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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!!!