An idea for capital ships.

No... Just... No...

Capital ships need to be left alone in that regard.

What you're suggesting is cutting Capital ship effectiveness by more than half. (See - Abilities)

Capital ships need their abilities (See - High level) to be effective.

If the devs implemented your suggestion, Caps would become buffed frigates with a few extra features...

1 of each capital ship capping at level 15 might be a nice Scenario / Victory Condition, since there'd be a lot of focus on capital ship placement. I'm not sure level 15 is all that necessary though since most caps after level 6 are pretty resilient.

The reason i suggest something like this is to stop what ive seen as capital ship spam. Not necessarily on part of players, but on part of the AI. they spam flagships at you like the pirates spam raiders.

My idea was to have people invest more in capital ships that they already have built, rather than to just build more. Capital ships are strong, there is a huge gap between a fully upgraded starbase/titan and capital ships.

Maybe it could be setup so once the ship had acquired the required experience to attain level "11" you would have to buy the level. Say 5000/500/500 to get the next ability. Like you would do with a starbase, but you would buy the upgrades for your capital ships. I can tell you if i had 50,000 credits invested in a couple ships i would make for damn sure they were protected.

It seems like doing that would make them like titans. It also feels like you are comparing a single capital ship to a titan and a starbase. Those two were made  powerful to counter / repel capitalship spam. The real strength in capitalships is using their abilities to bolster your fleets strength / survivability and weaken the enemies.

Well its really not that good of a strategy. Only reason you might see that in the Beta is because Capitalships are the only things that can stay in a titan battle for a little while, and their abilities are great support in this situation. Fleets die far too easily when fighting titans, and just end up giving your enemies XP (which you want to avoid at all cost). Thus capitalships are the best unit to use to support your titan against an enemy one.

If titans are later balanced so that certain frigates can at least hold their own with titans, this tactic will probably disappear, since per fleet supply capitalships have horrible stats, and having to many of them automatically punishes the player due to the fact that they split XP among each other, diluting their strength in the long run.

What could work is balancing titans like how they are in EVE, anything below capital class ... would have modifiers against titans ("inaccuracy" because of the amount of guns if you like) to nerf their effectiveness against smaller targets and make them dedicated Cap/Titan/Starbase/Structure killers

Points taken, basically i just want to get my assault capital ships to pwn harder

personally i like how titans are forceing greater use of capitols, i never liked how much of an after thought they felt compared to massed frigets and crusers. i hardly ever built more than one cap ship factory before, or bothered to build more than a token force of cap ships, now i always build a cap factory closer to my front icase i lose a cap ship. i would be sad if, as you suggest, frigets were set up as pure Cap/Titon/Starbase/Structure killers.  where is the interest in that blanket stratagy, where frigets and crusers counter everything an caps/titons are just for people with an ego.  it makes more sence to me that titians counter massed frigets and can destroy starbases, leveled cap ships increase fleet surviveability and can hold the line against titans, frigets en mass take advantage of cap ship buffs, supply the dps/utility to a fleet and therefore counter cap ships (not becuase of inherent counter mechanics) but becuase of pure numbers.  frigets should be the lowest on the rung.  the fact is that a highly leveled cap ship is powerful, useful and, now with titans, nessisary. titans mean that there will be more use of cap ship raiding early game in an attempt to gain xp/ slow titan rush.  if any change needs to happen in the way of cap ships. their supply limit should droped to a more reasonable level OR the cost of cap ship cre should be droped considerably (to fully upgrade the cap ship supply is much more expensive then it is to resurch and build a titan) and some underused caps should gain ether fleet buff abilities or titan counters.  some currrent cap ship spells also don't work on titans which is disapointing.  i don't belive ion bolt works on a titan for instance.

i just liked going in on the old games and rape everything in my way with 16 capital ships