Colonize ability...why?

1) Colony ships take an eternity to recharge Antimatter and they lose a huge chunk of it every time they make a jump. Cap ships with colonize are much more likely to be ready to colonize right when you want them to.

2) Free extractors/cheaper upgrades (I forget what the Vasari bonus was), over time, will add up to quite a bit more than a colony frigate is worth.

3) The colonizing cap ships generally have pretty damned good abilities on top of being able to colonize. Even if you only put 1 point into colonize, you'll have that base covered while having access to excellent abilities like the Advent area shield recharge.

4) In games vs. the AI, colony frigates are hostility magnets. It's just easier to bring your colonizer into the fight rather than making it wait on the sidelines until the coast is clear.

To summarize, you're not getting a colonizing cap ship 'just' for the colonize ability. You're getting it because it's likely to be a helpful addition to your team which also happens to be able to colonize.

As Sakhari said, colony frigates are slow to recharge and vunerably to enemy fire, Akkans on the other hand, can pretty much always colonize whenever you want it to. Take the the asteroid near your homeplanet as an example, normally, you would have to destroy the two rebel ships and then jump in with the colony frigate. With the Akkan, you can jump in, colonize the asteroid, and then deal with the rebels (destroy the siege frigate first). So not only do you save the resources you would have used on the colony frigate, you get the asteroid a few crucial minutes earlier with the Akkan. The same is true when it comes to capturing planets (though you should destroy any rebel siege frigates before colonizing).

Now with regards to the Akkan's abilities:

Colonize: Not as powerfull as the Advent (?) counterpart, but still useful, not only does it save you up to 500 credits, but means that you'll get metal and/or crystal from the planet a few minutes before you'd otherwise be able to.

Ion Bolt: Now I hardly ever manually use it as I've found the length for it to be to short. But it isn't completely useless.

Targeting Uplink: There really isn't much to say, it's great and requires no micro. Normally what I go for when my Akkan reaches level 2.

Armistice: Highly underrated and incredibly useful. The best TEC level 6 ability if you ask me. Armistice can be used to ensure that your fleet or parts of it (focus fire targeted caps) can retreat without losses, it can be used to grant repair frigates time to do their thing (very useful when fighting a fleet without them), and it can be used to create a cease fire between the enemy fleet and parts of your fleet, while fx a task force of LRMs take out defences. But the most powerful use for Armistice, is probably to charge your Akkan into the enemy fleet, cast Armistice, and let the rest of your fleet pound away unhindered on the enemy.

The value of 'free extractors' is questionable given that TEC can research, what, something like a a 50% cost reduction and a 33% build speed increase on them anyway.

40%. Base price is 250 with no planet special abilities.



Still, these are instantly (or nearly instantly) added as soon as the planet is colonized, so you don't even need to wait for that one starting LEV to get it's job done.

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Sakhari and Vanechka pretty much hit the nail on the head. Having an Akkan in your assault force is very very useful, not only for Ion Bolt (which at 2 or 3 can keep an enemy capship permastunned as long as your Akkan has antimatter remaining - and with upgrades it should regen fast enough) but for Targeting Uplink as well.

Plus Colonize lets you lock down planets as you go when attacking the AI, which has a horrible tendency of slipping colony frigates past you from nowhere, meaning you end up running back and forth playing whackamole.

Just remember not to set Colonise to autofire and you're good to go.

I hadn't thought of that use of Armistice, however.

Ion Bolt is also very nice for keeping an enemy capital ship "locked down" and unable to fire, as well as keeping it from jumping out so your forces can kill it.

Well, it's still better than the 'nothing' you'd get otherwise and you'd still have to pay for that research as well.

I'm not saying it's a huge savings but it's something you wouldn't be getting otherwise.

And just for the sake of clarity, I'm not saying colony frigates are useless either. I'm simply highlighting reasons why people use colony caps.

No it's not better than nothing. Takes a skill slot.

Advents is the only one that is great.

I'm not saying the others should be as good as Advents, it's part of improving advents eco and stuff.
But if one race got like free.


For vasari and tec the only real advantage is faster AM regen, which is alright on a multistar map.

It's your choice really. I usually only grab one level of colonize if i go with the TEC or Vasari cap ship, because the bonus for vasari's is only duration. I like being able to immediately take planets I destroy from the enemy. It prevents them from taking it back and I can have a beachhead right outside their territory.

The main reason I get them though is because I like their other skills, especially the vasari's DoT and damage debuff skill.

I don't mind waiting as long as it's not a very long wait. And if you manage your ships properly you can have your colony frigate jump in right as you finish the battle.



It's actually extremely useful to have a "hostility magnet." If one of your ships is getting beaten up you'd normally have to move it out of the fight to avoid its loss. This is an old WC3 trick called (as I recall) "dancing." You'd move your units out of a fight as they're about to die and your enemy would re-target to something with more health. You could move the other unit back in once the opponent's attention is focused elsewhere and thus spread out damage to your units without taking losses.

But having one of these colony frigates takes the focus off of the other ships in the fight. If you can kill the enemy ships quickly and there aren't too many then this is very handy. Or if you can shield restore that colony frigate then even better!

I do see how the other abilities of Akkan are useful but I don't see anything its colonize ability does that a colony frigate can't do with a bit of micro and good fleet management.

Yes, I know what dancing is but I thought we were talking about the ability to colonize.

Anyway, I figured I was talking to a newer, inexperienced player (No offense. Plenty of new people around) but since that doesn't seem to be the case... I'm not trying to argue that the Akkan is the best choice, especially due to colonize. Again, I'm just highlighting reasons that many people like using it for that purpose and yes, convenience and lighter micromanagement is a big one. For the sake of actual practicality, as Innociv touched on, the much higher antimatter regen rate is probably the best reason to do it (if you're going to do it at all) which is why I listed that first.

I don't know if the Akkan is the best TEC cap per se, but I wouldn't hesitate one second in recommending it as the, by far, best choice for a first TEC cap.

The Ion Bolt is a bit so so when its only a 3 second job, but its gets better fast - love the skill. Almost never put it on auto cast I prefer to micro manage and pick my targets.

Any fleeing ship you can slow him down quite a bit. Or simply put an enemy capital ship out of the fight for several moments, the skill recharges quite fast and has a lower cast cost - might tip the balance in a square fight.

personly, I understand the arguments put forth, it is a good tactic.

However, I always get the Marza for my first capitol ship. For the TEC, has the strogest forward firing Arc.

In shorter games, where rush tactics are viable, it makes no sense to make these colonizing cap ships. If the other player makes a battleship, he can duke it out with you, and you will lose your capship almost guaranteed. You can't really depend on abilities either if you are playing against Vasari, because your cap will have no antimatter.

In larger games, it makes sense to get the colonizing cap because it shaves 40 seconds here, 50 seconds there, 60 seconds there off your colonizing time. These faster colonizes make a big difference at the beginning because you get exponential returns on investment. Also the colonizing caps for each race has pretty good abilities (Evacuator has planet killer that gives you income and a pretty big DoT which really annihilates things like Guardians with high shield and low hull, and the Mothership has Malice and a fantastic PBAoE mega shield regen). With the money saved from not building as many colonizers (you will eventually want at least one in a larger game), build more light frigs to help your colonizer speed up the initial planet-grab phase.

I never really bother with Akkan's colonize past level 1. It's simply a lot more durable, completely free (except the capital ship factory, of course), and has a lot more antimatter than colony ships, which makes early-game colonizing easy. Further, it's got great support abilities. Target uplink can really make a huge difference, and ion bolt is amazing in the right circumstances (oops, your capital ship is down. oops, your capital ship is down. oops, your capital ship is down...). Armistice was an ability I did not care for much at first glance, but it has some really great application in a lot of different circumstances. One of the better level 6 abilities, definitely.

If you get the colonising cap then you can set up a forward base near your opponent. For example, I tend to have 3 planets colonised when I max my fleet out for the first time, at which point I want to attack. I can fly my fleet past whatever planets are in between me and opponent, until I get to one (usually an asteroid) on the outskirts of his domain - kill it's defenders and colonise it, and then set up some defense (regen bays) and ship production there. This is a lot harder with a colony frigate since it tends to get killed en-route as it flies through the independent planets. Even if it makes it, the time spent waiting for it to charge up antimatter is time your opponent can be finding you / kicking you out of the system. With the colony cap you get the planet instantly; your opponent can't really stop it happening.

EDIT: this is for 1v1 on small random maps

Hahaha! I think that to myself while blasting his doors off and he's frantically trying to reach the edge of the gravity well. SUCKER!!!