A) You should always have at least one fighter squadron on any capship, bombers will murder them otherwise.

There's a reason I generally target the weaker ships first -- it might be less of an effect than taking out the capitol ship, but if your focusing your fire on my capship while I reduce your cobalts, I end up taking less damage during the long and arduous process of reducing your capship to rubble. The fact that cap ships can take so terribly much damage makes them a much less appealing target. Whats nasty is I have no way to explain to the unit AI to prioritize the supports over the flagship, so I constantly have to micro to make sure the enemy doesn't start some stupid maneuvering game with his frigates to pull my units out of whack.

Please also note that since capships AI don't understand the concept of having two broadsides, they generally also need to be microed to get them to rush into a group of enemy frigates, unloading death with all weapons and not just the ones it "wants" to bring to bear.

I used to use that strategy, but it proves to be a fallacy, killing the cap ship first almost completely stops the enemy fleet's power, while killing the cobs only whittles it away slowly.

at least, thats what I've seen.

Perhaps its a function of the size of the escort. But I've generally won using my approach.

It's a function of experience. If you spend all your time trying to kill the enemy flagship and fail, you get zero. Skip it and go for the escorts unless it's a likely kill before the guy runs away to safety.

Ive lost my cap many times early game and still pulled out teh win.

@Ron: I've won before with 3 bomber squads often. Not very many use Sovas for their starting flagship, and I've not once I think seen a fighter wing on another flagship before your Sova

That's how it is with strategies.. you stumble across one that works for you, then someone comes along and trashes it, and then you rethink

Usually, though, I do target support ships and leave my bombers to deal with the capital in the meantime. But since yours was so damaged I thought I could pull it off the other way

Flagship as such should only be present in "kill the flagship" scenario... Otherwise it's an unneccesary RPG element that keeps you from managing the empire and forces you to babysitting your preccccioussss ship. As I've written the difference between an all-new and all-upgraded capital ship shouldn't be as dramatic as it is. Yes, it's good to have a difference but right now a capital ship can gain several abilites etc. and be hugely more powerful than it used to be when it was constructed. This leads to babysitting.

By the way - this has no connection to the capital ship/other ships power ratio. I have no complaints there. Only RPG elements can prevent you from managing the empire and force you into micronamagent of capitals. The "special powers" are fine by me but the difference between first and final level of a capital is far too RPG-ish.

I support you on this one. its good that capships are as powerful as they are, but the leveling is too strong and leads to too much babysitting.

Actually I like that babysitting very much. Fleet battles are after all still the meat of Sins and imho the most enjoyable part of it, so I like my high level capitals with lots of abilities.

Sins has a heavy focus on combat, not just empire building, so having capital ships is far from an unnecessary RPG element.



It is possible to upgrade a capital to level 4 (level 3 without research) without going out to fight in it. Other than that, have you ever seen a level 10 capital in multiplayer? I haven't yet, I think the highest was 7? 8? And that was once.

Anyway, as I've already said, Sins isn't an empire building simulation. It focuses heavily on battles, as is pretty clear by lack of any non-military victory conditions. Thus it isn't unreasonable to expect players to pay attention to their fleets when it matters.

and so've I.

if it takes you any more than fractions of a second to babysit your cap ship its not the game that has issues.

So you check on your ten+ capitals deided in four fleets in a fraction of a second? YOu must be one nerv-twitching guy...


Having them is cool! Making them from zero (comparing the levels, not to other ships) to hero is bad.

yes, the complaint is not that capships are too strong - I like them the way they are - but that the differences betwee levels are just very big.

and come on, buying levels 3 - 4 for them costs more and takes longer than it does to build them and even then when you have the ressources chances are that your enemy has even higher levels.

so again, the point for capships and watching them is at least for me out of question, but who said that the rpg was so much needed, or at least at this level? I mean, you worried about that kind of stuff in wc3, but that games is so much smaller in comparison (and it was still very hard to control everything going on.)

No, but it only takes a fraction of a second per capitol, generally.

not to mention if you have 10 caps over 4 fleets you do NOT need to babysit them, and its definately not an issue for small games.

I finished playing a great 1v1 game against Bobblhead the Great on the Close Encounters map. This is just another example of the uber power of capital ships.

In the early part of the game, we both lost our capital ships in the same battle. Bobblhead had spent his resources on civic research while I spent mine on getting the siege frigates and another capital ship slot (plus a couple of hull upgrades). Also during this time, Bobblehead was able to colonize BOTH ice worlds giving him a total of 4 planets versus my 2.

I had to stop his excess of resources before I was overwhelmed, so I attacked his nearest ice planet with a newly built KOL and my leftover Cobalts and Siege Frigates. He spammed a lot of frigates to try and defend the planet, eventually wiping out all my frigates....at the expense of a lot of his frigates and an extra level for my KOL.

I guess he didn't think building another capital ship was worth the expense. He probably didn't think I would invest ALL my resources and potential research into getting another cap ship so quickly. Sure, he had 2X the planets as me, trade ports and about 15 frigates....but all I needed was that single capital ship.

By the time he finally tried to lift the siege of his 1rst ice world with all those frigates, I had reinforced my KOL with a SOVA. Between them, they made short work of his spammed frigates AND the turrets/repair station combo defenders. Afterwards, my caps finally finished off the planet which I then colonized.

We later on had a 'who will blink first' moment where neither of us blinked. I lost my capital world and he lost his asteroid planet and his other ice world. But my capital ships continued to simply crush whatever he could assemble to send after me.

There is something wrong when ALL those frigates can't take down a single cap ship (with minor upgrades).

You know, if they simply reduced the power/toughness of capital ships a bit, there would be no need for this stupid hard cap research system for capital ships.

I've lost my cap ships to frigates in the past. 10 or so, IIRC (stacking made it difficult to count -- I didn't notice their formation had units on top of other units, oops).

I am a bit late to the discussion but I find Paradoxnt's last suggestion to be interesting (start with an advanced cruiser rather than a cap ship).

In the first game that I played, it struck me as odd that we start the game with the "tech" needed to create any cap ship let alone a high level one and cap ship construction yard.

Paradoxnt, I would build on your suggestion by replacing the first cap ship crew tech with the tech needed to build a cap ship construction yard (i.e. you don't start with a cap ship yard nor the ability to build one).

I think that this creates a few results:
1. Loss of a cruiser flagship in the early game would be easier to recover from, as there would be a lower power delta lost
2. Getting into cap ship production becomes a tech decision perhaps promoting the use of cruisers in early - mid game
3. Opens the possibility of making cap ships require technology plans like other ships

DanS

It sounds like he would just send frigates one by one to try and beat off his forces? If so, that was a mistake. As Ron has mentioned, 10-ish Cobalts can destroy a low level capital. If your Kol had its damage reduction ability it would have been harder, but if he had waited to collect all his frigates and send them in at once, chances are you would've had to tuck tail and run.



In our last big game, I had a fleet with a single level 2 or 3 Sova, along with about 8-9 Cobalts and 10-11 I think LRMs. I don't remember the exact numbers. With that force, I engaged a fleet of a level 3 Marza, level 2 or 3 Dunov, and a level 6 Akkan along with a handful (very few, though) cobalts. The Marza was destroyed, the Akkan managed to jump at about 10% hull, the Dunov also retreated and all of the cobalts were destroyed. My losses were a few cobalts and a few LRMs, my Sova had probably 75% hull hp remaining. I gotta tell you, most of the damage came from the frigates, not my Sova

Two capital ships cost about 6000 credits, 800 metal and 700 crystal.

15 Cobalts cost 15 * 300 = 4500 credits and 15 * 55 = 825 metal.

So no, it's no wonder he lost with that much less resource investment.

And yes, it's his fault for losing. Cause he didn't build a new capital ship. With a Kol or a Marza + frigates he could have killed your capital ships.

Btw. could you upload the replay of that match? Makes it easier to judge what exactly did happen.

Whoever you attacked wasn't managing his akkan very well. A level 6 akkan is only useful if you use the armistice in a strategic manner to avoid such things as capital ship losses. The level 2 and 3 ships weren't of any real value by comparison. A level 6 dunov with flux field would have had near infinite shield restores, a level 6 marza would have single handedly killed all your frigates even if all by itself.

It's a serious investment to drop a level 6 capital ship. Last night I lost my flagship and a second sova a couple jumps out after I spent a little too long creating a distraction, ended up getting worked every time I ran into the enemy fleet for about an hour after that. It took me quite a while to bait his fleet into a position where I could kill him. I had six planets to his five, fully upgraded, and he still ended up walking over me any time I engaged his fleet. I spent a fortune leveling two dunovs, a sova and a kol to level 4, baited him to my homeworld chasing them through a star well while he thought my main fleet was occupied, and bit him in the ass with it, only losing a single dunov in his original target. He only had one level 6 capship, a sova, if his dunov had been 6 instead of 5 and he'd had a second to restore it, I don't think I'd have managed to drop his fleet even with full tactical slots in defensive structures and a 100+ fleetpoint advantage. I'm pretty sure I was more advanced tech wise too, I had almost completed the combat upgrades up to 7 labs.

The little guys are pretty easy, it's when they hit 6 that they go from problematic to game altering destruction, which is usually what the enemy flagship rapidly hits after you lose yours, as I did. You end up needing to catch them with a vastly more expensive force a long ways away from more help.

Losing a cap-ship in a smaller map is very punishing. Chances are (at least the way I play) you'll barely rarely have enough resources for one. When you do, it doesn't matter because it's near the end of the game. The bigger problem is that you can't just run away in WC3, since they're hulking slow and huge, making them easy targets. however, they can also be used as tanks by taking damage while you destroy a bunch of frigates before jumping the cap-ship away.

On the subject, I think some abilities should be re-evaluated. Most abilities are pretty effective, but it would be nice to see more "aura" types of abilities, such as things that enhance, flight speed, damage, etc. At least damage or something.

Since we're arguing about more WC3 like, lets throw in town-portals and healing pots while at it! Let's also add agility hero's that can kill any other hero! OK I'm being sarcastic, but this game should be different, and losses should matter a lot more than some wasted time. I find the levels for cap-ships don't matter as much in this game as in WC3, but the overall damage/hp absorption is important.

frankly losing any capships in any games is punishing, so just dont do it.

I actually thought it would be worse... Lately I've been loosing some ships against the AI (because I'm not paying attention all the time) and I guess one CAN bounce back after you get sufficient credits BUT it may be far worse once the AI is better and can take advantage of your losses better (at all), as would a humna player.

Having an AI next to you in a FFA is a hugh bonus.

To me ,killing the AI is good cap expierence