Oh Great, Theres goes my 10th cap ship in a row :(

end game you need 8 donovs with sheild restore . you know how hard it is to kill my caps with only 2  .

but really advent have the hardest time keeping their caps alive because they dont have any huge healing bonuses like, TEC shield restore, or nanite armour on thier overseers.

lol i use that tactic all the time. I hit the enemy Caps (as they have the needed abilities) once ive focus fired and killed all Caps I then turn to their Command Cruisers. If your having issues with your Caps, you might want to try changing up your Cap Composition. I usually work with TEC because as said by Top Vasrari their healing bonuses keep me going.

My usual Fleet Comp for Caps by End game looks like this

As I use Two Fleets to divide and conquer.

3 Kols (adaptive forcefield and their ability to tank is needed to catch the hell coming from the enemy)

2 Dunovs (Are located in the rear of the formation so that their Shield Restore canopy covers my other five Caps)

2 Marzas (These guys are my Killers, they have the most fire power out of the bunch and will hand the enemy its ass while my dunovs restores its sheilds and keeps it living.)

1 Akkan (not only helps with colonizing a planet after destroying the occupying enemy fleet. But its armistice is of great help when you need a lull in the fighting)

Your best bet is to Focus fire, basically micro your fleet. By telling all of your Caps to focus in on another cap your putting all of that firepower on one ship which believe me 8 Caps versus 1 Cap is nothing to contend with. Eventually youll break down the oppenents backbone. And hell run for the border.

its not just you :> its impossible to keep support caps alive in late game combat - because they are too fragile to LRF fite....said it hundred times - long range need dmg nerf versus caps/structures.

Ever since overseers their turn rate increase I seem to hardly loose caps at all...

Grtz,
Flipkik 

light frigates are also improved lol...I loved the last patch overall - advent carrier cap got a shitload of dps - had 7 squads on lvl 5.'oh my god' - said illums spammer and ran away.

what? Recently my Vasari carrier cap survived 70 illuminator focous fire It was a bit of a pain thou tellign all the overseers to heal over and over and over and over, but it worked

I think the real problem is the damage mitigation system.

The devs made it so that focus firing penalizes a player, that way you have more fleet vs entire fleet combat instead of individual focus firing, which is more fun (and balance, in my opinion).

However, this equation needs fixing.

I think that mitigation should be a function of how many ships you have in the gravity well.

Let's say its (#ofshipsfiringatyourship)(#ofshipsyouown)/(someconstant).

That way if you have a single capital, it won't be mitigated that much so your enemy can kill it. But if you have multiple ships, they have to kill some of them through general fleet vs fleet fire before it becomes effective to single out the capital ship.

Recently my Vasari carrier cap survived 70 illuminator focous fire It was a bit of a pain thou tellign all the overseers to heal over and over and over and over, but it worked

End of quote

You're not the only one who does this.  Just the other day I had an Advent player lose his fleet multiple times because he kept trying to kill my Skirantra (rather than going for my assailants) and being unable to overcome my rather hefty healing. 

Slippery slope is bad enough in huge fleet battles.  I can't say I'd support this.

The problem with mitigation currently is more than you only need 2 or 3 units attacking you to hit your mitigation cap.  In fact, many strong units (heavy cruisers for instance) will actually force the mitigation of whatever they're attacking to max on their own, reducing the system to an over-elaborate armour scheme.

I don't think I have really evr had a problem with this as long as you now what opposing units you need to kill first, what your fleet make-up is and what level/how you use your caps.

Its true of every race, spamming works. to a degree, after that you have to focus on balance of your fleet. this is more true after entrenchment, and the most recent update. i cant wait until i never have to face a fleet of illums again because they gush atmosphere all over my ships.

With Vasari, between Skirantra and overseers you can keep other ships alive, and with the transports and the subverter most cruisers kind of lose out with abilities while enforcers and kortul, focus fire and ability can weed out a lot of the weaker units.

the simple solution would be to up the cost of frigates/cruisers and/or lower fleet supply. A lower fleet supply really helps w/ capital ship viability.

Well, you can play on "low" fleet settings in multiplayer, but most people don't like it.

Low isn't low enough for what I mean. You can still spam lrfs and shite on "low" settings.

Push it any lower and it'll just become a game of starbase spam, since they don't require fleet.

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/351380 Have fun with that

I do have something I want to say about this. I really feel most people don't use/preserve their caps properly. By that, I mean you see too few caps on a map because people don't want to risk the investment in them, and then they're surprised that their lone or two caps are the first thing the enemy goes after.

That's not a shot at anyone, more how I percieve the issue.

I really feel there's a good rule for keeping caps alive and useful in ur fleets. Always have (# lvls of taxation researched - 1) lvls of cap ships slots teched. By that I mean, if you have three levels of taxation reserached, then you should have 2 levels of cap slots reserached and so on.

This keeps the best ratio of caps to fleet, because you must remember, capital ships are the best support weapons you have in this game.

It's tough, because the fact is caps are the most logical targets. They hurt the most to lose. The "healer" support caps help dramatically, but microing to keep an eye on your caps is a must. Don't let your cap get entangled in the fray. Keep it to the side. Close enough to do damage, but far enough that it can actually move if it needs to. One of the biggest frustrations is when a cap gets stuck and tries to change direction = death sentance.

My point is this. If you're only going to keep 1-2 caps once your fleets hit 300+ ship slots in size, you make your enemie's first target of choice pretty easy.

One of the few perks of rush maps seems to be that fleets stay relatively smaller so "cap targeting" doesn't have as big a payoff, so I'm assuming you mean in bigger games that last longer.

Good rule of thumb: Buy a second cap once you have your opponent on the run. ONce you are ready to start seiging your opponent's planets, get a second cap. It does wonders.

Guess my thoughts are gettin a little random here, but I think they all vibe together. Hopefully something I said here helps.

I am totally with Raging Amish on this one.  Capital ships are the heart and soul of your fleet, and I personally strive to get three out the door as soon as realistically feasible.  The sooner you get them out, the sooner they start leveling up and the sooner their powerful abilities start turning the tides of battle.  Yes, they do die occasionally, but in the long run they will pay off.  Some will die prematurely, some will live long and prosper; I find that the average case is vastly beneficial to the person who invested in capital ships.

Although I'll occasionally lose caps to LRF, most of the time the culprit ends up being bombers, nanos, or... sigh... getting stuck.  Keeping capital ships alive is usually a matter of having the right counter-measures on hand.  If you know you're facing an enemy who singles out capital ships, bring along Overseers, Hoshikos, or (GASP) dominas.  Healing saves capital ship lives, so use it!

Well since the new patch. My kortul with overseer seems to always reach lvl 9 or 10, and is very useful in large battles too.

I really like the patch. the kortul is actually strong now!!

My experience is the more Caps you have (a good mix of them as well) in a single fleet  with a very good mix of support units the more likely your caps will walk away from the fight in one piece. Im not too sure about the other two factions but when I face off against TEC I always hit their Caps first to take their biggest bonus's out and then hit their Command units. This deteriates its ability to focus on particular units and youll find they quickly target wildly sometimes not really working as much as a team as they did with the Cap and Command units. As for Advent and Vasari I usually take out the Cap and then just slug it out until they take heavy enough loses that they begin to route. When dealing with Advent Hoshi's are always the key to keeping your Caps alive. You just got to learn to micro. Turn off some of the autocasts that you dont want interfering like the hoshi's demobots...........They seem to prefer attacking then healing when its turned on. Entirely ignoring a severly damaged unit just to hit a HC that doesnt need to be chased down.