange Morality: The Advent Rebels. In taking the Unity back to its utilitarian 'true purpose' (humanity as one big gestalt consciousness), most of their signature abilities revolve around their people committing suicide to empower allies or destroy enemies. This isn't quite as horrific as it sounds, though, because they also routinely bring people back from the dead.
• Body Backup Drive: The Advent motherships can transfer the spirits of experienced crews from destroyed ships into “willing vessels” aboard other ships. Whether the minds of the receiving crew share their bodies, are reduced to observers or are simply erased isn’t stated.
• Church Militant: The Advent; formerly Actual Pacifists, now on a crusade of revenge for their unprovoked exile.
• Cloning Blues: Because of their dramatically reduced population, the Vasari are forced to clone their best commanders on a regular basis in order to field more capital ships.
• Create Your Own Villain: What the Trade Order didn't realise - even a thousand years after the original Advent were violently exiled, a Hive Mind remembers. This has scarred large numbers of the Advent even down to the present day, and while some of them seem calm and collected, others are outright psychotic.
  • And said Advent's genocide-war against the peaceful Trade Order, combined with the ransacking of the Vasari pushed half of the TEC into seeking nothing less than the eradication of any invaders, to the point of waging war against their fellow TEC members if they try to stop them.
  Ragnarov Titan: 'We'll destroy every last one of them!'
• Crystal Spires and Togas: Split, with the Advent having the crystal spires and the Vasari having the togas.
• Defenseless Transports: Carrier Cruisers and Constructors don't have any weapons of their own, but capital ships that carry Strike Craft are armed to Battlestar levels. Colonizers are technically armed, but so lightly that you'd be better off using Scout Frigates for combat.
• Dissonant Serenity: Those of the Advent unit voices who aren't audibly seething tend to exhibit this.
  Guardian: 'You shall come no closer.' (cue psychic Knockback)
• The Dreaded:
  • Whatever the Vasari has been running away from for the last few thousand years which also wiped out their empire.
  • In-game, basically anytime a massive fleet shows up, whether your fleet invading the enemy planets, or the enemy invading you. Can be really brutal if you're caught unprepared for an invasion, and either lack a fleet to fight them off with, or your main fleet is on the other side of the map.
• Eldritch Abomination: Whatever's chasing the Vasari eats planets for breakfast and Mind Rapes or Brown Notes the survivors to insanity. That's all we know about it..
• The Empire: The Vasari, until they were forced to go on the run from an enemy that managed to wipe out their entire fleet (except for one badly damaged ship that came back with its crew gone stark raving mad).
• Enemy Mine: The TEC Rebel Truce Among Rogues upgrade causes pirate fleets to leave their territory alone, and a further upgrade allows their Radio Stations to hire pirate ships.
  • Vasari Rebels see Humanity as a Worthy Opponent, and want to bring them along as they flee the Eldritch Abomination chasing them-or failing that, stand with them in a Last Stand.
• Energy Weapons: Used by everyone, with the Advent emphasizing them almost exclusively, the Vasari using them heavily in conjunction with their signature Phase Missiles, and the TEC using them as secondary weapons to supplement their kinetic firepower. Both Frickin' Laser Beams and actual plasma-beam styles exist, in every faction.
• Excuse Plot: The game lore is used only to justify each faction's technology/look. The developers promised a full campaign in an expansion pack, but.. it sort of didn't happen.
• Expy: The Vasari, as depicted by character portraits, appear uncannily similar to the Protoss. This carries over to gameplay as well in terms of them being the “elite” faction.
  • However, the history of the Vasari is similar to that of the Rakata from Knights of the Old Republic. Both were alien conquers who ruled over a galaxy-spanning, multitude-enslaving empire which eventually collapsed from within.
  • The Advent are quite similar to the Aeon Illuminate, as they are semi-theocratic with Crystal Spires and Togas theme, and are a Knight Templar faction who want to eliminate the TEC who wronged them in the past.
  • The Vasari Kultorask Titan is basically a skeletal version of the Amarr Empire's Avatar Titan.
• Fan Fic Magnet: The Excuse Plot. It's so vague you can fill in the holes with pretty much anything.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • The TEC exiled the Advent's ancestors because they considered psychic powers to be 'deviant'.
  • It's also a gameplay mechanic. During the calculations for diplomatic relations, there's a hard-coded 'Racial Inclination' that gives you a positive boost for being the same species as another faction and a negative for being a different one. Some diplomatic research can reduce this penalty.
• Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon: The Marza Dreadnought and TEC Rebel Titan are built around huge mass driver cannons. In the former's case, it's twice the length of the rest of the ship. With the Titan, it makes up the entire fuselage, with a control bridge somewhere in back and turrets dotted around the length of the railgun's barrel.
• Foreshadowing: The Diplomacy intro mentions 'dissension' in the TEC between those who want to launch a massive counterattack and those who fear this is 'going too far' and would rather stay on the defensive while they try for peace. It would seem that the latter became official policy (TEC Loyalists), while the hawks eventually seceded and became the TEC Rebels.
• Gravity Master: The Vasari have gravity manipulation as one of their many advanced technological capabilities.
• Grey and Gray Morality: A major theme.

  • The TEC are generally quite sympathetic ^note , but kicked the Advent's ancestors off their planetfor basically being different (it is noted that most rediscovered colonies followed a surprisingly similar culture, whereas the Advent didn't) and the pictures that accompany this section of the intro movie have some distinctly Nazi undertones. Not to mention that they are alarmingly quick to resort to Nuke 'em, and to subjugating neutral Trader colonies that aren't yet part of the Coalition.
  • The Advent were a peaceful society seeking spiritual escape after the great wars of the past, but their exile darkened their racial psyche towards Revenge, leaving their crusade to reclaim their homeworld (and punish their oppressors) open to interpretation either as the actions of Well-Intentioned Extremists or Knights Templar.
  • The Vasari ruled their empire by oppression and slavery (if you've developed space travel they'll enslave your race; if you haven't then you're not a threat, so you'll be given minimal status in the empire as a 'valued citizen'). But these guys lost their whole empire to some unknown adversary, and were forced to live on the run for 10.000 years, so it's kinda hard to not feel sorry for them.
  • The only seemingly truly evil presence in the systems is the ominipresent Space Pirates. Add in the fact that owing to a certain bug/programming overlook that makes them incredibly powerful and hard to beat, they can and will be a player character's worst enemy both in and out of character.

  • Now expanded in Rebellion:
    • Loyalist TEC wants to ride out the war through superior defensive capabilities, diplomatic maneuvering, and economic superiority - even if that means ceding entire systems and leaving their populations enslaved or mind controlled; Rebel TEC wants to crush everyone in expansionist warfare and react violently against what they consider to be 'defeatist,' 'collaborationist', or other similarly treasonous philosophies which involve dialogue or reconciliation - however, they are notwithouttheir reasons for this mindset.
    • Loyalist Advent wish to continue getting revenge on the TEC at any cost and spread their utopian collectivist hive mind throughout colonized space; Rebel Advent want to sue for peace with the TEC as the war is leading the Unity away from their true purpose and believe that an internal purge is necessary in order to put the Advent on the right path once again.
    • Loyalist Vasari want to strip mine the local systems using enslaved humans workers and make a run for the next region of space before the unknown threat arrives; Rebel Vasari want to do the same thing but bring humanity with them, even if preparing the disorganized TEC for the journey costs them time and forces both to make a desperate stand together against the unknown enemy - it probably won't end well, but apparently humanity has proven themselves to be worth the risk.
• Guttural Growler: The Vasari are an entire race of bad Revolver Ocelot impersonators.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Both the TEC Rebels and the Advent Loyalists; the former, hateful of the cruelty of xenos from years of war, is just as merciless as the xenos were, and the latter has grown to Revenge Before Reason levels.
• Humans Are Warriors: The TEC, and to a lesser extent, the Advent.
• Hopeless War: Vast swathes of Trader space have been ruined, the conflict spreads ever wider in search of resources, splinter factions have used the chaos to set up powerful pirate groups everywhere, diplomacy is difficult due to past grudges and the decentralised nature of the three sides, rebellion has fractured the warring powers even more, and all the while the Vasari's unknown enemy draws closer..
• Invading Refugees: What the Vasari essentially are. They've been running away from something for the last few thousand years, stripping any planets they come across for resources while continuing to flee. Then they run into TEC worlds, and find out that this new enemy isn't going to be a pushover.
• ISO Standard Human Spaceship: TEC ships.
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: The TEC are predominantly reliant on kinetics and explosive ordnance, as their few energy weapons are mostly inferior to those of the Vasari and Advent. Any ammunition costs that may be associated with the use of lots and lots of plain old guns are invisible to the player because of the superiority and efficiency of TEC logistics and manufacturing abilities, and the brute force of these weapons allow them to match the superior technology of the other factions. Advent also use kinetics for planet bombardment, although for ship-to-ship combat they rely entirely on energy weapons.
• Lady Land: Downplayed with the Advent. All the voice samples you hear in-game are female, and women are stated to be over-represented in high ranks, but male acolytes and leaders can still be seen in the artwork. This imbalance is stated to be because their social structure is based on Psychic Powers, and Advent females tend to be the stronger psychics.
• Little Miss Badass: Several Advent ship captains, particularly the one for the Rapture-class battlecruiser, sound about 6 years old (perhaps due to the Advent Hive Mind making them Wise Beyond Their Years). It's actually quite frightening.
• Living Memory: One of the perks of the Advent Unity, both in the backstory and in several in-game abilities.
• Magic from Technology: The Advent's Psychic Powers are implied to have been created through technological means (neural and chemical Bio-Augmentation as well as cybernetic enhancement and integration) and honed constantly over a millennium to the point where Clarke's Third Law can be invoked by the other human faction, the Traders/TEC. The Unity have become rather incredibly dependent on it though, and use for everything from early warning (which the TEC just achieve through plain old electronic technology) to holding their ships together under fire (which the TEC achieve by just having more armor).
• Magic Genetics: The Vasari tailor their biochemistry to better suit the worlds they (temporarily) settle down on, for example, Vasari on volcanic planets are modified to breathe sulphur.
• Magitek: The Advent have 'PsiTech' devices, which, as the name suggests, run on Psychic Powers rather than proper fuel.
• Magnetic Weapons: Both railguns and Gauss cannons are employed by the TEC. Their defense platforms use Gauss cannons as their main weapon, and the Rebels' Ragnarov Titan uses them as its secondary weapons, while the Kol Battleship has an antimatter-powered ability confusingly called 'Gauss Rail Gun'. Full TEC railguns however are their rarest and most powerful weapons, seen only in two cases. The first is the giant and incredibly powerful main weapon on the Ragnarov, which has the highest base damage of any single ship-mounted weapon in the game before using its deadly antimatter-powered abilities, and the second is their factional superweapon, the Novalith Cannon, which is a massive orbital railgun used to project nuclear warheads across interplanetary or even interstellar distances to wipe out enemy colonies.
• Mega-Corp: Faction names suggest that some TEC 'players' are these, whereas others appear to be local system governments
• Mental Fusion: The concept behind the Advent's religion, 'the Unity'. Interestingly, their Hive Mind is more compartmentalised than most examples, with individual 'Coalescences' handling different factions and battlegroups.
• Mind over Matter: Various Advent special abilities work through telekinesis; the most impressive of which would be the Iconus Guardian's Repulsion, which can toss all enemy ships (except for strikecraft) out of its effect radius and keep pushing them back, creating a barrier that can prevent short-ranged vessels from attack and bunching them up for easy targeting by various area-effect abilities. Even capital ships and titans can be shoved around helplessly by the ability, and Guardians can thus be used to trap them in bad situations. The Halcyon Carrier has a similar ability that targets strikecraft, Telekinetic Push, which also damages them and leaves them disabled for a while. Finally, the Advent even have Mundane Utility uses for telekinesis, and use it to improve their resource extraction.
• Mind Rape: A lot of the Advent special abilities are based on mind control, from the Domina Subjugators who psychically paralyze the crews of enemy ships, to the Revelation Battlecruisers that can cause planetary populations to go insane and start killing each other. High-level Rapture Battlecruisers can simply take over enemy frigates and cruisers using an active ability to dominate their crews' minds, while the Advent Loyalists' Coronata Titan can empower its weapons fire to inflict extreme fear on enemy crews and cause them to defect. And finally, at high levels, the Coronata can instantly take control of whole planets even when they're defended by loyalty-enforcing starbases.
• Mile-Long Ship: The capital ships may be this, although it's unclear exactly how large the physical dimensions of any ship in the game is. The titans are more likely to be this, with the TEC Rebels' Ragnarov being perhaps the longest ship in the game (mostly composed of a giant railgun, like the UNSC ships from Halo), and the Advent Titans being mile-tall and the Vasari Loyalists' Vorastra being mile-wide. The Vasari Rebels' Kultorask is perhaps the largest ship overall in terms of maximum dimensions, being shaped like a giant spiky sideways umbrella whose handle is its tail. All capital ships and titans have crews of thousands, although for the TEC and Advent this ranges from just over 1000 (for specialist capital ships) to about 5000 (for titans). For the Vasari, capital ships have 'crews' of around 10000, and titans carry a whopping 130000 - most of which is the remnant Vasari populace, and not actually military crew, seeing as the Vasari have been on the run for the last ten millennia and live mostly aboard spaceships in a Battlestar Galactica sort of manner.
• The Mole: TEC have La Résistance and merchant spies, the Advent have local converts, and the Vasari try to root out both of the above by the very Orwellian use of fake sympathizers.
• Muggles Do It Better: Faced with the AdventandVasari, and without any warships to speak of, the Trade Order fell apart. The Trader Emergency Coalition that rose from it's ashes however, managed to, through industrial know-how, sheer grit, and good ol' fashioned firepower, gain the upper hand against both of it's enemies in canon.
• N.G.O. Superpower: The Pirates, who start the game with a well-fortified base and periodically send out raiding parties on whoever has the highest bounties. If you don't put in the effort to smack them down regularly, they can become powerful enough to hold off if not outright destroy player fleets while easily razing planetary populations.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Averted by TEC ships, which are just a name and a descriptor, like 'Protev Colony Frigate', 'Percheron Light Carrier' or 'Kol Battleship'. But played very much straight by the Vasari - their ships have rather more dangerous sounding names. Such as Kanrak Assailant, Sivuskras Ruiner, Kortul Devastator and Vulknoras Desolator. The Advent are in-between - their frigates have bland names along the line of '-something- Vessel', such as the Seeker Vessel, Missionary Vessel, Illuminator Vessel, etc. Their cruisers have slightly more Vasari style naming pattern - Talion Savior, Destra Crusader, Iconus Guardian, etc. Their capital ships are TEC style names plus descriptors, but the names themselves tend to symbols - Radiance Battleship, Halcyon Carrier, Progenitor Mothership, etc.
• Nanomachines: The Vasari's forte, along with their gravity-manipulation and genetic engineering technologies.
• No Transhumanism Allowed: Averted by the Advent, enforced with prejudice by the Trade Order / TEC. Speculation abounds as to why the Trade Order felt this way, such as possible bad experiences with transhumans during the 'great wars' that happened way back in the universe's timeline.
• Obliviously Evil/Obviously Evil: The Vasari fall somewhere between these categories. Their 'Empire' research tree has the 'colonization/civilian' research sub-tree named 'Oppression' and their Diplomacy tree is called 'Manipulation' (their Envoys even gloat about 'deception' in their unit responses). This may be a hold over from their Evil Empire days, or it might be the only way they know how to survive and move fast enough to outrun whatever is chasing them.
• One-Federation Limit: The TEC, although argument could be made that they are more of a Hegemonic Empire (albeit a fractured one as of Rebellion). Vasari are the game's obligatory empire (of the vestigal variety) and the Advent are an interesting variation on the Hive Mind
• Planet Looters: The Vasari, although nowadays it's driven by necessity rather than colonialism.
  • The Vasari Loyalist faction in Rebellion has this as its top-level research, allowing them to completely destroy a planet they control for a massive resource boost. The same research chain lets them use their Titan as their capital and their capital ships as both kinds of research station and for tax income, meaning they don't have to build structures at all except to build reinforcements.
• Psychic Powers: The Advent use them for everything from interplanetary communication to remote piloting their fighters in combat.
• Reconcile the Bitter Foes: Attempted by all sides in Diplomacy, presumably with some localised success, but still ongoing as of Rebellion. Official policy for the Vasari Rebels (who want to form a united front against the Ultimate Evil chasing their race), although they aren't above using Gunboat Diplomacy to achieve it.
• The Remnant: The Vasari as we know them, powerful though they may be, are the desperate and shattered survivors of their once glorious empire.
  • One of the militia factions you can find occupying a planet are the Aluxian Refugees, the last tattered vestiges of the old Aluxi Dynasty whose collapse heralded the creation of the TEC. Being that they only got mentioned once in the opening narration of the vanilla game, their significance is quite likely lost on most players.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here!: The Vasari Exodus Fleet began as a single colony which invoked this trope. They've been invoking it constantly for 10,000 years, and it's even factored into Vasari gameplay, with their emphasis on phase space manipulation and mobility. The Loyalists can strip down their own planets and go completely mobile with their titan being their capital, and the Rebels can even make whole starbases jump between the planets and stars as if they were normal spaceships. The trope is also very common in gameplay, as retreating whenever a battle is looking unwinnable or becoming too costly is a good idea for any faction, and is indeed vital to preserving high-value assets such as capital ships and titans - and various ships and structures have abilities that can help them and their fleets get away or prevent their enemies from escaping.
• Shiny-Looking Spaceships: Advent and Vasari ships.
• Shout-Out: Just look at the achievements.
  • The new supercapital ship class in Rebellion is called Titan. Now what other game calls its largest starships Titans too..?
• Sinister Minister: There's one leading the rally in the intro movie where the Trade Order decide to exile the Advent's ancestors.
  • And then there's the Vasari (who in some artwork wear priestly robes, and are definitely sinister). Since they're this game's Evil Empire, it is to be expected.
  • The Advent have also been sliding further and further down this path as the war goes on, to the point that some of the Coalescences have had a Heel Realization and formed a rebel faction fighting for redemption.
• Sins of Our Fathers: The whole premise of the game.
• Space Elves: Technically, the Advent are transhumans and not a true alien species of course, but they exhibit a few aspects of the trope, what with the psychic link and racial 'hivemind', an inscrutable and alien (to baseline humans) ideology focused on 'unity' and 'harmony' which does not interfere with a very real capacity to wage brutal war, a strong Crystal Spires and Togas and Magitek aesthetic and the central role of women in their society (common to quite a few varieties of elves in fiction).
• Space Nomads: The Vasari are a nomadic race running from some nameless threat, and while they colonize planets in the game, lore-wise this is only temporary before they pack up and leave again. The Vasari Loyalists in Rebellion take this even further, having the in-game option to move all facilities onto their capital ships and Titan and abandon planets altogether.
• Spikes of Villainy: Vasari ships to a degree, though the Pirates go nuts with the concept.
• Telepathy: All Advent, either via natural psychic talent, or psi-boosting implants. Almost all humans are capable of receiving telepathy - those who aren't are called 'Silent Ones' and are treated as the Red Headed Step Child of Advent society.
• Transhuman: The Advent and the Vasari are both technologically enhanced over their biological baselines, in different ways.
• Ultimate Evil: The unknown enemy hunting the Vasari. Its precise nature is the source of much Wild Mass Guessing among fans.
• Used Future: TEC ships, due to almost all of them being re-purposed from civilian vessels for the war. The Kol Battleship and their Titans are perhaps their only exceptions besides their strikecraft. Prior to the Kol, the Sova Carrier was pretty much their only combat ship, intended to fight against pirate raiders, and it had been in service for centuries prior to the Vasari invasion.
• Vestigial Empire: The Vasari once ruled a great interstellar empire that was destroyed by some unknown menace. The Vasari you see in the game are the descendents (and tag-alongs) of a single remote colony that autonomously decided to pack up and leave. They still follow many of their old imperial practices, such as 'Locking down' a planet and enslaving the populace, but these days it's more because it's the only way they can work fast enough to survive rather than to build an empire. See We Will Use Manual Labor in the Future below.
• The Worf Barrage: In the game's lore, the Vasari sent their entire fleet after whatever it was that was eating its way through their empire. Only one ship made it back, heavily damaged and with the few surviving crew driven insane.
• We Will Use Manual Labour in the Future: Vasari policy towards their empire's 'valued citizens' consists of sitting in orbit with a BFG pointed at the planet, while the enslaved indigenous population mines resources for them or else.
  • The Advent, on the other hand, avert this trope by using remote-control strike craft instead of piloted ones (which actually makes sense - saving weight on life support systems and the like).
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: All three factions to an extent. The Vasari literally destroy whole planets while running from an enemy that practically wiped out their race. The Advent were just a peaceful collectivist/religious/hive-minded society on a desert planet - and then along came the Trade Order, who banished them from their homes for a thousand years for 'deviancy.' The TEC (or at least their Rebel faction) want to wipe out the aliens and 'deviants', but only because they nearly wiped them out.
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: All three Rebel factions, with the Advent and Vasari rebels on a slightly lighter end of the scale than their Loyalist counterparts, and the TEC rebels on a slightly darker one.

• A Commander Is You:
  • TEC Loyalist: A mixture of Economists, Industrial, Brute Force and Spammer though they are switching to Turtle by late game. Their manufacturing ability is practically unsurpassed and coupled with their strong economy and the fact that the TEC have some of the least expensive frigates and cruisers of any faction, they can easily build massive fleets of extremely durable warships and overpower enemies with sheer numbers. Oh, the Loyalists also get their superweapon earlier then the other factions and have reduced construction costs for said superweapon. They also get a lot of defensive bonuses, their Ankylon Titan specializes in fleet support and are able to deploy two starbases around a planet and five around a star. They lack the extra weapon technology the rebels have, but make up for it with many defensive technology which adds a lot of bonus in owned systems. With Outlaw Sector installed, planetary militia will get these bonuses as well.
  • TEC Rebel: Like Loyalist forces a mixture of Economists, Industrial, Brute Force and Spammer while at the same time introducing elements of Guerrilla. They are capable of allying with the Pirates, using pirate warships and utilizing milita forces. They still retain much of the same economic and military characteristics of the TEC Loyalists, with the same cheap, tough warships. Their Ragnarov Titan also packs the absolute highest firepower of any ship in the game, being the super-offensive philosophical opposite to the super-defensive Loyalist Ankylon.
  • Advent Loyalist: Mixture of Technical, Loyal and Researchers. They are capable of advancing through their Tech Treevery quickly and their ships excel in long range firepower but lack durability; their ships have powerful shields but very weak armor and hulls. They get access to culture early and are more proficient in its use. They turn into Ranger and pushes their Technical focus even further by late game as their technology focuses more on weapon damage rather than survivability or staying power the rebels do. Their Coronata Titan is capable of mind-controlling entire planets.
  • Advent Rebel: Same as the Loyalist but adds Spammer to the mix. They get a research ability that allows them to respawn destroyed frigates and cruisers. Their Eradica Titan packs a lot of firepower, is able to heal itself by cannibalizing other ships which also can be used on reanimated temporary ships from the rebel's technology and when it does get killed, it will become invulnerable and continue wreaking havoc for two minutes before going down. With Outlaw Sector installed, the militia ships give them a lot more to work with.
  • Vasari Loyalist: Elitists, Rangers and Espionage. The Vasari tend to have fewer, but more expensive units that have extremely hardened hulls. They have extra upgrades for their Pulse and Wave weapons, which are generally the most hard hitting weapons in the Vasari arsenal. Their ships tend to use Phase Missile technology, which have the possibility of completely bypassing the shields of enemy ships. The Vasari Loyalists can generate income with their capital ships and can set their Vorastra Titan as a mobile capital world. They can also completely drain planets of resources, leaving dead husks behind.
  • Vasari Rebels: Also Elitists, Rangers and Espionage. They pack the same powerful but expensive ships as the Vasari Loyalists, and go even further with upgrading their Phase Missile technology. Instead of focusing completely on self-mobilization, they get a lot of abilities that allow them to support their allies more effectively as well as making for powerful offensive tools - such as their capability to add jump engines to their already-mobile Orkulus Starbases and effectively convert them into very powerful spaceships. Other than their upgraded Phase Missile technology, they mostly get defensive upgrades compared to the Loyalist counterpart. Their Kultorask Titan is more of a fleet support ship than an all-out combat titan, but is still capable of heavy offensive power and is very hard to kill thanks to its abilities.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: The CPU players taunt you when they invade your planets. Especially painful if they have a large invasion fleet, and you either have a meager fleet (possibly as a result of a failed invasion of your own which cost you a lot of ships, or you're focusing on research instead of building a military force), are being besieged by another player/CPU in another planet, or the planet they invade is really far away from your own forces, and reinforcements will take a while to get to the besieged planet. However, the enemy will use the same taunts even if they're sending their fleet to its doom against your most heavily fortified planet.
• Alpha Strike: Bombers specialise in this, made all the more dangerous by the fact that their supposed counters can rarely destroy them before they reach their target (flak frigates are too slow to keep them in range, and the coding for fighters means they always 'flyby' targets rather than chasing them, and neither can destroy bombers in a single pass). The best counters are Kol flak burst, Halcyon TK Push, or possibly phasing a vanguard of flak frigates into the gravity well before having the rest of your fleet follow.
• Anarchy Is Chaos: One planet attribute in Forbidden Worlds is 'Anarchic Society' and is completely negative. Tax income, trade income, ship build speed, ship build cost, culture spread, and max allegiance all take negative hits.
• Apocalypse How: Class 2 constantly happens.
• Arbitrary Head Count Limit: Played straight for the most part. The exceptions are the Advent Rapture and TEC Corsev battlecruisers, which have special abilities that allow you to steal non-capital enemy ships. On large maps, the game can start to get a little choppy and slow if there's a large number of ships. On larger maps you can actually run into the max fleet limit quite early.
• Are We There Yet?: Upon selecting a just-constructed Advent Mothership: 'All shall join the Unity, in time.. Is it time?'
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Vasari phase missiles have a chance to bypass enemy shields and directly strike the hull, potentially destroying vessels without having to deplete their shields. This has caused balancing issues with the Advent (who favour shields over hull more than the other races). How to fix this is a common debate online, as the Obvious Rule Patch giving Advent a (relatively small) chance to block phase missiles in their own culture is generally considered inadequate.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • The AI in this game is not the brightest bulb in the fridge. Instead of sacrificing its fleet to protect its planets, it will happily sacrifice planets to protect its fleet, thus allowing you to attrition it to death. It rarely builds planet-damaging bombers; if you do, you will almost always out-DPS it. If it loses all its ship factories, it will not demolish old buildings to make new factories either. Developer updates have alleviated some problems (such as the highly-annoying practice of the AI jumping to your world just as you jump to theirs) but not all of them, and it's possible that the continued absence of a single-player campaign is largely due to the size of the overhauls that would be needed for the AI.
  • Other strategic errors include poor planning when it comes to planet specializations, as they base them more on their distance from the front lines than exploiting local bonuses (e.g. to build rates). Superweapon targets are also random unless the shot is manually fired, often targeting strategically worthless planets or pirate bases that you might have been using as a major distraction in a system that you have no personal claim in.
  • Tactically, the AI's use and timing of special abilities is generally poor (which makes Advent-playing AI weaker than it should be because of not using and synergising said abilities to their full potential). They also won't retreat capital ships until too late, resulting in otherwise avoidable losses. Targeting priority means combat ships waste time chasing trade and refinery ships instead of strategically important non-combat structures. Pirates only leave a system they have raided once every ship and structure is demolished, but none of their ships are equipped to detect Space Mines, which results in all the pirates twiddling their thumbs in the system until you kill them off (or if you're a TEC rebel allied with them, destroy all the mines).
  • If there is a flagship present, the AI will put all their effort to focus fire on it and ignore anything else. They also never use their own flagship offensively despite it can often be a great addition to the fleet's firepower and will just send it running as soon as they are taking some shots.
  • In-universe, Novalith cannon shots and other super weapons seems to be giant dumb bombs. Once launched, they won't self-destruct or change course if the existing civilization was wiped out (or colonised by YOUR people!) during the missile's painfully long travel time.
• Asteroid Miners:
  • The colonies you can place on resource-rich asteroids are explicitly mining colonies, with a population and development cap to reflect it.
  • This game plays the trope well past its logical extreme, with asteroids being the only source of metal and crystal. Planet mining is apparently a thing of the past.
• Astronomic Zoom: Rightfully a touted part of the game. Zooming between a close-up of a single bomber and assessing the position of your forces over different solar systems at a glance, is a press of a button away.
• Author Tract: A downplayed example with Forbidden Worlds planet bonuses. Certain types of societies give different bonuses/ disadvantages, but some are undoubtedly better than others. For example, Free Market Society gives positive bonuses for all planet attributes, while Anarchic Society does the opposite.
• The Battlestar: Many examples among each side's capital ships, from battleships with strikecraft capability to full carriers that - in the case of the TEC's Sova-class - even look like aircraft carriers.
• Beam Spam:
  • The Advent's warships in general. The Halcyon Carrier capital ship carries up to 12 drone squadrons each containing 7 beam-armed bombers in addition to the 8 heavier beam cannons mounted on the ship itself. Add Aeria Drone Hosts and any Advent player fielding over 30 bomber squadrons can 'light up' a target with an Alpha Strike composed of hundreds of focused beams. Or if they choose to go with frigates, their Illuminator Vessels can deploy 3 heavy beam cannons each, one in front and one on either side, with tactics that involve charging forward into the middle of an enemy fleet and putting on an impressive and highly destructive light show.
  • The Vasari, on the other hand, use Pulse Wave Cannons, which are generally used by Capital Ships. A variant of these beam cannons are used for bombarding planets.
• BFG: All superweapons can be considered as one of this. Except the Advent Deliverance Engine, which is essentially a Big Freaking Mind-Control Device. Also, the Marza Dreadnought's Siege Cannon.
  • The Ragnarov Titan takes this Up to Eleven as nothing but a giant cannon with gun placements on the side and engines on the back of it.
• Boarding Party: One of the TEC Corsev Battlecruiser's abilities.
• Bottomless Magazines: TEC ships fire missiles and cannon shells, and some Vasari ships fire phase missiles, but they all have unlimited ammunition. The TEC justify this by the smooth background operation of their logistics and supply chain working to keep your forces supplied at all times, while the Vasari ships that use phase missiles probably just nano-manufacture them on-board.
• But Thou Must!: Locking teams before the game begins more or less nullifies the impact of missions: you still get offered them, and still accrue ire when you ignore them, but teams are locked, forcing Teeth-Clenched Teamwork! There is still an incentive to keep on your allies' good sides though, because high Relationship Values grant access to 'pacts', each of which improve both players' ships or economy in some way and each faction offers unique ones.
• Casual Danger Dialog: As mentioned above, the Advent who aren't furious are eerily calm, even under fire.
• Cherry Tapping: You get achievements for feats such as not using Capital ships, not researching any military tech, and not using strike craft.
• Chummy Commies: The planetary modifier 'Ordered Society' from Forbidden Worlds improves mining output and taxes but penalizes culture, allegiance and trade income. Definitely preferable to many other 'Society' modifiers and a boon in certain circumstances. In a bit of commentary on the nature of such societies, the icon for this trait is a honeycomb.
• Cool Ship: Everything, in it's own way. Well.. except maybe the refinery ships.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard : Literally, there is an option to allow the AI to cheat by giving it extra money and resources.
• Combined Energy Attack: The Loyalist Advent Coronata Titan has this as an ability, called 'Unity Mass'. Every friendly ship in it's range adds 50 (plus 5-per-level) damage to it.
• Cosmetically Different Sides: A good example of how to use a Tech Tree and a myriad of subtle unit differences to avert this trope without introducing units with radically different functions.
• Converging-Stream Weapon: The aforementioned Unity Mass, which fires two tributary beams before firing off the Wave MotionSpirit Bomb proper.
• Corrupt Bureaucrat: A game mechanic in the Forbidden Worlds DLC. The planet attribute Planetary Corruption reduces tax income by 2.0 (potentially into the negatives) and trade income by 20%.
• Crippling Overspecialization: The TEC and Advent anti-structure ships can't target other ships, including hulking behemoths like capital ships and titans.
  • Slightly justified in that their shots are slow and unguided. It would be easy for any ship to dodge them, especially since they tend to fire at extreme ranges. This, of course, doesn't explain why they can still target Vasari Orkulus starbases, which are also able to move around, albeit more slowly than any ship.
• Cruelty Is the Only Option: The standard way to take a planet by force is to kill off the entire local population so you can then colonize it with your own people. This does lead◊ to a bit of Fridge Logic..
• Death In All Directions: Prevalent with capital ships, since they all have weapons in at least two of their four possible fire arcs, so they can engage enemies from multiple sides. In particular, Battleships (Kol, Radiance, Kortul) are built to fly directly into an enemy's firing line and start hammering at everything within reach, and the Kol is the only ship in the game with guns in all four arcs ^note , letting it quite literally do this.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: The Entrenchment expansion introduced Starbases, extremely powerful (and expensive) fortifications that can be upgraded like capital ships. The best way to deal with them? Set your fighter and bomber wings on them; they're too small for the starbase to hit and come free with your capital ships and aboard carrier cruisers.
  • This is also a favored tactic of the Advent who field more strike craft then the other factions. It's not uncommon for Advent capital ship fleets to consist almost entirely of carriers and support craft which can field dozens or even hundreds of bombers and fighters to lay waste to planetary defenses while the capital ships themselves remain safely out of the enemies reach.
• Death World: An explicitly-named planet attribute in Forbidden Worlds and is one of the few completely negative traits. The attribute lowers the max population, growth rate, tax income, and maximum allegiance.
• Deflector Shields: A very common technology in Sins; almost all combat vessels are equipped with shields, which regenerate constantly at a decent rate and can mitigate a large fraction of the damage a ship takes under focused fire (60% for Red Shirt frigates, all the way up to 75% for level 10 capital ships and titans). The only unshielded entities are strikecraft, pirate ships, and orbital structures (usually^note ). Shields are the primary defense mechanism of the Advent, whose ships have powerful shielding but light armor. The TEC on the other hand have weak shields but heavy armor, while the Vasari are in-between. Pirates meanwhile try to make up for their complete lack of shields by covering their ships in gratuitously thick armor plating, but even with this they are more fragile than the equivalent ships of the three main factions and rely essentially on the Zerg Rush to be dangerous.
• Derelict Graveyard: The 'Ship Graveyard' planet type in Stellar Phenomena. Despite containing several intact capital ships and a large space station, it's pretty much just a dead asteroid with a few metal mines.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom:
  • In Rebellion, the Vasari Loyalists can strip any planet they capture for resources, culminating in an explosion that irreversibly reduces the planet to a worthless dead asteroid.
  • Also, while it doesn't blow it up, the TEC's Novalith cannon will heavily damage a planet (repeated hits will cause whoever owns it to lose said planet, unless they have a starbase in orbit with the remote government upgrade).
  • The Shattered Moon planet type from Stellar Phenomena. Large chunks of it are still in orbit around the rest, rather beautifully
• Easy Evangelism: All sides can overthrow enemy planets this way via the 'culture' mechanic. The Advent are the most adept at this (More Than Mind Control, a genuinely better society, or a mixture of the two - you decide), and can boost it with their Deliverance Engine superweapon. The TEC however are the most overt about it, with a research option that allows them to spawn small fleets of rebels over enemy worlds (all of the fighting is taking place in Trader space, so this is basically just arming La Résistance).
• Enemy Civil War: Can occur if you set two CPU players to be the same faction but on different teams, or if two or more players are using the same faction and fighting each other. The Rebellion expansion also features this happening canonically in all of the factions.
• Enemy Exchange Program: Several abilities can cause this, such as the TEC's Corsev Battlecruiser or the Advent automatically converting a few ships of a retreating fleet. The unit's response lines don't get changed a bit, which is excusable when it's the Advent mind-control enemy crews to their side, but less so when human boarding parties adopt the voices (and abilities) of the ship they captured.
• Ethereal Choir: Due to the Advent's churchy nature, most of their 'nothing's going on' music has this. It sounds quite nice.
• Faction Calculus: Trader Emergency Coalition(Powerhouse) to Vasari Empire to Advent(Subversive).
• Fake Longevity: Quite a few of the Achievements require you to deliberately stretch a match out in order to attain them. Particularly bad offenders are the destroy 1000 Pirates in a single game, destroy 2500 strikecraft in a single game, finding all the artefacts in a single game, or researching all of a tech tree in a single game.
• Feudal Future: One of the planet attributes in Forbidden World is this. In effect, it reduces tax income, culture spread speed, and ship build speed, but also decreases ship cost and increases resources mined.
• Flying Dutchman: One of the random events in the Stellar Phenomena DLC is the appearance of a Vasari Titan from the 'Mad Dark Fleet Remnant' faction. It will appear in a random system and wander around looking for a fight. Lore-vise, its appearance raises some very disturbing questions regarding just how much time there is left before the ancient enemy that wiped out the Vasari Empire arrives in the Trader space.
• 4X: As evidenced by the 'RT4X' moniker. The base game lacked much in the way of civil development for your solar empire, as well as a staple of the 4X genre: non-military win conditions.
  • In Diplomacy they added Diplomatic victories. Oddly enough, this doesn't change much. Sure, you can gain diplomacy points and win that way, but the main way you get those points? Finish missions that have you destroy enemy ships and structures, inevitably leading to war. So yeah.. There's always the research victory.
• Fragile Speedster: Corvettes in Rebellion, which sacrifice the hull and shield points of normal frigates for speed and evasion, and carry a versatile arsenal of light weapons and a minimal crew. Somewhat subverted by strikecraft - although they are even faster and have no shields and few hull points individually, most weapons and abilities can't target them at all, and their carriers or hangars will keep rebuilding them for free using their antimatter reserves whenever they do get destroyed. Strikecraft act more as proxy weapons systems for carriers and hangars than as autonomous ships.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: The TEC recruitment poster in the Rebellion intro contains the rather amusing line 'Bring a friend - earn higher starting rank'
• Frickin' Laser Beams: Vanilla laser weapons are fired in pulses, taking a few seconds to get to the target. Inverted with 'beam' weapons, which are sustained-fire plasma/laser weapons that hit instantly.
  • There is a mod that replaces standard TEC pulse lasers with thin red beams that pulse. This changes nothing in the gameplay (although, the mod may reduce your fighter/bomber count gained in expansions), but makes it look and sound more realistic (less like a Star Wars blaster and more like pulsing hum). The mod only affects TEC lasers, though. The Advent ones still travel to target.
• Fun with Acronyms: The final Phase Missile upgrade technology on the Vasari tech tree is called NME Warheads.
• Game Mod: See here and [1] for starters.
• Gang Up on the Human: Largely averted, but can be invoked should you make teams, and both CPU players on either side of the player happen to be on the same team. And then decide to attack you at the same time. Can be painful unless you have a strong fleet, strong defenses, or a good ally.
• Glass Cannon: The long-range frigates (Javelis LRM, Kanrak Assailant and Illuminator Vessel). Lower speed and defensive stats, but more offense and quite a bit more range too. Multiplayer tactics prior to Entrenchment used to revolve around Zerg Rushing these frigates and then going to town; later balancing would make them less dominant while still being useful. There are also the Siege Frigates and Anti-Structure Cruisers. The former of which uses heavy weaponry to bombard planets from orbit, and the latter of which trash orbital structures with specialized weapons. Both classes are lightly armored and are virtually helpless when attacked. Rebellion adds in Corvettes, which pack a surprising amount of generalist firepower that can take on all sorts of targets, but are fragile and tend to suffer significant attrition in pitched battles. Finally, in the realm of capital ships, the carrier capitals (Vasari's Skirantra, TEC's Sova and Advent's Halcyon) pack the greatest firepower of all capital ships by a large margin when combining their own weapons with those of their squadrons, but are the most fragile, and are generally kept in the back lines in large fleet battles.
• Hard-Coded Hostility: The pirates (who are For the Evulz) and the planetary militias (who are lore-wise Trader colonies but will still resist the TEC - presumably they don't want to be forcibly annexed and/or conscripted into the war effort) are hostile to every faction. The pirates are especially notable; even if they are hired by you to attack someone else, they'll still engage your forces if they encounter them en route to the target.
  • The TEC Rebels get a research development that ends this hostility.
• Healing Factor: All ships repair their hulls and regenerate their shields slowly, all the time both in and out of combat. Vasari have some specific abilities which allow their ships to quickly self heal, such as Reintegration on their Enforcers and Skirmishers, and the Power Surge of the Kortul Devastator capital ship. TEC have some too, including the Kol Battleship's Finest Hour and Ankylon Titan's Furious Defense. Apart from that, dedicated repair structures and various capital ship or cruiser based healing abilities are available to all factions.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: Lots of them! The TEC have their Marza Dreadnought which starts off with a slow area-effect damage-over-time ability called Radiation Bomb, and at high levels acquires the mighty Missile Barrage, which deals huge damage to every enemy unit in a large area around the Marza. The TEC Kol Battleship meanwhile has a specialized area-effect attack called Flak Burst for dealing with swarms of strikecraft. The Advent have Malice on their Progenitor Mothership, which causes any attack that hits any enemy within its effect to hit every other enemy within its effect, and also have a specialized anti-strikecraft area attack, the Halcyon Carrier's Telekinetic Push. The Vasari have the Volatile Nanites ability of high-level Kortul Devastators which causes everything it hits to take increased damage and explode like a small bomb on death, creating a chain effect. The TEC and Advent starbases are capable of dealing massive area-effect damage to anything near them using Safety Override Protocol or Meteor Swarm respectively. And finally, ALL Titans except for the Advent Loyalist Coronata can deal area-effect damage: The TEC Loyalist Ankylon with its Disruption Matrix, the TEC Rebel Ragnarov with Explosive Shot and Scattershot, the Advent Rebel Eradica with Chastic Burst, the Vasari Loyalist Vorastra with Desperation and The Maw, and finally the Vasari Rebel Kultorask with its combo attack of Nano Leech, Gravity Pulse and Dissever.
• Hero Unit: Capital ships. Titans even more so.
• Hired Guns: TEC Rebels can eventually hire mercenaries with the Broadcast centers, which spawns a small fleet of pirate ships to the planet. Extremely useful if you need a few defenders there in a pinch, or for some fodder to cause a distraction while your main fleet attacks somewhere else.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: TEC Rebels can eventually acquire the 'Truce Amongst Rogues' upgrade, which makes all pirates or planet militia friendly permanently. The upsides are great, but the coding prevent you from attacking any militia or pirates, which sounds trouble if you have allies. The militia will attack friendly trading vessels, cutting into both of your profits, and if a large pirate fleet is attacking an ally while yours is the only one close enough to respond, you can't lift a finger to save your friend's planet.
  • Being hit by a super weapon you fired on a hostile planet that you just claimed.
• Hold the Line: Defensive structures such as turrets are basically just speed bumps for an invasion fleet. But a fully upgraded defensive starbase can hold its own against most forces. It can decimate smaller fleets, and against larger ones, will usually put a large dent in their forces, even if you don't send a relief force to assist it. It can sometimes be a good idea to plant one in a wormhole system (preferably on both ends), so that it can delay potential invaders and bog them down for your forces.
• Hyperspace Lanes: You can only travel from one planet to certain nearby planets in any given jump unless you have phase stabilizers. However, interstellar phase jumps can be done from one star to any other star, or between the mouths of a wormhole.
• It's Up to You: As usual. What's particularly jarring about this, though, is that your opponents tend to do pretty well, whereas your allies are saddled with a clear case of Artificial Stupidity. The end result is Fake Difficulty: you'll win, but it'll take a long time as you march through every enemy's territory one planet at a time—or sometimes less, when you're forced to double back.
  • Later game patches have mostly fixed this. Allies now have been known to defeat enemies by themselves with minimal assistance. Massing up a large supply of Novalith cannons helps.
• Just One More Turn: Ohhh you better believe it. Arguably even more insidious than normal, because Sins is real-time.
• Lampshade Hanging: The descriptions for the Unrealistic Black Holes mention how unlikely it is for the black hole to not have absorbed the planets orbiting them a long time ago, and is still able to function mostly how a regular star would.
• La Résistance:
  • Every neutral planet starts out with a small fleet of varying strength. Lore-wise, they're Trader citizens whos planets have been largely wiped out, and those ships are all they have to defend what's left.
  • The TEC's 'Insurgency' upgrade, which periodically spawns an assorted collection of TEC ships on enemy planets. Useful for automatically wiping out defeated enemy remnants or disrupting enemies who haven't invested in defending planets deep in their own territory.
• Lightning Bruiser: Late game Vasari fleets. Their ships have a nasty combination of damage, shields, and hull armor that makes engaging them in a straight fight nearly impossible if both sides are closely matched. With phase stabilizers and a Kostura Cannon their entire fleet can show up anywhere on most maps in one jump making them nearly impossible to set up hardened defenses against or sneak attack. Up to Eleven if the fleet is escorted by an Antorak Marauder with the Distort Gravity ability, which improves the speed, acceleration, and phase jump range of all nearby ships.
  • The Vasari Loyalist Vorastra Titan in particular, with its Micro-Phase Jump ability giving it a lot of mobility for a ship of its class.
  • Kodiak cruisers with the Intercept ability. Despite being heavy cruisers, the ability ramps their speed up by 800%, allowing them to rocket across gravity wells at hilarious speeds to catch enemies.
• Large Ham: Planet-bomber Capital Ships seem particularly susceptible:-
  • Vulkoras Desolator:MY POWER IS UNMATCHED!!
  • Marza Dreadnought:THIS is how SPACE JUNK is BORN!
  • Antorak Marauder:Let terror RAIN!
  • Pirates and some Titans and corvettes in Rebellion
  • Ragnarov Titan:I put the 'LAUGHTER' in 'SLAUGHTER'!
• Limit Break: The Finest Hour ability for TEC Kol Battleship. The ship lights up, the crew cheers like soccer fans, and the ship can perform its anti-matter based abilities and repair its hull more quickly.
• Macross Missile Massacre: The Marza Dreadnaught's Missile Barrage, the Vulkoras Desolator's Phase Missile Swarm.
  • The TEC's Javelis LRM Frigates or the Vasari Kanrak Assailants, whenever there are more than one of them in one place at any given time (which is pretty much always). Or whenever you have swarms of TEC or Vasari bombers around, which also both use missiles. On a smaller scale, the Vasari's Junsurak Sentinels use swarms of tiny phase missiles to shoot down hostile strike craft.
  • Sova Carriers have to ability to launch temporary missile platforms to supplement their firepower, which quickly stack as more and more are deployed into battle. Each one is more than capable of matching multiple Javelis frigates in output, and the havoc this wreaks against non-capital ships is astounding.
  • TEC Gauss Cannon platforms can be upgraded fairly early on to mount missile racks, giving them additional firepower and engagement range. Even a small cluster of these turrets can put hundreds of missiles into the fray.
    • In Entrenchment the TEC are granted the Ogrov Torpedo Cruiser- the bulk of which is storage space for GIANT torpedoes that can only target buildings. The explosion each of these makes is comparable to the size of the torpedoes. Think an ICBM silo with rocket engines at the back.
    • Also from Entrenchment, the final stage of weapon upgrades for the TEC Starbase fits it with dozens of missile launchers around its hull. In battle, the station fires so many at once the sight is best likened to a river of high explosives screaming through the void.
• Mad Scientist: The Hoshiko Robotics Cruiser voice certainly sounds like one.
• Magikarp Power: The Kol Battleship isn't that strong fresh out of the drydock, despite the glowing description in lore. It has poor antimatter reserves, unflattering damage and can be beaten by most other capital ships in a duel. With enough levels and antimatter upgrades, though, it becomes able to use its abilities much more freely, dramatically improving its power, and Finest Hour can turn a fight around.
• Magic Tool: Everything in the game is built with what appears to be an oversized blowtorch.
  • The Vasari constructors use a kind of nano-spray instead of the blowtorch.
• Mana Burn: Every faction has a capital ship which does this - the TEC have the Dunov Battlecruiser with its area-effect EMP Charge, the Advent have the Radiance Battleship with its ability-silencing Detonate Antimatter, and the Vasari have the Kortul Devastator with its passive Disruptive Strikes. These abilities tend to be particularly good for nullifying most of the antimatter-based high-power abilities of Titans.
• Mega-Maw Maneuver: The Vasari Loyalists' Vorastra Titan gains an ability at level 6, aptly called The Maw, which allows it to suck in and swallow entire fleets of enemy frigates and cruisers, instantly destroying them and giving resources to the Vasari. It doesn't matter how much shields or hull you have, if you're in anything lighter than a capital ship and in range when The Maw is activated, you're going to be Eaten Alive. That said, it is a rather short-ranged ability, and the Titan is normally slow.. until it Micro-Phase Jumps right up to a fleet and eats it.
• Mighty Glacier: Capital ships and Titans in general, being slower than any normal ship but also exponentially tougher. The most extreme example is the Vasari Orkulus starbase, which is technically a structure, despite being able to move (very, very slowly).
• No Biochemical Barriers: Averted; planets and atmospheres of different types have different defense and population thresholds.
• More Dakka: The TEC's Marza Dreadnought takes this trope and runs with it. Then throws it out the window. Then sets it on fire. It's armed with missiles, pulse lasers, rocket pods and autocannons firing incendiary ammunition. And it can be upgraded further with a Siege Gun to attack entire planets. Andnukes.
  • The Marza is particularly egregious because it came out of the gate with a high-tier ability to launch a barrage of missiles whose count scaled with the number of enemies in range. It also was able to put out more damage than almost any frigate could take, allowing it to annihilate whole fleets in one hail of destruction, or at least close to it.
  • The whole niche of Dreadnoughts is in fact planet bombing, although they can be a horrific capital ship to face in any case. The Siege Gun 'upgrade' for Marza is basically a massive chain-gun the ship is built around on that fires slugs roughly the size of a small spaceship towards a planet.
  • The Titans run on this trope and can destroy whole fleets by themselves. All of them except for the the Advent Loyalists' Coronata, possess area-effect abilities that can annihilate entire fleets of sub-capital ships, and they all also possess lots of straight-up firepower on top of that. The TEC Rebels' Ragnarov is perhaps the most extreme example - it's a massive gun, with more guns attached to it, and it takes everything exemplified by the Marza and turns it Up to Eleven.
• Nuke 'em: The TEC, and the Marza Dreadnought in particular. The Novalith Cannon takes this trope and runs with it, as one-yes, ONE!-can completely sterilize any planet with only two shots. (Except if the target planet is shielded.)
  • And if you build more than one, your opponent (or you, if they flip it around) is basically screwed.
  • The Entrenchment expansion allowed you to build starbases in orbit around your planets and give them off-world government upgrades, allowing you to maintain control of the planet despite Novalith bombardment. It's still quite expensive though, and the threat of a Novalith can give the TEC player an economic edge.
• Old School Dogfight: Sort of averted. Vasari and TEC have guided missiles, but TEC fighters only use autocannons, while all Advent weaponry is beam based. Advent fighter and bomber craft are however specifically stated to be drones, so they don't really count under this trope.
• One Game for the Price of Two: The game shipped with Skirmish mode being the only functionality, with three 'micro-expansions' promised. One added options for system defenses; the second more Diplomatic options, bringing a little more 4X flavor in; and the third has been expanded into a full-fledged stand-alone.
  • Not so with the Trinity pack, which is the main game and the 'Entrenchment' and 'Diplomacy' and is reasonably priced.
  • 'Rebellion' is a standalone expansion, and if you own the original, you can get it at a discount.
• Orbital Bombardment: Standard way of destroying and capturing enemy planets. The TEC can even take it all the way to interplanetary and interstellar bombardment with their Novalith Cannon.
• Padded Sumo Gameplay: 'Shield Mitigation' allows ships to ignore 15% of incoming damage, becoming more effective as damage is taken. and is present on on all ships which possess shield systems (even when the shields are down, where it acts as a Reinforce Field on the ship's armour instead). It broadens tactics by limiting the utility of focus-firing on single targets, but also slows down battles. Disabling mitigation in the pre-match setup significantly increases the speed of combat, although people should be aware that doing so slightly disadvantages Advent players (as one of their racial perks is higher maximum shield mitigation).
• The Plague: A game mechanic in Forbidden Worlds, with the 'Virulent Plague' planet attribute that reduces maximum population by 20 and slows population growth.
• Planet Eater: The Jarassul Evacuator (once it reaches level 6) and the Vasari Loyalist faction in general.
• Playing Both Sides:
  • Possible normally, by hiring different sides to attack the other while exploiting their distraction for your own gain.
  • This borders into cheating, but if you're playing single player and reload a save, you can swap places with an AI character, then sabotage their operations or direct them to raise relations with your true faction.
• Point Defenseless: Strikecraft (fighters and bombers) are tiny, very fast free-to-build ships that are deployed into battle by capital ships, titans, specialized carrier cruisers, orbital hangars and starbases. They cannot be targeted by most weapons or abilities; the only things that can attack them are other fighters and flak frigates, and a few antimatter-powered capital ship special abilities (the TEC Kol Battleship's Flak Burst and Advent Halcyon Carrier's Telekinetic Push). Starbases in particular are exceptionally defenseless against strikecraft without fleet support, as they have nothing that can attack the strikecraft directly, and they either don't move at all (Advent, TEC starbases) or they move too slowly to effectively engage the carriers (Vasari). Starbases also tend to not house many or any fighter wings of their own as they would have to sacrifice a lot of direct firepower upgrades in order to field a small number of squadrons. Titans in Rebellion though avert this to a degree - they do have turrets that can target strikecraft, and all of them can house their own fighter wings, but, of course, they still need fleet support to fend off serious bomber assaults. Rebellion also added the Corvette class ships, which can target strikecraft with their secondary weapon pods and can be used to take out enemy bombers in a pinch if fighters aren't available.
• Portal Network: The Vasari can build one of these, allowing ships to jump from one gate another within the same solar system instead of picking their way along the standard phase-space routes.
• Power Glows: Whenever a capital ship or titan levels up. Also, many units do this when activating special abilities.
• Psychic Radar: Foreshadowing and Acute Premonitions, upgrades in the Advent's research tree, allow them to extend the range at which they can detect hostile fleets whose destination is the player's territory as their psychics increase their own range.
• Resurrective Immortality: The Advent Motherships had shades of this since the beginning (via Body Backup Drive) with their Resurrection ability, but in Rebellion the Advent Rebels have fully harnessed the ability (possibly as a result of them 'purifying' their section of the Unity of its revenge obsession and returning it to its 'true purpose') and can research technology which allows them to randomly resurrect both their own ships and enemy ships as they die to augment their fleet.
• RPG Elements: Capital ships and Titans gain Experience Points which can be used to purchase upgrades.
• Rule of Cool: When the Kol Battleship activates its Finest Hour ability, the crew justroars and the ship is engulfed in a nimbus of white light.
• Salt the Earth: Korsov Siege Frigates with their 'High Yield Warheads' ability cause severely slowed population growth. The Novalith Cannon superweapon has a similar effect, but it's part-and-parcel rather than researched/toggle-passive. Great for harassment, but when you're the one putting down stakes, a bit annoying.
• Serial Escalation: Happens with every expansion, except possibly Diplomacy.
• Settling the Frontier: As with most 4X games, you must race to establish new colonies before others beat you to it. The worlds you're capturing aren't uninhabited though - they have existing Trader populations which are hostile to every one of the playable factions (even the TEC, as they don't want to give up their planetary sovereignty) and tend to have small defense forces trying to prevent you from colonizing them. They're also always willing to bombard their own planets with nukes from Krosov Siege Frigates in case you do set up a colony. The TEC Rebels though can research a truce with the neutral planets, though, that causes their forces to ally with you and allows you to freely colonize their worlds. But otherwise their defenses are typically used as an easy way to gain experience for your first capital ship early on.
• Single-Biome Planet:
  • Averted with Terran planets, which are extremely Earth-like and presumably have the geographic range that we do.
  • Played straight with every other type. In the vanilla game there's volcanic, desert, and ice, and the latter two contain slight aversions due to possible having visible oceans. The Forbidden Worlds DLC adds the classic Oceanic and Jungle planets, along with Barren and Ferrous planets.
• So Last Season: Happens with every expansion, some things that used to be prominent in the earlier iteration of the game fade into niche uses or uselessness. Titans in particular can render entire fleets of standard frigates and cruisers near-obsolete once they're deployed, given their powerful area-effect abilities, with the only exceptions being corvettes, which are not affected by Titan abilities but can still be targeted by normal weaponry, and carrier cruisers, which can stay far away and attack with their strikecraft. Hence Rebellion fleets tend to be centered around Titans and large numbers of carrier cruisers primarily deploying bombers, escorted by capital ships and small numbers of support cruisers and flak. Heavy cruisers in particular are much less powerful in the expanded game then they were in the original.
• Space Is Noisy: It's actually optional. You can reduce the volume of sound effects to zero separately to the other sound options (like music).
• Space Is an Ocean: Complete with noise, ships (some of which look like ocean vessels) with bridges and distinct upper/lower sides, naval ranks, small maneuverable fighters/bombers (some of which look like aircraft), trade routes, and..
• Space Pirates: Present in almost all maps, presumably thriving due to the chaos of the war. You can pay bounty to get them to attack whichever other players you want (just make sure you pay attention: the AI loves to counter-bid at the last second). They favour ships with Spikes of Villainy and holographic pirate flags, and (possibly by Rule of Funny) talk with stereotypical pirate dialects when messaging the player.
  • They grow more powerful over time and were buffed considerably in Diplomacy, turning them into borderline Demonic Spiders - however you can build up a fleet big enough to wipe them out, or use Novalith Cannons. In the expansions, you also have the ability to make them inactive, which makes them just stay at their base instead of taking bounties.
  • In Rebellion, the TEC rebels can form a peace treaty with them; since they will then attack only other Empires it basically makes them a powerful ally, especially if you do it early. Later research lets them hire pirate fleets as mercenaries.
• Special Effect Branding: The three sides have different ship designs and different weapons. Even weapons that are supposed to be similar between the sides have different effects. Most of the TEC ships are hastily-converted cargo haulers and passenger liners, and it shows. The Kol-class battleships are the only ones that were designed specifically for war, but their appearance is decidedly utilitarian. They primarily use pulsed lasers and kinetic weapons. The Kol is equipped with powerful red laser beams. The Advent are psychic cyborg humans whose ships feature sleek, gleaming designs. Their staple weapons are bright blue beams that look nothing like the TEC lasers. The Vasari, being nonhuman, feature vastly different designs, although not different enough not to be recognizable. They're still sleek, but alien sleek. Their weapons are mostly of the green plasma variety.
• Standard Sci-Fi Fleet: Each faction has 2 Frigates (a scout and a combat ship), a Cruiser, a Light Carrier, a Missile Boat, a Colony Ship and 2 Science Vessels (one supportive/defensive, one disruptive/offensive). Troopships are supplanted by planetary bombardment frigates, and the Advent have a Beam Spammy Space Gun in place of their Missile Boat. Also, in terms of Capital Ships, each faction has a Battleship, a Battlecruiser, a Carrier, a Worldship (capital ship capable of colonizing) and a Banner Ship. Technically, any capital ship can be considered a Battlestar after gaining a strikecraft squad, and all Vasari capitals can be considered to be Worldships. The strikecraft themselves include an Interceptor and a Bomber. Rebellion adds Corvettes that are smaller than Frigates as well as super-sized Titans. The Titans in general are even larger and deadlier Battleships/Battlecruisers, and the Vasari titans are again, Worldships, while the TEC Rebel titan is one gigantic mobile Space Gun.
• Standard Starship Scuffle: Enforced/justified, since everything's at 'brown water' distances-in orbit above a planet/star, which makes Space Fighters and sublight munitions controlled by non-FTL sensors viable strategies rather than pipe dreams.
• Stone Wall: The TEC Loyalists' Ankylon Titan, which has far inferior offensive capabilities to the Titans of the other factions, traded off for being incredibly tough and packed with defensive support abilities. Similarly the Advent's Iconus Guardian support cruiser is this; they can push back enemy ships and create a telepathic barrier to their movement, or project their powerful shields around friendly ships and absorb fire for them. Finally, flak/anti-fighter frigates are also this in a sense; they have no focused firepower and only provide area defense against strikecraft and corvettes, while being surprisingly tough for their cost.
  • Starbases with high defensive upgrades but no weapon upgrades qualify. Certain capital ships can also qualify depending on how you assign their abilities—special note goes to a Kol with points in Adaptive Force Field but none in Gauss Rail Gun, making it extremely tough but giving it no offensive capability against other ships besides its standard weapon banks (Up to Eleven if its ultimate ability comes into play).
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Sins has always featured a complex rock-paper-scissors, although it has shifted over the course of expansions. A rough and ready summary can be found here◊.
  • Factional differences and special abilities make the web even more complicated - for example capital ships can tailor their abilities to counter all kinds of things. TEC Arcovas (scouts - normally ineffective against structures) upgraded with Timed Explosives can be used to slip past enemy lines and blow up high value assets quite efficiently. Meanwhile, the Advent's Illuminator Vessel (long range frigate), isn't anywhere near as vulnerable as the TEC and Vasari equivalents against corvettes, and can match or even defeat the corvettes thanks to its superior armor and shielding and its multiple beam cannons - the tradeoff being its inability to focus all its firepower on a single target like the other LRMs can, and having a shorter range.
• Taking You with Me: TEC starbases can be upgraded with the 'Safety Override Protocol' function. It causes the base to self-destruct, causing immense damage to an invading fleet. Useful when you're in danger of losing the base anyway.
• Teleport Spam: Some Vasari ships are capable of phase-jumping short distances within a gravity well - namely their Stilakus Subverters, which can phase jump into an enemy fleet and disable it, and their Loyalist titan, which can phase jump into an enemy fleet and eat it.
• Turns Red: The Advent Rebels' Eradica Titan once it gets its ultimate ability will turn invincible and glow angelically for a few minutes when destroyed and gets almost unlimited supply of antimatter before dying when the timer runs out. Even before it's destroyed, it will get stronger and stronger the more you damage it
• 2-D Space: Space looks very three-dimensional, with ships weaving over and under each other, but for gameplay purposes it is essentially flat - also, ships grouped into fleets usually adopt some sort of 'wall' or 'sphere' formation, but they still all orientate the same way. However, it is nice that the ships sometimes realize that they don't have to go around stars or planets, and will readily fly over them to get to their target.
• Unrealistic Black Hole: Black Holes are a type of star in the stellar phenomena DLC, and despite being unrealistic, they're still death-traps for other reasons. On the good side, you're never at risk of being pulled into one. However, they have a permanent phase jump inhibitor effect, so if you're engaged with the enemy, it's often a win-or-die scenario. Additionally, there's a constant DoT effect, making it hazardous to keep smaller ships stationed there, and trade and refinery ships don't acknowledge it so they often randomly explode mid-journey.
• Useless Useful Spell: The Radiance Battleship's 'Animosity' ability is functionally worthless in multiplayer, since while computer players won't bother to issue fire orders to their ships, human players can completely undo its effect by just giving their ships a new target.
• Variable Player Goals: Finally supported in Rebellion.
  • Military Victory: Conquer the galaxy by exterminating (the majority of) all enemy forces.
    • Capital Victory: Simply knock out their capitals.
  • Diplomatic Victory: As mentioned, this mostly involves pleasing some opponents by beating up on others, so it's more of being a Villain with Good Publicity than actual peacemaking. Hey—everyone who's still alive thinks you're awesome!
  • Research Victory: Once you research ## number of standard topics, a special (and super-expensive) topic comes up that, when researched, causes victory.
  • Occupation Victory: A planet exists somewhere, guarded by Vasari mobs. Occupy it for ## minutes to win instantly.
  • Flagship Victory: If enabled, each player gets a 'Flagship,' which cannot be rebuilt. Destroy everybody else's to win.
• Visible Invisibility: All the Space Mines have this, which despite being phased out, invulnerable, and can't be targeted by most ships, are helpfully marked on your screen so you can spot and avoid them (the computers don't). Only scout frigates can expose the mines, which then allows every other ship to blow them up.
• Wave Motion Gun: The Advent Radiance Battleship's Cleansing Brilliance, and Advent Loyalist Coronata Titan's Unity Mass.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Necessary for some of the more powerful entities in the game to be balanced. For example, starbases possess no weapons capable of hitting strikecraft, and titans' otherwise-very-powerful abilities are unable to hit corvettes.
• We ARE Struggling Together:
  • Whenever opposing players are of the same race and ideology (mostly Rule of Fun, but possibly justified by increased fracturing of the three sides over the course of the series).
  • TEC get access to an 'Insurrection' ability, which periodically spawns rebellious TEC ships on random enemy planets. However, those rebels have Hard-Coded Hostility, and so are hostile even to the faction that armed them and sent them to attack! Just like in Real Life, funding terrorist groups is risky business..
  • The TEC Rebels get a useful ability that subverts this; 'Truce Among Rogues' allies the player with all neutral factions.
    • Who of course, have no such alliance with any of the TEC Rebel's other allies, who have no such option, and can't expect help from said Rebels and their ceasefire treaty.
• We Have Reserves: Can be deliberately invoked in two situations. One where your planet is being invaded, and you crank out as many ships as possible to delay them, or if you split your forces up, and hold back a portion of your fleet to use as a reserve force should another part of your empire be attacked while your main force is attacking, or in case your main fleet needs help.
  • The former situation is actually a specialty of the TEC Loyalists with their Rapid Counterdeployment tech, giving them a boost to ship construction speed while hostile vessels are present at that gravity well. Combined with TEC Starbases already being able to build ships at almost twice the normal rate, the fact they can have two at once in one gravity well and Industrial Juggernaut research, calling it a Zerg Rush is a study in understatement.
• Worker Unit: Constructors, colony ships, trade ships, refinery ships..
• You Require More Vespene Gas: Or rather, Credits (gold), and then Metal and Crystal (lumber). Ships require more Metal than Crystal, but almost everything else is vice versa, and Crystal is the rarest resource. Fortunately there is an Exchange where you can buy and sell resources. (The AI never uses it.)
• Zerg Rush: Light combat frigates and corvettes are built for this.