There's been a lot of talk recently on how overly titan-focused the game is, in large part due to Titan AoE damage marginalizing pretty much all non-carrier frigates late game. Even in diplomacy before the rise of titans, most of the early game frigates lost usefulness by late game for less pronounced but similar issues.
Now a series of rather interesting thoughts came to me a little bit ago, going something like this:
Point 1: AoE is out of hand
Point 2: AoE is *mostly* a late game concern
Point 3: Most ability damage dealt to frigates is AoE damage
Point 4: following from points 2 & 3 resistance to ability damage on frigates would have minimal effect on the early game
Point 5: Since AoE damage is pretty much exclusively ability damage, resistance to ability damage could be used to address late game AoE issues
point 6: Following from points 4 & 5 & 3 Resistance to ability damage could be used to allow other frigates besides carriers maintain their usefulness late game without havign a major impact on the early game
Ok so that was a bit of an odd way to present my argument, but the idea is fairly simple: At present the damage table entries for ability damage is pretty much 100% across the board to all armor types except capitalships & titans for which it is 75%.
What if we for example the ability damage type were changed so that for example it did 65% to light armor, 50% damage to medium armor, 85% to very heavy armor and still did 100% damage to very light & heavy armor?
Suddenly Light frigates(the counter to carrier frigates I'd like to note) & heavy cruisers would be just as resilient to AoE as Carriers, improving their staying power into the late game.
Now I'm sure many think this sounds kind of unorthodox and roundabout, but think of it this way: The only other real way to moderate AoE is to address each powerful AoE individually. This way in one fel swoop we can make whole classes of ships nolonger obsoleted by titan AoE.
Pretty much the only real collateral damage are the couple instances of Early game AoE damage. Well I suppose there's also something to be said for this making abilities more counter intuitive.
Well that's the theory in anycase. To be completely honest I'm not even 100% convinced myself, but I thought it could make for some interesting discussion on the forums if I posted it so what the hey? 
Don't suppose any of our resident modders have experimented with anything like this in the past?
