Really I think all of the factions should get the 2.5% bonus to make culture more worthwhile to everyone, but as the Advent get 6 culture techs plus allure of the unity they will naturally benefit more.

There must be some hardcore developer at the ironclad studios who seems to beat everyone in-house proving advent is balanced. I wish they'd at-least share what he or she does and explain things in detail. For now all the buffs we are asking for are justified.

But probably not all of them together. A lot of little buffs can do surprising things to the game balance.

What about getting an extra bonus to creating trade chains than other races: E,g a chain of 4 route jumps should give you 1.5 instead of 1.3 and so on?

I think Advent's bad economy is simply a faction quirk. Rather than balance the Advent economy to approach the economies of the other races, I think what's supposed to be Advent's strength (namely, military) deserves a buff instead to make them competitive with other races.

In particular, it'd be nice to see a skilled Advent player to have at least a slight chance against a somewhat decent Vasari player late-game. The phase missile advantage combined with Advent's bad durability is simply too much.

Unfortunately, this causes some pretty significant distortions based on map size or start positions.  The obvious case is an Advent in the pocket in a 5v5 multiplayer simply will never compete with a pocket TEC in multiplayer.  If Advent had the strongest envoys in the same way they have the weakest economy then that could clear up the team-based issues, but this is not the case.  Furthermore, it doesn't deal with the problem of more expansive 1v1 scenarios where there is lots of time to build a strong economy at the start of the game. 

In any case, Advent needs more economic techs at the 4-7 lab levels.  Resource Focus would be a great place to start; that tech has been useless since the day the game shipped (I'm given to understand it had a purpose in the beta, but its numbers are totally out of whack now), and Advent lacks a true refinery.

naw, mod the abilities of the ships and defensive weapons. For example, awhile back I made a mod for their SB which allowed it to tilt to fire at ships that attack it from extreme z-axis/gave it sloooooow movement + modded its "stun" ability by making it longer ranged, gave it a shorter duration, and caused ships under its affect to come towards it/rotate around as if they were dead in space... ergo bringing them in range for nastiness (: Oh yeah, and also the shield regen for hangars was made to effect any nearby friendly ships. Pretty balanced imho.

I agree, lateral micro changes seem less overkill than overall changes to the Advent economy. Also, their superweapon needs to be ramped up. A 20% damage bonus to either friendly or enemy/neutral planets is nice, and a culture bonus is great for quickly getting planets up to high allegiance, but overall it comes so late in the game as to be redundant. 

Agreed, I vote the friendship cannon temporarily causes a few enemy ships in the grav well to turn neutral and attack.

Being the only female race, I reckon they should have a nude ability to entice the other 2 male races.

Female race? So TEC is male race ?  Quite disturbing.

Now we know who is most likely going to drop the soap during ***Shower time***.

Who says the Vasari are male?  Maybe a deep raspy voice is a really feminine trait for their species? 

In all seriousness, lore-wise the upper ranks of Advent society are primarily female, but it's not a 100% deal.  Same goes for the TEC; they seem to have a cultural bias (similar to modern western society) that military service and higher political leadership is primarily a masculin position, but that doesn't mean there aren't any women in those positions.

There is at least one female TEC portrait in Diplomacy and perhaps a male Advent portrait (with some of them like Darvin's picture I have had a hard time deciding lol ).

Could it be there's a mix up in the genders? Maybe the females are shemales and the men are transsexuals.