re : Capital Ships

Build a cap factory right away and the first cap you build from it is free.

Build a capital ship factory and then click on one of cap ships from the list to start building

Bah...

Blair is too fast for RTS forums - should be posting to CSS ones instead :p

I blame lagg for 33 seconds of delay!!!

Building your capital ship factory is the very first thing you should do in the game.  Then queue up a build for a capital ship, preferably a Mothership (one that can colonize planets).  Then send it to the asteroid that's attached to your starting terran.

Don't bother making a second one though. Frigates and cruisers give you more bang for the buck.

Unless you want to. I always find it fun to have lots of capital ships. (Course I only play single player, where you can get away with it more often.)

Capital ships ARE fun...

if watching your fleet get massacred is your idea of fun, that is.

I dont know what Cap ship you use but if you have a decent attending fleet with it, they tend to do well. But to each his own.

He looks to be one of these min/maxer types where anything other then the absolute ideal thing is going to get "massacred" in every game everyone plays, all the time.

I use Cap ships online and do just fine. It could be the "bang for your buck" is only calculated with total hull points and damage in mind, rather than abilities, seige damage, and hit and run techniques,

You only play offline...    As our unofficial Sins online multiplayer cheerleader, I really hope you'll consider coming online sometime (it's that Ironclad Online button).  If you don't want to play against other people then play in humans v. AI games.  You'll get to meet other Sins players and chat and it would be fun to have human teammates.

I hereby put forward a motion to make the position official. It's just the coolest sounding title. You have to submit a picture of yourself with pom poms, though. You know, for authenticity and all that good stuff.

Cap ships enhance fleets. You can't just evaluate them on the basis of how much attack power/health/etc. they give for your buck. A fleet with a mothership regenerating everybody's shields is 5 x's as dangerous as one that just added 3k more worth of frigates and cruisers.

Or the Advent Carrier that us increasing the firing rate of every ship in his fleet.

I didn't know people were playing human vs AI games, actually. I may do that when I'm not playing WoW.

The size of the fleet doesn't really matter (as far as the capital ship's survival goes) if your opponent has a large fleet and he's ordered it to focus fire on your capital ship.  It isn't necessarily the smartest thing for your opponent to do based on what kind of capital ship we're talking about and the composition of the fleets, but capital ships are great big targets and people will focus fire on them.  It's always a little demoralizing when one of yours goes down.

Don't be so sure; a high level Kol (or racial equivilent) can take a truly impressive amount of damage before falling.

I like the suggestion - don't like the idea of him with pom poms

its called a comp stomp... A lot of the "pros" don't like it as it is still vs AI. But it does help people get wet in the shallow end of the pool before jumping in to full human vs human MP games. So Centurion and I decided we will start promoting it to people who only play SP...

Yes - a high level Kol can take a lot of damage, and you can often run it away when it gets to 50% and still have enough health to get out of the system to repair. But some ships (e.g. Vassari egg) can strip alot of that armour away (get the nanites to lvl3 and some ships/structures have negative armour...). And at the end of the day - if their are enough ships putting enough DPS into it, it will still go BOOM. It will just last 5-10 seconds longer....

If you get theirs at the same time I don't feel so bad  - especially if I get more of their fleet then they get of mine - both lost, but I lost less, therefore I won

The one thing losing a cap does do (unless you have a spare somewhere) is force you to get seige frigates to pop planets until you can afford to build a new one. And even then, you want to train it to lvl 4 before sending it out into the world. So it ends up costing 7500 credits + 400 metal + 250 crystal plus the cost of the research to get lvl 4 training upgrade...

I wish there were ships that had the ability to sacrifice themselves to protect the cap ship.or reflect lasers

Dude, capital ships are actually some of the best ships if you use them right. Even in multiplayer.

If you use them in sector fleets, like i do, then they really pack a punch. Group them with at least two carriers (i.e. percheron), one command cruiser (i.e. cielo), two heavy frigates (i.e. kodiak), and about seven other frigates, then they make a formidable and versatile fast moving attack force. In one multiplayer game, i used them to great effect. In fact, i won that game through the use of my fast response sector fleets.

Dont forget that the advent caps can really increase overall fleet effiency and longevity think guardians with progenitor or illums with halycon

My command statagy is to build one of each capital ship as a fleet then 30 little carriers as it's own fleet as strike crift support. I then build up a fleet of frigs & cruisers to suport the capital fleet as necassary. this brings the game to a Fleet Commander feel that I love. My Nest and I play up to 8 at once with 2 AI as bait for the first strike. The stratagy is to enter a Planet G/W with Cap Fleet to draw the defences to them like CenturionJixra stated.

This brings them open for the Strike Fleet to swarm their orbital platforms making the Structures vulnerable to the Frig/Cruiser attack, thus bringing every planet we encroach upon ours.

Oh yes I played against a noob team a few weeks ago (I haven't played more than 50 games of yet). But he was so insane to attack my lvl 8 kol which was backed up by two dunovs. Full armor, hull and shield upgrades. His 50 Illuminators did zilch while the Kol was running martyr and my Marzas used rocket salve ability. 3 minutes later nothing was left My Kol didn't even get to zero SP Well, I had a few Hoshikos as backup as well, but didn't need them  

If you play Advent, the Guardian can help spread out some of the focus fire damage and if you have a Radiance Battlecruiser capital ship you can use Animosity to direct the focus fire.  (If you have a Rapture capital ship then you could have it cast Vengeance on the Radiance.)