I created a simple mod where the capital ships were beefed up to make them more capital ship like. When going capital against capital, I had them fairly balanced between races. The damage was relatively high with high shields and hull, but varying between the different caps. On the other hand though, when a single capital ship took on a fleet of frigates, especially light frigates, the capital ship decimated the fleet without breaking a sweat. I then decided to up the capital ship crew and fleet points in hopes the AI would take advantage of it and create more capital ships. (A little side note: I play 99% of the time with TEC and made it so I only had access to one ship at first and would have to research the rest. Also, my ships were more expensive than the AI's..the AI's being 1000, 100, 100 cost.) But instead of creating more cap ships, the AI just made more frigates. In response to this, I decided to just make frigates inaccessible, so I deleted the frigate factory from each of the home planets and replaced it with a capital ship factory and deleted the frigate factory from each of the player files.

I figured this would be flawless and I would be facing much stronger fleets. I decided to go all-in and played a 4-player medium map. 3 locked-team unfair difficulty, random AI against me. I started off by conquering 4 or 5 close planets and then building up my fleet and researching defenses, etc. After a while I had a strong enough fleet that I decided to attack some of the AI's outer colonies. One-by-one i made across the map, not a single colony being colonized by the AI until i came upon each of their homeworlds where they had a couple research stations, a trade port, a few defenses and one single capital ship (the free one). Each of the three unfair AI had nearly the exact same thing. This was after about 2-3 hours of gameplay, so you can only imagine my disappointment at having spent 3 hours looking forward to a huge endgame fleet battle to face one ship.

In summary here are the changes I made:

1. Capital Ships weapons damage, shields and hull all increased in order to last longer.

2. TEC(my race) has one ship until research at the fifth combat tier.

3. Advent and Vasari capital ships all cost 1000 credits, 100/100 crystal/metal.

4. No more frigates.