New player trying to figure out Culture wins?

Culture is almost never a game-winning mechanic, even against the AI... and Advent doesn't really have that much of a cultural advantage over the other factions.

95% of the time the winner of a game is determined by who has the bigger fleet (or starbase).

If you're having trouble killing the Easy AI, try this. Play as TEC in a 1v1 random small against an Easy Researcher AI, with Pirates off and Quick Start on. Queue an Akkan as your free capital ship, build 2 military labs, research LRM frigates, and set your homeworld's Rally Point onto your Akkan capital ship.

Queue as many LRM frigates as you can. Once you've built as many as your supply can hold, go up a supply level and build more. Repeat.

Your scouts should have scouted a good amount of the galaxy by now. Once it's built, send your Akkan towards the enemy, colonizing planets as you go. Your LRM frigates will be supporting your cap. (Remember to develop Civilian Infrastructure on your newly colonized planets ASAP, or you will lose a lot of credits to underdevelopment) Once you start running into your enemy, you should have 30-70 LRM frigates along with your Akkan. They will completely decimate whatever fleet the AI has and you should be able to steamroll their homeworld in well under an hour, even with no micromanagement at all.

Also AIs don't like to circumvent Starbases like us players. So if you can get a hold of a major chokepoint and fully upgrade an SB there. You are practically set to do whatever providing you have a defense fleet and repair bays set. Culture is good to boost one's income and at times you can kill an opponenet with it if you know you practically cripple him and don't feel like going after his HW.

What culture does is it provides a small boost to tax and extractor income at all planets under the influence of friendly culture. It also can cause enemy planets to turn neutral (the enemy loses ownership of the planet) if your culture is allowed to influence their planet for a long period of time. (But it's extremely easy to defend against culture. One culture station and/or a capital ship is probably sufficient)

That's all. Oh, and it can also provide some small combat bonuses after you do the (expensive) higher-level culture research.

Using culture offensively is rarely a good strategy... culture stations are expensive and are easily destroyed if a stronger enemy fleet warps in.

Pretty much.

Once you have the basics of the game down and are preparing to fight harder AIs like Hard/Unfair and above, starbases make your job much easier. But on the lower settings, LRM spam alone will do the trick, even in the hands of a new player.

I thank you both for your advice. I will give it a try as soon as I can. Is there any other strategies you could offer? I do appreciate the Cap the LRM strat but it seems to be more bent on steam-rolling brute force versus tactical superiority. Being a former Marine I can appreciate sending in the calvary and killing it, then kill it some more, but I was also in the Intel division which required careful planning and tactics. Hence why I think I like the Advent.

I will try your strat and see what I can learn from it since I havent won a game yet. I dare not log into ICO as nubsauce will get a new name.

Thank you,

Grev.

I'd suggest learning to walk before you learn to run.  Brute force isn't the end of the road in terms of strategy, it's just the beginning.  Once you get a sense of what can be achieved by raw brute force and how to do it, you can start building more elaborate tactical approaches.

All factions require careful planning and tactics.  Not getting away from that one with any of them. 

With Advent, your biggest ace in the hole is the "repulsion" ability of your iconus guardian, which lets you literally throw around the enemy fleet like rag dolls.  Used carefully this makes retreat impossible for the enemy and can protect more vulnerable units.

My advice on that one is to get to the point at which you can reliably beat the unfair difficulty AI first. 

I will start with the brute force method and gain my first victory... From there I will span out new strats to take full advantage of the rest of the fleet and technologies. Thank again all for your input.

Grev.

No one pointed out that advent is hardest race to play with since its slow to develop economy slow to grab neutrals (free extractors) and most ships require a lot of micromanagement to bring full potential out of them.

TEC is easiest to start from and vasari is very strong due to movable star bases.  

Ok... I can colonize planets pretty well now and build a fleet. Problem I am having now is squadrons and the AI turtling me... Drives me nuts when I do have a substantial fleet of LRM and my Akkan to only lose most of them to a small squadron. To protect your worlds do you just build some starbases and defenses?

Thanks,

Grev.

Upgraded Starbases with several repair bays can hold off all but the largest AI fleets. Human players of course would just build bombers and sit at the other side of the gravity well, but the AI will often suicide its fleets on your defenses. Only the TEC AI has decent chance of destroying a fully upgraded starbase with a good part of its fleet intact.

Once you get to the mid game diversifying your fleet a little bit can be a good thing. A small amount of fighter/bomber (two mid level Halcyons can be enough) support with a few defense vessels (advent actually have the best antifighter ship) can keep moderate amounts of enemy fighters somewhat thinned down and distracted. Keep a progenitor mothership and a guardian or two in your fleets to greatly increase the survivability of your "battleball".

Sa'weet!!! Just won my first game using the bumrush tactic above. Made an Akkan and a whole bunch of the LRM and wiped them out. Military Victory! The victory was somewhat bittersweet since I only used 2 military labs and 2 civilian labs on my home world and just started mass producing the LRM's. Was hoping for something... I dunno, just more. Any thoughts or suggestions. I know I will come up with some more ideas with a few more games was just curious on y'alls thoughts.

And thanks as always,

Grev.

It gets there, now that you know how to make your most basic fleet, you can begin mixing it up with more complicated ships. For the TEC a decent force of robotics cruisers are a must, and if you were struggling with some strikecraft flak support as well. Later game some carriers and a more heavy cruiser based fleet are completely viable, not the least because the TEC economy really takes off to be able to afford them. Sadly they don't have a whole lot in terms of strategic abilities like the Advent and Vasari have, relying instead on brute stats and powerful single target abilities to win the war of attrition if they don't overwhelm their opponents early.

In singleplayer they're fine.  This guy is still working on easy difficulty, he's not hitting multiplayer (where playing Advent is an exercise in masochism) any time soon.

Low-tech/high-upkeep empires are some of the most fun to play once you reach advanced tactics.  They actually are far more reliant on careful planning, positioning, and tactics since they lack the flashy high-end specials.

Well, this one may be a bit tricky for you as of yet, but if you've got your heart set on Advent you can try the Halcyon Armada (really fun against the AI, very rarely viable online though).

Your primary combat unit will be the Halcyon-Class capital ship.  You will use its "adept drone anima" ability to increase its strike craft capacity, and combo that with the "telekinetic push" ability to defend yourself against enemy strike craft.  Your top priority is building up experience on your Halcyons.  You'll want to have at least 4 of them, and to take each one to at least level 3.

In combat, try to run away from the enemy and run circles around the gravity well.  Remember you can split up your forces and phase jump injured units out of the gravity well.  If you can make it up through the tech tree, the iconus guardian with the repulsion ability can be very helpful for keeping your halcyons alive.  Complement them with defense vessels to help swat down enemy fights and illuminators to kill enemy light frigates.  In the long-run, the Rapture Battlecruiser with its concentration aura is a great choice to bolster your Halcyons. 

Don't get more than 6 capital ships until you've researched "mass transcendance" (this is an expensive late-game tech, so focus on units past 6 capital ships) otherwise you won't have enough experience points to go around.  Experience points for killing enemies are shared equally between your capital ships, which means too many capital ships will slow down the rate at which you level up and can actually make your fleet weaker rather than stronger.

One warning: if you see a lot of light-frigate type units, immediately add a large force of illuminators to your fleet.  Massed light frigate is the counter to this strategy and you'll need to reassess your fleet composition if the AI does this.

Another fun tactic is to lay minefields with your drone host carriers, then use the Iconus guardian repulsion ability to toss enemy units into them.  That actually would complement the halcyon strategy I laid out fairly nicely.

Ah yes, i forgot advent have homing mines..   

 ... which don't explode sometimes so gave up on that tactic

Really?  Never seen that.

The biggest issue that homing mines have is the damage delay.  There is a delay of about a second or so between when they explode and when they deal damage.  If you run a scout through a minefield at top speed all the mines will chase after him and cluster into a line.  If you suddenly order the scout to stop, they will all slam into the scout and explode, but none of them will deal damage until all of them have exploded.  You can often remove 20 or so mines with a single scout in this fashion... and of course 20 homing mines is far more expensive than one lone scout.

Yes advent homing mines sometimes overshoot target and when they get out of range they become stationary again.

Easy to try is to move your capital straight into and straight on the other side of minefield at full speed. Some of mines that are a bit on the side will overshoot.