No they just turn them 'neutral', which completely destroys the point of culture in my opinion. Not to mention that culture is a complete secondary force since even turning a planet neutral takes like 10 minutes.

This makes the super weapons definetly unballanced.

unbalanced...how so? (ive only messed with the vasari SW so far)

Well seeing as the Novalith does a set amount of damage and is guaranteed to obliterate the planets populace. While the Avent one works completly with culture and makes it weaker. This makes the Advent overall a bit weaker then the rest of the factions.

the concern isnt that they're unbalanced with respect to the game, its with respect to one another.

quite the opposite, the novalith has limited uses where the advent one might be used to say, buff your ships during an assault into enemy territory

and seriously, the culture from the advent one is AMAZING, garunteed to take most any planets.

You can still take out worlds with culture but there are two fundamental changes. First, they turn neutral, you don't take them over. Next, culture reaches full culture indepedant of how fast it takes down allegiance. This allows it to spread out and you receive the benefits of it well before the planet is lost (which was too punish previously).

"and seriously, the culture from the advent one is AMAZING, garunteed to take most any planets."

For it's duration at least, takes 10-15 shots to turn a semi-distant planet neutral. I must say that I do like how they altered culture in some ways (making it so you have to force allegience to 0 rather than a chance at any allegance < a certain value) but the whole neutral concept just plain doesn't make sense ('Hey guys! That empire's so culturely superior! Why don't we just completely abandon our planet, all at once, and go nowhere!') either realistically or tactically. If culture could turn planets that would pretty fairly balance the superweapons, the TEC one would damage prior to invasion, the Vasari would do whatever it does now (haven't had a chance to mess around with it yet) and the Advent would, after repeated shots, allow you to take a planet without any ships. It wouldn't be unbalanced because it already takes a number of shots to neutralize the planet and you'd either have to have ships nearby (in which case you could have invaded regurally) or hope that no one invades you.

I agree that the beta culture was bad (especially the old 'capture planet, planet goes enemy' cycles, but also the chance of rebellion) but this new culture is a little underpowered.