@Yarlen @RammaStardock
If I may make a suggestion, I've thought about this and may have a solution that balances Advent Unity abilities in a way that works.
In its current form post-nerf, half the Advent Unity abilities are borderline useless unless you push with culture which in your changelog update quote "early game Proselytize/Conversion rush strategies that were proving dominant and difficult to counter".
My idea is, maybe undo the nerf and revert the changes back to before but increase the cost of Focus by 300% so it can't be used often. With great power comes with great responsibility right? At a cost of higher power requirements and can also be risky, if a player puts a huge investment into an early rush Proselytize/Conversion rush strategy they would have ended up diverting a substantial chunk of resources into this that leaves them vulnerable and having not built enough ships for counter offensives if the early rush fails and also takes away from upgrading their credit/ crystal / crystal economy.
For example, Tier 3 Proselytize can cost 200 Focus instead of 50 and Tier 3 Conversion can cost 500 Focus instead of 300. So this rush strategy wouldn't be used often and rarely if at that because of the risk factor of diverting too much resources if the rush gamble fails. This would stop players abusing it early game. If a player manages to successfully pull of a Proselytize/Conversion rush early game, then they rightfully deserve to win the game because if the risk gamble failed could mean they lose the game otherwise with no resources invested into building a bigger fleet or economy putting them about 20-30 minutes behind their opponents scrambling to catch up.
And late game, players can just upgrade their starbases with the Planetary Shield Array upgrade to prevent Conversion from being spammed on enemy player's planets. The idea is, Unity abilities can be most useful during mid-game when a player has to decide what strategy they want to go with, predict what they opponent's strategy would go with whether they invest all in Unity abilities when their opponent doesn't have enough resources to upgrade all the starbases with planetary shield yet until late game, or build a bigger fleet and forego investing Unity and just brute force it with a fleet. Their opponents would be thinking the same thing.
As it is now, half the Advent unity abilities are semi-useless and not worth investing into, because pushing culture means you have to invest not only in Unity upgrades in the Harmony tree, but also Culture upgrades which doubles the cost and resources, and on top of that there's no guarantee that your culture will dominate or overpower an opponents culture if their culture resistance is too high. And by late game, even AI opponents have all their planets covered with the starbase Planetary Shield Array upgrade, effectively rendering Conversion completely useless.
Sorry for the wall of post above. It wasn't easy explaining this in as few words as possible lol.
