Alright, I'm posting this because there's an issue with Returning Armada/Dark Armada that people should know about. It's not incredibly serious, but it definitely gives an edge to a power that's already pretty unbalanced. I'm probably shooting myself in the foot since I play Vasari, but then again I feel guilty for using it. My apologies if this has already been posted.

So basically the exploit involves going WAY over your unit cap wih free units from the RA. Here's how it's done. Most people don't know you can create a control group out of Phase Stabilizers. You can. If you select each one when it's built and add it to a control group (Ctrl+1, for example) and then right click the Returning Armada power, you can disable its use for all Stabs in the group.

Now, a fully upgraded RA sends 50 supply worth of units. So if you have 50 cap free and, let's say, 8 Stabs, then you just wait until the power is ready to use at all your Stabs (enough antimatter, cooldown expired.) Now you just pull up your control group, and instead of tabbing through and clicking on each RA to summon ships (which would only get you 50 supply worth,) you can just right click to autocast the summon on all of them. The Stabs will see that there's 50 supply and automatically bring in  group of RA. The supply cost isn't calculated for a second, so most or all of them will bring in units, leaving you at around -200 supply usually. That way you can sail past your unit limit without having to upgrade the cap.

This is an exploit specifically because of the ability to bypass the cap. The money not spent on upkeep can then be applied to research, colonization, infrastructure, etc. If your fleet gets wiped, you can always auto-summon another fleet.

One aspect of this bug to note is that it only works on the Stabs within the same solar system. If you have a control group spanning two systems, the Stabs in the first system will summon ships, while the Stabs in the second will not. I'm guessing this is because Auto-Casting only affects the units within a system when you activate it on a control group.

Hopefully this can get fixed in the next patch, although I'm sure plenty of Vasari players will curse me.

-zenchronus

p.s.-A quick fix to this would be to change code so that right-clicking autocast on a power only enables/disables it for the unit highlighted, rather than for every unit of that type in the control group. This would be a good fix for another reason. Sometimes if there are 2 cap ships of the same type in a control group and I want to, let's say, enable Jam Weapons on one but not the other, I can't do so while both are selected. If I auto-cast on one, it will autocast on the other, overlapping and wasting the power.