The Advent's weapon is in the Civilian research tree, at the end of the Culture research path - it's called the Deliverance Engine.

What it does is throw a huge chunk of your culture towards any planet, friendly or hostile. This serves several purposes:

1) The Advent have research that displays any grav well where they have culture, so you can peek anywhere on the map for a fairly long while, since it takes some time for the culture effect to wear off.

2) The Advent's culture techs give all of their ships extra shield mitigation when they're in friendly culture. The other races have their own bonuses. So, shooting the Engine at a planet you're about to invade means the defending fleet doesn't get their bonus and you get yours. This can make a big difference in a fight with about even fleets.

The Vasari superweapon is the Kotsura Cannon, it damages and disables planetary structures for 3 minutes, and damages and disables ships for I think 15 seconds. It's also good for busting through heavily defended planets, since shutting down all the repair bays for 3 minutes and dealing some damage to everything isn't a bad thing.

Interesting! There is a planet very close to me, which i have had a eye on for some time, its alligeiance is showing at 50% because i have researched other culture bonuses, so does this mean that hopefully i should be able to take it without the sword?

This would be very handy because the empire whom the planet belongs to is the only one who is friendly to me in a sea of 7 other competitors, i want the planet - but i dont want to go to war with them yet, i think i'll give it a shot!

Like the Kostura, this weapon is more useful with a fleet following the shot in.

Culture bonuses aside, the Deliverance Signal also gives your ships a 15% bonus to damage output when they are in the gravity well of the affected planet. On larger fleets, this makes a rather significant difference.

The Advent and Vasari superweapons are not worth the cost and are just about useless.  TEC sucks (which is why so few experienced people play TEC online) so TEC really does need a superweapon like the Novalith to make playing TEC somewhat worthwhile.

You might say that the Vasari's superweapon in 1.05 (to be killed in 1.1) is Returning Armada.

The Advent's superweapon is a synchronization of certain high level capital ships combined with Illuminators that have fully researched laser beams or Crusaders that have fully researched weapons (with the 30% weapon fire (cool down) speed up).

I once played a game where the random, single-system map boiled down to one, single chokepoint.

All fleet resources from all races were thrown into that one point, and nobody could make any headway at all.

Hours and hours of fighting, all in that one gravity well, with no hope of actually being able to make it further with enough of a fleet to scratch the planets beyond.

Then I built a couple of Deliverance Engines, and started aiming them at fringe worlds far past the blockade.

An hour later, I'd won.

It's no less useful than a big gun, and a lot more versitile.

It is only my two cents, but it is nice to have "weapons" that are not really guns-with-bullets kind of weapons. It makes for a more interesting game, where there are tactics and strategies beyond just the simple shoot-em-ups.

-Teal

I'll have to agree that the Deliverance Engine actually isn't as useless as it may seem.  No good for single direct attacks, of course, since it's a support weapon as pointed out.  But a friend and I have also found some entertaining ways of totally screwing over opponents with them.  It usually only works really well on large maps, though.  But building multiple cannons on 'backwater' worlds and firing them all off at once into an enemy's territory can have some massively devistating effects.  Do that 2 or 3 times and you'll wipe out the opponent's control of the targetted worlds and typically their neighbors without ever sending in a fleet.  Course, the defences are still there, but you can wipe those out much easier with the being in your own culture, etc.

That does make me wonder about the Kostura cannon.  If it can disable starbases within the gravity well of a planet...yipes.