Strongest Capital ship is........

Interesting indeed... however the Skirantra and Halycon have better fleet support abilities and scale better than the Sova. So while 1v1 gives a good indication of DPS and ability strength, it doesn't show which Cap is better in FleetVsFleet.

Missile batteries is indeed a beefy ability however and the Sova should never be underestimated. AND your test has proven the incredible power of the Sova for clearing militia.

Additional Observations:

The level 1 Skirantra Scram Bomb appears to better than the 1.18 Scram Bomb, despite spawning less squads (2.5 squads vs 3).  It gains its advantange from spawning the squads quicker.  And..

The level 3 BETA Skirantra is even better!  The level 3 1.18 Halcyon won those old tests, now it looses badly.

My old tests of 1.18 showed:

Level 1 Skirantra..Scram Bomb.3 Bombers....280  W    L  Halcyo......Adept DA...4 Bomb (vs  600)
Level 3 Halcyon..2ADA 1TKPush 6Bombers....280  W    L  Skirantra..2SB 1RC.....3 Bomb (vs -400)
  or 680 hull point swing between versions.

Remember these were 1.18 tests, not of the further buffed 1.19 Scramble Bombers!

Based on the above tests, it is one more reason why I believe the BETA Nerf to level 3 & 5 Scramble Bombers can be increased.  Possibly bringing the extra squads spawned back down to 1.18 levels (4 & 6 Squads, rather than the current 5 & 7.5). 

I find what is more important to the damage abilites is Damage per Antimatter, not really DPS...

GRG has very, very niice dps, but since its DPA is so low...

The beta patch significantly reduced the DPA of scramble bombers... and now the skirantra will run out of antimatter even faster. 

One more thing: your not causing your bbrs to hold position.  If this was done... I think the skirantra will come out on top again. (lv 1 will be almost tied, lv3 will be skirantra win)

What might be even more intresting, would be to see what the optimal ratio of bombers to fighters is in order to counter an all bomber cap. 

Try your lv 1 haylcon vs a lv 1 skirantra BOTH with 2 fighter squads...

Or, my favorite test would be something like an all fighter skirantra vs a all bomber sova... and the other way around.

Using Scramble Bombers alone, I have not seen the Skirantra run out of antimatter.  It runs right at empty, but keeps going.  (Prevents using Repair Cloud though).

Whereas, Missile Batteries will drain the Sova.  The maximum batteries that I've seen spawned is 4.  Not the theoretical 5.14 turrets deployed as mentioned in your excellent reply #67 in Beta changelog thread

I did do some tests with all fighters vs all bombers.  Surprisingly the level 3 Skirantra with all starting fighters did worse against an all bomber Halcyon:

Level 3 Skirantra..2SB 1RepairC 4Bombers..0-400 W     L Halcyon.....Adept Drone A...6 Bombers
Level 3 Skirantra..2SB 1RepairC 4Fighters..0-100!W     L Halcyon.....Adept Drone A...6 Bombers

Level 1 Halcyon....ADA 2fighters 2Bombers......600  W    L  Skirantra..Scram Bomb......3 Bombers
Level 1 Halcyon....ADA 4fighters. winning........ ?    W    L  Skirantra..Scram Bomb......3 Bombers
   - was taking too long to wait to see results, but I think it WASN'T doing as well as 2 & 2!

I don't understand why the difference.  So, I don't know what is the optimal ratio.

An all fighter Repair Cloud Skirantra creamed an all bomber Scram Bomber Skirantra by 1900 hull, but it was a ridulously long fight, since neither really had any offense.  The Repair Cloud Skirantra leveled up 3 times (to level 4)!  Which was also the most anything that anything I tested leveled up!

A lv 3 sova didnt manage to spit out 5 turrets?  It should have enough antimatt.... oooh, right... your cap ships were jumping in and starting 100 AM down.... but indeed the lv5 sova should have had 5 turrets?

I mean... 270+30*4 with .85+.09*4 regen/second gives 390 AM with 1.21 am/second... Missle batteries use 70 am every 35 seconds = 2 am/second (+ initial 70)... Starting at 290 AM... mb -> 220 Am - .79am/second... that should have lasted long enough for you to see 5 turrets? 278.5 seconds of maximum turret generation before antimatter is depleted... You should have actually seen 5 turrets for at least 3 turret spawn lenghts... ???

You miss understood me when i said all fighter skirantra vs all bomber skirantra... sorry. when  I was vasari, before i renounced the skiratra as a starting cap, I would use all fighters with scramble bombers, so in theory, id have 3 fighter squads, and 2.5 bbr squads till i was out of am.

I'm not surprised that Sova is the strongest "brawler" at level 1, since missile turrets have always given excellent value for such a low-level ability.  Nor am I surprised it scales poorly; this has always been the Sova's biggest problem.  I'd say due to its lack of fleet support abilities that there's plenty of room to buff the Sova in the level 5+ range.

I'm not convinced that scramble needs more modifications.  As you mention, it is stronger in some ways due to deploying the initial fighters faster, but the most important nerf it got was it now costs significantly more antimatter to maintain them, so it's completely impractical to enter the fight with all your squads already scrambled.  I believe that this is the desired outcome, and we do want the ability to remain useful and strong.

I just watched the replay.  The Sova was able to spawn 5 turrets while I was leveling it up against seige frigates, but in the battle against the level 5 Skirantra, it died before it could build 5.  The Sova had 4, with enough antimatter left for 1 more, but the cooldown hadn't expired befor it died.

No, we don't want to be buffing any Carrier caps, they are all still too strong.  No real reason to build anything but them (carrier caps).

No, its not impractical to enter the fight with all of your squads scrambled.  In fact that is still a big exploit, that just gives the Skirantra an even greater advantage.  You can come into the battle full force, whereas a Sova has to build up.  It still has enough antimatter from what I've seen to maintain the fight.  (It uses 200AM every 120 seconds?).  The ability is still useful, and TOO strong.

Oh, and I'm not a Vasari hater!  In fact, Vasari has always been my race of choice, then TEC, and if I have to - I can play Advent, but never have really liked Advent.  So I know the Skirantra very well, and have abused it as much as anyone else.  I just want to see the game balanced, so that Ironclad Online isn't all multiple Skirantra spamming bombers, and nothing else having a real chance...  And: Advent still need alittle more love to balance things, in my opinion.

I emphasize my qualifier of "level 5+".  I fully agree we don't want to see the Sova any stronger below that.  With larger fleet sizes, other capital ships vastly outperform the Sova since it really offers nothing more than brute strength (which, at the end of the day, LRM's and Kodiaks do better)

If you really think scramble needs further work, I think the best route to approach this would probably be a bomber nerf.  Bombers are already the strongest strike craft by a considerable margin, and Vasari have the best bombers (mostly due to the favourable phase missile weapon), which adds to the utility of an ability that spawns Vasari bombers.  A nerf, either direct or indirect, to bombers would further weaken scramble.  I could definitely support that approach.

Agreed, though there are still a handful of things I'd like to see nerfed.  I'd still like to see the durability of their scout dealt with; there's really no reason for it to have 2 armor and 800 combined hull/shields.  Repulsion also needs to be brought into line.

If those are fixed, there will be lots of room to give Advent the love it very much needs.

Dunno man, all the tests I've seen you post lately (about the beta so far) seem kinda biased and/or reactionary. And no, that's not a personal attack, I'm not trying to offend you, just pointing out matters of objectivity. That said, props for putting forth the effort to do any kind of experimentation at all, no doubt everything helps them somehow.

SO... what if we ....

You know.. standard stuff... added a few extra bulkheads... added an extra aux control room, threw in a few extra shield generators, and reinfored the area around that ever so touchy antimatter reactor... Tweaked a few of those weapon systems (you know those engineers and their excessive factors of safety...)

We should end up with...

 +300 base hull, +30 hull/level, +40 shields/level...  (adjusted for -5 hull on the kortul, and +5 shield, -10 hull for radiance, and +15 shield (for armor adjustment))

Now our battle ships will finaly be able to hull tank better than our colony ships.

Our weapon tweaking should increase damage per level from .05 to .1... refire rate from .03 to .05...

Lets go ahead and have about double the repair teams... I mean, it makes no sence for our repair teams of our very precious Battle ships to be the same size as our heavy cruisers!, that should inch that repair rate from 1.5 +.1 to 3+.15, and the shield tweaks should increase their restore rate from 3+.2 to 5+.4...

Now... Now, we got ourselves a CAPITAL ship. (maybe)

(ehh, just something like a 10% base boost, +25%/level boost... 2x healing, 2x damage at level 10... simple stuff.)

Just trying to make a point.  No offense taken.  There's too many opinions, and not enough solid evidence, and change is too long in coming.  I hope the devs listen to solid reason, but I am open to anything.  My bias is from observing what happens online - the ultimate testing ground.  I always watch replays, and observe all players.

I just which the devs would come out and show us their balancing rubric...

make things soooo much easier.

Certainly would be nice to hear their own thinking on a lot of these ideas and issues.

to fix vasari bomber simply switch their weapon type to wave cannons instead of phase missiles

the other races have to research all the different weapons for their fleet where vasari only need to research one

this is where the vasari are op the most

they can up their weapons for whole fleet at 3x cheaper than other races

this saved money can go into more research (in turn saving more money) and/or bigger fleet or faster expand

advent cant even up damage of their damage dealers (ilums/bombers) untill 4 labs

tec must research lasers for fighters, gauss for flak, and missiles for lrm/bomber (same for advent except takes more labs)

vas reseach one thing for flak, fighters, bombers, and assailants

advent can upgrade scouts, disciples, flak and fighters with 1 upgrade.

vas dont have a way to destroy mass bombers/fighters.

That said phase trap does need a nerf

Devs may have intended carriers caps to have the role of killing other caps while battleship have the role of killing the other type of ships.

Currently the halycon can easily stop scramble bomber with deploying fighters now with the beta patch

At this point the problem is more bombers in general, not scramble bombers.

TEC fighters use the gauss weapon type.

They get the first beam upgrade at 3 labs.

my point remains valid lol

Throw in a formation of 3 Kortuls and they can ignore it pretty much indefinitely, though.  Expensive, but once fleets get to a sufficient size the economics of it start to get favourable.  I've had a couple 2000+ command battles before where churning out Kortals to shut down enemy bombers was simply an awe-inspiring investment, completely shutting down a huge segment of the enemy fleet. 

The fact that phasic traps are superior to this capital ship ability, though, is a major problem.  Hangers have no business with uncapped abilities like these.

Autocannons, actually. The same ones on the Kodiak, Garda, and most of their capitals.

TEC and advent SC solutions are less than ideal.  Basically you are looking at telekinetic push as far as abilities go for advent.  TK push does pretty crappy damage but it can delay dps as well.  It takes several hits with it to destroy squads so its hardly cleaning up the field.  TEC have magnetize which is not exactly clearing the field either and flak burst.  Flak burst suffers the same as TK push in that it does not do enough damage short of level 3 to clear the field.  These aren't ideal SC solutions although they help thus the problem we had with scramble being too powerful last patch.  If we had good answers to strike craft then there would not be a problem with scramble to begin with.  With phasic trap it does not matter how many strike craft or what kind.  They are all disabled indefinitely.

As to scouts being a level 1 upgrade, I would trade that any day to be able to have a level 1 upgrade that is used for everything important including lrf that I have like vasari and for that upgrade to be as powerful as phase missles is for vasari.

Also I do not see what problem you have with repulsion still.  It is easily outranged with assailants, javelis and strike craft.  They are always the first thing targeted once they show up.  You can still fire if you have the range even when they are being used which can't be said of subverters.  They are more expensive than other support cruisers being similarly expensive to HC and they take up more supply slots(7).

[_]-Greyfox

I'm sorry, I don't really want to scan all the posts above (some of them are pretty illegible) but I don't get this thread. What exactly are you comparing? The ability to clear neutrals? Or being able to beat other caps one on one? Cause if we're talking neutral planet clearing then I cannot understand how Marza with it's MB didn't make it into your post. Even at lower levels, minimal micro to group all enemies in one place + rad bomb really does the job pretty freaking fast. Later with MB, this has to be TEH winnah.
Then again, if we're talking 1 on 1, I just can't see how the teeny weeny sova could beat the Kortul. Maybe it could be possible on level one, but on level 3 it definitely stands no chance against lvl2 PS + lvl1 DS. Nou wai.

So, what's this thread about exactly? Comparing only carrier caps or what?

What's the problem Nerull?  U don't want a Vasari nerf?  The post is about level 1 caps.  As explained in the link about conditions in these 1 on 1 fights at my earlier post.

Everyone knows that level 6 missile barrage is the best.  But you would never use it to clear neutrals.  Rarely can even get it. 

The Sova does beat the kortul at level 1, and every other ship and ability that I tested (under the fairest conditions I coud create, as described at the above link).  Mostly the same story for the other race's carrier caps.   

It knocks out momentum, effectively turning it into a form of stun that can be used againstcapital ships. 

Marza with MB generally doesn't exist until clearing militia is no longer a relevant exercise.

I wrote what I did just because I thought a PS Kortul would beat the Sova. I tested it a minute ago and indeed, Sova at level one has beaten the Kortul. However, at level 3 it was a whole different story:
- Sova lvl3 with lvl2 missile batteries and lvl1 HSC, with 4 squadrons of bombers let loose and missile batteries on auto.
- Kortul lvl3 , Power Surge lvl2, DS level1, one squadron of fighters DOCKED (aka not fighting), PS were used manually only when shields are down and hull is damaged a little (to make use of hull regen). I even manually ordered the Kortul closer to the Sova to make sure he gets all the missile battery love.

Even under these highly favorable conditions for the Sova, the Kortul won with over half health and a third of the shields. And since you almost never have a completely naked and unsupported lvl1 cap as your flagship... I would not go as far as to say "Strongest Capital ship is ... sova".

I'm not negating that carrier caps are strong and scramble bombers are broken or whatever. I'm just saying your comparison is pretty synthetic.
And as for the "u don't want a Vasari nerf", you're laughably touchy. Take a break, not everyone posting something else than "Oh my God you rule I agree 100% nerf carrier caps AMEN" is actually trying to offend you.