Wait, doesn't the ships that were replicated eventually wear out or are they there until they get blown up?

permanent

They are temporary.

One, those ships only last 3 min.  Two, scramble bombers is total worth it if you know when to use it (i.e., if you need to draw the enemy fighters away from high-value targets).  The AI will send all umpteen thousand of his fighters after 1 bomber.

That's an AI exploit, not an actual use of the ability.  Considering Sova gets extra strike craft damage passively, and Halcyon gets extra strike craft squad size passively, I don't see why the Vasari Carrier can't get extra bomber squads passively, either.

Well, they get strike craft survivability passively, which isn't a minor benefit.  It's not purely offensive like the other two races' passives, but it's very useful regardless, since it applies to all friendly craft within the radius, including the bombers sent in by your supporting carriers.  Same goes for the healing effect: it heals all friendlies within range (ships, structures, strikecraft), which makes it great as part of a large fleet.  I'd much rather have those than the Sova's specials, personally.

My point wasn't about the other abilities of the Vasari Carrier, which are perfectly respectable.  I was comparing, specifically, the Vasari carrier ability that allows it to deploy extra strike craft with the TEC carrier ability that improves strike craft damage and the Advent carrier ability that gives it extra craft in each squad.  My point is that the TEC and Advent equivalents that improve the strike craft hosted by their carrier are all passive, whereas the Vasari one which deploys extra bombers is not, even though it's really on the same level of strength.

i always thought scramble bombers is actually quite a bit stronger than Heavy Fighters or Adept Drone Anima. its basically 2 bonus squadrons of bombers up almost all the time. i never took the time to number crunch it or anything but i always felt like 2 extra squads is alot more powerful than the passively better squads from the other carrier caps. 

there's more to it than just the effect of the extra fighters. it gives you a squad rebuilding mechanism on a seperate track from your normal one. the Skiranta still rebuilds lost strikecraft like any carrier does but it can apply its antimatter regen to maintaining its fleet as well. combine that with the microphase aura and you get the most resilient strikecraft presence in the game. 

now that doesn't mean i actually go this route....i still think you get more benefit from just spamming repair cloud (which is an insanely good skill) then you do from blowing anti-matter on extra bombers. 

The point is that Sova gets to keep its anti-matter for embargo (the only reason to have a sova in the first place) and Halcyon gets to keep anti-matter for TK push.  Because the Skirantra wants to keep its anti-matter for regeneration cloud, this makes it highly questionable as to whether you'd even want to scramble the bombers.   While scramble bombers is superior to those passive abilities on a low level carrier, a high-level one has so many squads of its own that the Halcyon and Sova specials become far more effective by comparison.

The notion that one can replace Cap ships with a handful of standard fleet attack craft is appealing, but maybe a little misguided.  Cap ships are not replaced by attack frigates, HC, or carriers.  They are replaced by *siege frigates*, since no other unit in the game can attack planets, which is the cap's ulitmate purpose.  If you dont build caps, you must build siege frigs.

If you factor in the high expense vs general uselessness of  fragile Siege frigs, and the cost of building enough of them to whittle away a single planet sometime this century...the utility offered by a pair of even moderately combat viable caps seems like a bargain.

You make my point for me.  So the glorious, "big and bad" capships are really just glorified siege frigs?  That's what you envision when you think of a capship (say, the starship enterprise or the borg cube)?  That's what the devs had in mind when they put capships in the game?

LOL.

Dude, seriously.  They cost 50 fleet supply.  If you want uber-caps, they need to be priced accordingly.

Of course they should be priced accordingly.  Everything should be priced accordingly.  If capships are to retain suckiness, price them down a bit.  If they are to be "uber-caps" as you speak of, price them up.  No arguments there.

They are more than worth 50 fleet supply and their resource cost.  They do not suck.

a level 1 cap ship bombs about as well as 3 siege frigs. a level 5 cap ship bombs about as well as 5ish siege frigs. a fleet with 3 level 5 cap ships (easily attainable by midgame) is doing the bombing work of 15ish siege frigs. they're occupying 150 fleet logistics to do this job (as well as all the other cool stuff they do). 15 siege frigs would use up 216 fleet logistics and do nothing else whatever.

its not even close. you need to glass planets and cap ships are the only useful way of doing that.

not even going to get into the debate as to how they compare for similar logistics/cost of attack frigates. the versatility, durability, and game-changing power of well developed cap ship special abilities makes them the clear winner.

the only thing you can say against cap ships is that its not practical to develop them when you are under a large amount of pressure. they require significantly more time to deploy and level up then a similar commitment in frigates would take. if all you're worried about is time pressure then frigates are the winner. in the end though cap ships provide indispensable power and utility.

I think an issue with cap ships is the triple growth curves they have on levelling up. Cap ships, when they level up gain:

- Extra shields and hull. Basic health.
- Extra max mitigation and armor points. Two health multipliers.
- Extra shields, health, armor, and maybe mitigation through research. Multipliers on top.

- Extra base weapon damage. Basic DPS.
- Extra weapon fire rate. More DPS Multipliers.
- Increased weapon damage from research. DPS multipliers.

- More powerful and effiicient abilities.
- More antimatter and quicker antimatter recharge.
- More AM storage and recharge through research, to grant even more excellent abilities.

What you get is a unit that is rather unremarkable at level one, which advances to absolutely awesome at max level. The research bonuses tend to balance out across the board, although  Advent's mitigation boost is awesome for their cap ships.

So yeah, capital ships seem to suck at the low levels, and they really do. They are equally bad if you build them just to add to an endgame fleet. But that's because capital ships are a long term investment. You can't expect to fill your fleet with level 1-4 cap ships, then expect the caps to excel. It'll never happen.

So you are saying you need to cripple yourself with low level capships in the earlier phases of the game, in order to make a long term investment that hopefully pays off mid or late game.  What serious online player can afford to cripple himself early in the game?  Plenty of games are won/lost/decided in the early phases.

If this were true, you'd be building multiple ones right off the bat when a game starts.  But seeing as you are a "pro" player (I've seen your name on some list, anyway), I doubt that you do that.

Would you like to revise your statement?

i think AgentOfKharma is referring specifically to cap-ships after the first. he mentioned earlier that he likes to get the freebie and then scuttle the yard to get some of those resources back to. 

i still disagree with him though. i get the distinct impression that he's playing almost entirely rush maps and his games end with a GG/disconnect as soon as one player loses a good chunk of his fleet to the other in the first major encounter. if those were the terms you were playing your games under then yeah, it wouldn't make any sense to build more than 1 cap.

i'll just quote myself for my take on this whole debate, i said it a couple of posts ago.

the only thing you can say against cap ships is that its not practical to develop them when you are under a large amount of pressure. they require significantly more time to deploy and level up then a similar commitment in frigates would take. if all you're worried about is time pressure then frigates are the winner. in the end though cap ships provide indispensable power and utility.

 

its really as simple as that. if you're in any kind of situation where your not under severe time pressure (meaning you're not pushing a rush and you're not defending against a rush) then you'd be dumb to skip getting additional cap ships. they get EXTREMELY powerful once they get some levels. 

See further down.

Bingo.

Normally 1v1 or 2v2, an occasional 3v3.  There is usually rushing by one or more players in all games I play.  This doesn't mean that games last 5 minutes, but I can qualitatively say that I've never had a game reach "late stages" except in long games against the AI.

I assume all "competitive" games are similar, as I can't see "pro" players sitting back for hours leaving each other alone while they build up huge uber-fleets of doom, but I could be wrong.

I played on a huge map of my own making 3 stars 10 players. 1 Human 9 normal AI

I finally ended up with 3 attacking / fronter defense fleets Each with 1 battle 1 colony 1 palnet seige cap ships plus support ships and i found that with those 3 sperate fleets i was able to meet and destory any of the single fleets that the ai's would throw at me. I had about 20 ships as my quick response fleet to help defend my non frontier planets.

Cap ships make or break a fleet. Having said that sending out wave after wave of cheap light ships to wear down enemies or even defend a planet works quite well to. While they are cheap and fast to make once they go boom you have nothing left so you total output of $ and resources can be higher than a cap ship in the end.

Plus Capital ships get Exp !!!!

I think the biggest issue with caps is that the game focuses on major tide turning fleet battles, and capital ships are meant to survive many light skirmishes. Because of this, most caps don't ever get to see a real fight until it's too late to realize that they've got no chance. The secondary levelling system(training) is pointless. I don't think there's any competitive reason to pay more than a frigate's cost for a minor boost in stats, and then it only maxes out at a dangerously low level. The only time purchasing a level up is useful is to pay a few dozen credits for the last few XP, just because that's the only time it can pay off.

I think most of the capital ship sucking issues can be addressed through improvements to the training system in Sins. High level caps are too much early game, but low level caps late game are equally unacceptable. They need to scale better across a long game.

Edit: An idea (posted elsewhere) is to tie crew training to the ship logistics upgrades. As players upgrade their capital ship logistics(which naturally happens through the game), better crew training becomes available. So at the start, you can't buy levels, but at the end, you can double in to get a ship around level 7 or 8. Early game caps will level up much faster than this research rate(who goes all out on cap ship research?), but in extremely long games, secondary caps will end up having a LOT more going for them.

Don't know if you know this, but Advent get a tech where all capships roll out at level 3.