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 ).

Goafan:  1 thing you forgot is the BB's big guns would blast most PT/Destroyers out of the water at ranges the destroyers couldnt engage back.  The point of the screen of escorts was to make the enemy small ships take fire from the BBs at long range, and then be finished off by the smaller ships before they get in range to even hurt the BB.

In SINS, this doesnt work because the BBs shoot the same range as the PTs.  This is also why Carriers are so good, and most consider hangers better then gun platforms.

IMO, a good fix for caps would be to make them act like caps in firepower/range as well.  Sure, KOLs will get swarmed, but on approach you are going to lose 2-3 smaller ships, and during battle a few more.  Due to speed the caps wont be able to kite, and the little ships will be able to dictate the engagement area.  Using your own little ships, you can keep his ships away from your caps too.

doubling the caps current range would be a good start, since this forces him to charge through your little guys fleet to get to the cap, or engage your little guys and let the big guy do the damage.  This way, the guy with a balanced fleet (caps and small ships) would have an advantage over the swarm.

Another small change I'd add would be to add flak guns to all caps.  Adding the equal of a single flak frigate to each cap (Maybe more for certain ships, like akkans) would also help slow the current carrier spam.  This way a cap fleet isnt totally reliant on escorts to stop bombers.

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.

You need a team to back you up if you are building multiple caps in competitive online play.  Unless your opponent sucks. 

Having said that - Two Kortuls chaining nanites = GG

Siddy, did you get GO BIG OR GO HOME in multiplay using the GBOGH mod/rules?  If not that's pretty impressive

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 don't really think of the Marza as a combat cap. I meant the ones that don't really have any supporting role. But good god is that lvl 6 ability nasty after the patch. I thought people would already be freaking out about it in multiplayer. The first thing I do when I get it is wipe out the pirate base. It only takes a minute unless you actually want to kill all the gauss platforms.

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.

With the new strikecraft buff, all anti-strikecraft caps bask in glory...
Ever used 2 or 3 Halaycons against enemy bomber hordes? Telekinetic push will annihilitate any strike craft that comes close to them. With a bit of microing, you can even prevent them to make their inital atack run. No mass of defence vesells could do that.

I agree that caps are extremly costly, but if you use them in the correct way (and that is NOT dealing damage vs. enemy ships), they are worth the money.
However, one can argue that the slot costs are imbalanced, esp. the 3rd and 4th is too costly, compared to those tech levels where you get 2 caps for only slightly increased costs... It would be better to reduce costs for research levels 2-5 and increase it for later ones, esp. the last two.

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.

Depending, just bring in a few flak frigates and bombers were no problem. Man I miss the homeworld series, heres hoping it returns one day. Or we get a SINS single player campaign.

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.

In realistic space combat, ships would never be within visual range of each other. It would be a guessing game of where that ship is going to be when your energy weapons reach it based on a guess from what you can see of it which is where it was a few seconds ago. Not a very fun RTS, IMO.