Capital Ships

I agree.  Ill be utterly shameless here and point you toward a mod I made that does some of what youre getting at, they dont get up to 15000 but they all start with around 5000 health and are much more capable than the original cap ships.  (Btw its for Entrenchment 1.02 so youll have to be playing that to use the mod).  I'd love to see regular sins like this but I doubt such a change will happen.  Heres the link to the mod if you so wish to download it:

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?w2imghnymgn

So you want a cap ship that not even a fully upgraded starbase can take down???

Capital ships are pretty tough as is.  The issues I have with their longevity have more to do with the units killing them - nanos and assailants or huge swarms of bombers being the most likely culprits. 

The main problem with caps is that they are supposed to support their fleets.  Yet, they can't do this when they are dead.  They die way too easy to focused fire from massed assailants, lrm, or illums.  In other words, I largely agree with Darvin3.

I don't know the solution, but one idea is that capships could have 2 shield mitigation values.  One vs. standard frigs, which could go extremely high (maybe in the 90's), and the other vs. capships.  Basically, you'd have to use a cap to kill a cap.  It's an idea, anyway.

In my mod, squads are slightly weaker, with increased dmg but less ships per squad.

Caps are much stronger, first battleship maxes out around 12k hull, (new) second battleship maxes out around 15k.

weapons for them starting around 50-60 and reaching 80-100.

to balance that like he noted above, a maxed out vasari starbase has 50k hull and 20k shields.

starbase weapons start around 80-100 and max around 200

all the prices were increased also, so Caps and Starbases are costly but worth it.

i have a "super carrier" Cap that costs 50000 cr before any cost decreasing research.

they also have higher fleet point counts

frigs and cruisers are slightly upgraded but not much. frigs pop like frigs should. and when squads come under heavy fire, they go down quickly. i also made it so all Caps but the siege have at least 1 wep that can attack squads.

i think it is quite balanced and is more rewarding. i also fully re-worked the experience system and, well, everything. you get the idea

Fantastic idea. Why didn't I think of that...

One question. How do you win if your cap is dead? This is a case of last cap standing wins.....

Couldn't we just get a similar effect by lowering the effectiveness of regular weapons against capital ship armour types?  Really, we only need to look at LRF and strike craft.  Light frigates and heavy cruisers don't have the range to swarm around a capital ship effectively, and nothing else can seriously damage a cap anyways.

Bombers are the tricky case, because they scale too well, and if we nerf them for the late game we stand to make them worthless early and mid-game.  I think the solution here is a DPS cap.  If a capital ship takes more than a certain amount of damage within a 1 second interval, further damage is ignored.  So, if the DPS cap is 400 (for a 4000 hp capital ship, that's a 10 second lifespan, fairly reasonable considering they don't get much tougher than that) and a fleet of 100 bomber squadrons descends upon it, they will deal a mere 400 damage because their attacks were too synchronized.  This would mean to get full effects out of your bomber horde, you'd have to stagger your attack, giving more time for the capital ship's fleet to accommodate and attempt to survive.

A DPS cap doesn't make sense. Damage disappears? That would buff animosity quite a bit, and would severely punish players for using focus fire. A synchronized fleet attack could end up losing over half of its damage output over a frighteningly long time, ruining a larger fleet for no apparent reason.

Issues between different phases of the game can be taken care of with research topics. If something is too weak later on, give it a topic to get back up to speed. If it's too strong early on, then it should be moved to later in the game. For example: keep bomber damage high. Then give cap ships a research topic that increases their resistance to strike craft weapons (like EM defense, point defense, etc.). Another example: give flak frigates a research topic that causes them to place an "evasive" debuff on strike craft. This debuff causes strike craft to attack with reduced power/accuracy/speed, as they're forced to spend time avoiding flak instead of getting free shots.

  Na, you guys are simply trying to make things complicated that doesnt need to be complicated, the simple fix that i find works amazingly well is simple, make caps stronger, actually what i do is make everything stronger, personally i found the base stats for just about all the ships and caps were stupid low.

 My years of playing WOW has taught me one thing, nerfing is for ignorant people....end of discussion. If one aspect of the game is OP, then tweak everything else out in the game to be a little OP also, makes game play so much more fun.

 Don't be afraid of the firepower boys, embrace it like men, now stop crying like b!tches and blow some sh!t up, peace.

Actually, it makes perfect logical sense.  After an explosion, there's going to be a cloud of debris being blasted off of the capital ship which will absorb some of the incoming punishment from successive attacks.  At a certain point, there's just so much shrapnel and debris around the capital ship that there literally isn't a line of fire for more attacks.  Until that debris clears a bit, further attacks would indeed be futile.  I'm not talking about a small DPS cap, I'm talking about huge numbers that can only realistically be attained by huge bomber swarms.

I proposed a cap of about 400.  That's a very conservative number.  Even if we take the animosity example (caps out at 32 vessels), those vessels would have to deal over 12.5 DPS (after mitigation and armour) to actually cause that overflow effect.  Not going to happen; animosity on its own won't bring this factor into play.  As I said, it's primarily aimed at bomber swarms.

actually, i'd say that if you had a horde of bombers descend on something, they'd melt right through the debris. then again, not that that kind of attack leaves debress unless their hulls are made of dust.

why not just make the cap for bomber DPS only?

Ok, so you melt the ship's outer armour.  There's still going to be a thick plume of super-heated plasma surrounding the target afterwards.  I think that will block just about any missile.

Considering the numbers I'm throwing around (400 DPS) you'd be hard pressed to achieve that kind of damage through any other method anyways.

i have to agree with darvin.  lots of explosions, while melting the armour, would also increase the ablative effect of the hull.  the sticky point is that the effects would be more pronounced on energy weapons, at least according to my understanding.  in the end though, a damage cap could make sense.

if you guys are serious about modifying damage to only capitals, the answer is found in Gameplay.constants:

DamagePercentBonus:ANTIVERYHEAVY:CapitalShip 0.75 (for strike craft)

DamagePercentBonus:ANTIMEDIUM:CapitalShip 0.75 (for Lrm)

Isn't that what shield mitigation is about?  Maybe monkey with that in a mod, you know.