Cap ships as pure combat is kind of silly.. With one or two exceptions. A lvl 6 Marza being a huge one. Give it a Dunov or 8-10 Hoshiko's and it's good to go for wiping all your frigates in 30 seconds.. Or as a free 'leveler' for your other caps. Drag two new caps along with your high level Marza for a pirate base raid.

Another would be the colonizer. A colonizer is a must have for any forward fleet. You can expand much faster than you would with a few planetary assult frigates and a colony frigate. In this case alone, the cap is much more efficient/effective. Several comparisons have been done on what cap ship to start out with, and typically the colonizer gives quicker initial expansion. All the cruisers in your fleet cap won't take a planet... or colonize it. So even late game, having a second or even third colonizer cap works well, depending on how many fronts you're fighting on. The space egg with it's 'Green funnel of doom' is awesome in this respect.

Caps ( and it's been said many many itmes ) are not the lords of battle some people would like them to be, Unless it's a very small map with almost instant combat. I try to think of them as Frosting. Good to have, but not a replacement for the actual Cake ( frigates and HC's ).

I agree, the caps main wepons range shuld be increased by 300%

And by main wepons i mean things like Beam cannons on kol and radiance and missiles on marza and desolator.

The secondary guns shuld stay the same range as they are now.

also the flak on caps is intresting idea. Since flak, by any means is not enought to hurt fighter swarms alone.

I usualy ignore flak frigates and enemy fighters all together and go straight for enemy LRMS; fighters are free, frigates are not.

no mods, it was during good ol [GE] time

We teamed in grindstone.

Then all made only caps. So basically we had 8 caps gang; Dunnov, dunnov, dunnov, sova, skirantra, skirantra, marauder, egg.

Hard to kill, lots of fighters to swat early LRM's. huge healing power and so on...

Planets died fast and we just rolled as we went, everyone bought the first 2 levels and so on, was fun.

Was super, but took lots of TS co-ordination

I like sins, and caps do have their advantages but the only combat caps to ever get it right were in Homeworld 1 and 2. Battleship and few cruisers/destroyers and it was game over.

Sins seems to favor a mix of its own/WW2, ie Caps can take damage and have unique abilities other then being massive weapons platforms - though they can't rule all. I won't lie I prefer the rule all approach as that seems the most logical, seeing as if you were going to build something that big as an offensive weapon why not design it as a mobile high yield weapons platform, why purposely equip it so it can't survive against 10 frigates?

And in all fairness to both sides of the argument this is space, the whole idea of naval tactics in a vacuum is kind of ludicrous though I guess thats besides the point.

in HW1 caps were all end. In HW2 Fuckload of frigates and laser corvettes was much beter :/

in HW2 the caps were good but died horribly without supports, to a small craft swarms.

All these comparisons with WWII surface ships are ridiculous.  But then the game physics are ridiculous too.  I was disappointed in this game because I wanted a space war simulation.  But, then I forgot realism and put it in the same category as a game with wizards and goblins, and I like SINS as a fantasy game.

I'd give 99% odds that for real spaceships armor will never hold a candle to firepower, everybody will try to move at very high velocity relative to their target and manuever like crazy to avoid being hit.