The only other viable Advent starting capitalship is the Mothership, and when deciding whether to built it or a Halycon, I think it comes down to two things.

A. If the economic value of capturing planets faster with the Halycon is greater the benefit given by the Mothership's colonize ability (both in reducing upgrade prices and cost saved of needing an extra colony frigate). If you have plenty of room to expand the Halycon may even allow you to get planets you wouldn't have otherwise gotten. On the other hand, if you have a fairly limited number of worlds you can easily contest that extra colonize speed may not be very useful.

B. How long you think it will take for a serious fight to break out with your enemies. If this is a very small amount of time the Halycon is already better as the fighter support from carrier caps is a huge advantage to very early skirmishes. If you have enough time to do a bit of expansion a mothership maybe better for the colonize ability and to ensure you can have shield regeneration (with enough ships to make the ability worth while) online before you get into a major battle. If you have enough time to quickly get a second capital before the action starts, its probably best to go with the Halycon for the faster expansion with a newly built Mothership with shield regeneration to fall back on.

Battleship opener is a double-whammy, not only is it just weaker than a carrier opener in general, but it is also countered by a carrier opener.  The Kortul is the only battleship remotely viable as a multiplayer opener, since it balances its offensive and defensive capabilities with a reasonable antimatter overhead.  The only other capital ships that boast that are the carriers.

The big problem with non-carrier capital ships is that they need to get in close to the enemy fleet to use their abilities and weapons.  Carriers can stay far away and contribute with their strike craft and abilities.  A Marza sitting on the edge of a gravity well is a dead weight, but a Sova can be using embargo while contributing valuable strike craft.  This discrepency means carriers have a much stronger and more reliable tactical application than other classes of capital ships.

Is it boring? Yes, but it's often times the best strategy to use if you're trying to win.

Exception: the Evacuator colony cap can be an extremely strong opener, even in very cramped 5v5 games.

I'm just thinking off the top of my head here, but... you probably want the first cap because it's free, you might want a second cap to increase bombing speed (plus moderate firepower and to be a damage soak), and you might build more later if one of your caps dies, or (if fleets are large enough) a non-carrier cap if it has a useful AoE ability.

Combat frigates still do more ordinary damage per supply than capital ships, of course.

Vasari are unlikely to be using Skirmishers that much at all, at least not if the player is decent. Reintegration, while nice, is unfortunately rarely used simply because the skirmishers themselves are almost always subpar in comparison to the Assailant or Sentinel.

I don't really like the idea of a Vasari player going cap-heavy against Advent though... because if Advent have 30+ disciples (very common early-game), it would probably be quite easy for the Advent to damage the Vasari cap and pursue it after it retreats. Even if it makes it to a repair platform, that'll only repair 15 hull/sec: unless the Vasari player has a large fleet or a starbase or 4+ turrets defending, the capital ship being attacked may well die. Bottom line: Vasari needs a fleet with firepower.

Against Vasari, the Advent have to have a good number of Disciples built at any one time to help protect against the potential threat of an Orkulus being built on the Advent HW or key choke point. So it may well be in the Vasari player's best interest simply to build Assailants / Migrator.

Building more capital ships can help if you already have the advantage and are anticipating bombing an Advent world, but I think since Assailants simply provide a lot more firepower against what the Advent need to have, Assailants would be more useful.

Building a cap for its fighters to attack Seekers can work, I guess, but you don't want to be having to target the durable Seekers in the first place - which can be avoided if you know what you're doing.

This all is true. In a plain fleet-to-fleet battle, if micro skill levels are equal, Advent tier 0 will win over everything else, at least very early in the game. And if the battle is just a fleet-to-fleet battle, Vasari going a few Assailants and then all Skirmishers and then beelining for Reintegration could well work (for the very early game).

However: what I'm saying is that with the addition of an Orkulus by a Vasari player who knows what they're doing, the Advent's tier 0 advantage disappears. If the Vasari player can manage to get a starbase to the Advent HW, Advent will have to focus fire on the starbase with Disciples, which will be countered by the plain Assailants that make up the rest of the Vasari fleet. The Vasari player then keeps building Assailants to melt the newly-built Disciples that the Advent player is building in an attempt to fight the Orkulus.

While it's true that the Advent player may have some number of Seekers in an attempt to counter the Assailants, the Seekers will be near useless against the Orkulus - and, though durable, Seekers also have (slightly) lower damage output per supply and cost than the scouts of other races.

What I don't really like about this is that Vasari plan is so simple, but can still be extremely effective: build Assailants, build a starbase, then build more Assailants.

The purposes of the Vasari player having fleet firepower was for the ability to push back against the Advent fleet pursuing the Vasari cap. Not to win (because the Vasari can't plain *win* a plain fleet battle early on vs tier 0 spam) - but to have a moderate ability to fight back. The Advent player will probably have tons of Disciples quite early - and a Vasari player building a second cap early will put them at a severe firepower disadvantage. A lot of Disciples can easily handle a Skirantra or two if the Vasari player doesn't have a significant supporting fleet.

It would... if the game was balanced across races

An Orkulus costs about the same as a capital ship (maybe a little less) but is significantly more durable, and can do large amounts of damage if it manages to finish building and stay alive for more than 20 seconds or so. (Make sure to have Repair Cloud on your Skirantra to buy an extra few seconds)

If the Orky manages to kill two batches of Disciples (30 seconds? 40? I'm not quite sure) before it explodes, the investment will certainly have been worth it. However, if you're going to be SBing your enemy's planet, you'll almost certainly want to have only one capital ship so that you can invest primarily in heavy-firepower Assailants.

Whether the Orky-based strategy is a good one or not depends a whole lot on map positioning though...

Also, after watching a very recent replay, I'm going to go back on what I said before: Vasari spamming only Skirmishers against Advent actually can be somewhat effective. The situation was that the Advent player had 2 Halcyons - 8+ fighter squads, plus TK Push - I'm guessing the guy playing Vasari didn't want the Advent player to easily take out his Assailants with fighters.

Indeed, if you can't put the SB up on their HW or on a key choke point very close to the enemy's HW, it'll probably not be worth it because the enemy will simply avoid it.

Since you'll probably be attacking the enemy HW with this strategy, it's very unlikely (even with 3 carrier caps) to be able to bomb it out in a reasonable period of time. Bombing for the purposes of killing the HW planet only works once the enemy fleet has been destroyed or has run. So you don't need to be spending funds primarily on increased bombing capabilities yet.

Investing in 10 or 11 Assailants instead (for the purposes of killing the enemy fleet) works much better. One carrier (Repair Cloud), one Orky, and a small cloud of Assailants with more on the way can often roll an Advent opponent.

Agreed.

I would like it if Vasari players needed more skill to use that tactic properly.

Well...phase gates do make defending the empire a wee bit easier....

If you already know the game mechanics pretty well and have played a number of multiplayer games to have a sense of things, they're definitely pretty easy.

As is TEC, really. Build a bunch of LRM. Then Hoshikos. Keep spamming until you die or your enemy dies.

As is Advent. Build a ton of Disciples and attack. Maybe build scouts too if your enemy gets LRF.

In a relatively cramped setting (quite common for ICO), the general idea for each faction is simple if you know what the strategy is.

When I play as TEC, I always get Demolition Bots. Those things are damn useful, even if they don't get the credit for it.

You underestimate my modding capability.

My copy had Demobots 'fixed' long before the patch did.