No one will argue that most abilities are really bad.  Also no one will argue stuff jsut does not scale.  Like old Malice was great, it scaled with fleet, it now blows chunks, NO ONE uses it.  Antorak used to be awesome, it now stinks because of Assailant nerf, and the buff to Egg speed. List goes on and on.

BTW buff Akkans lvl 1 Colonize plz to 1 extractor, so we actually have an incentive to take it.  No other buff to this needed.

Well at begining of the game it will be 250, then if you are goign military (not everyone gets the research especially in MP) then at lvl 3 you might take second lvl of colonzie, for 500 saving.  To topt hat off, because the extractors build isntantly you get additional resoruces isntead of waitign for the extractor to be built.

I agree with you on most of those points.  A lot of caps could use some reworking, and there's no question that the big three (Marza, Evacuator, Progen) simply outclass everything else in their respective factions.  The micromanagement problem, however, is more to do with the crappy auto-cast AI.  It doesn't have to be perfect, but right now it's completely and utterly appauling how it works and with few exceptions (shield regen on progen, how can you mess that up?) it sucks.

I would like to say is that I dislike how you target almost every ability, even if they do scale well.  Maybe Kol's flak burst does need a AM buff, maybe it doesn't, but the fact remains that it scales well as fleets get larger, so it doesn't really fit with the theme of your topic.  I also think that some abilities (such as magnetize and EMP charge) do scale well because they can be used against capital ships.  If caps are stronger, then anti-cap disruption abilities inherently get more important.

Agree on colony frigates; long overdue.  Disagree on capital ship max upgradable levels.  While 5 is arguable, the 6th level should not be purchasable.  I strongly feel that has to be earned.  Early on, you can always attack a pirate base or something to get that level anyways, but the point is you can't do it while sitting around picking your nose.  This is important for FFA's, since getting out and fighting is necessary to raise your capital ship levels, whereas if you can get to level 6 you can get all the abilities that really matter anyways without ever having to raise a finger.

Now it's cloned the progen's ability.  I do think this should remain single-target, as it's primarily for use on your own capital ships anyways.  It's not a front-facing ability, so I don't think any change is necessary.

Buffing the Marza?  Incendiary shells, sure, but definitely not the other abilities.  Radiation bomb and raze planet rock at the start of the game, and once you have ship anti-matter upgrades later on anti-matter isn't a huge issue for Marza.

Dominance requires you to actually enter battle and come into range of enemy units.  You will lose more ships than you gain from using it, and if you don't you already outclass the enemy fleet so dramatically that you could steamroll anyways.

Replicate forces, however, can be done within the safety of your own empire and could be used to create an indefinitely large force without ever spending a penny.  It would be classic RA all over again...

Actually, I like that idea a lot.  Seems very appropriate and would make the Antorak a must-have.

As for the Advent ships, they're probably fine as is, but if everyone else is getting a buff some of them may need to be changed. 

Radiance:

Detonate anti-matter and its armour upgrade are fine, since one is anti-capital ship (automatically scales, IMO) and the other also scales well.  If similar abilities get buffed, animosity could probably use a maximum target buff, but otherwise is fine.  So long as malice isn't buffed back to its former glory (probably some middle ground is needed) cleansing brilliance could use some love.

Revelation

Reverie is another anti-capital ability, so it automatically scales.  Guidance could use a moderate buff, but making it an area of effect ability could well be going overboard.  Clairvoyance scales well, as does its ultimate.

Mothership

Malice could probably use some balance between its current and old form.  Maybe no maximum number of targets, but instead diminishing returns on "shared" damage.  It would still be better to have more targets under its effect, but each individual target would take less damage.  Its other abilities are fine; ressurrection is sub-par, but given how powerful this cap is I think it's fine to have a sub-par ability.  Ressurrection scales well, anyways, since it buffs friendly capital ships.

Halcyon

If the number of strike craft carrier caps support is increased, Halcyon should be fine.  Maybe its ultimate needs to be looked at to scale appropriately with the additional strike craft, but otherwise fine.

Rapture

Vertigo is fine, Concentration is VERY fine, and domination works wonders.  Maybe vengeance could get reduced anti-matter cost and faster cooldown.  Along with a better auto-cast AI, it could be very effective if spammed on multiple targets (who are taking the most damage, of course...) across your fleet.

The AI isn't much of a threat, so singleplayer gamers don't exactly get a full sense for the game's balance issues.  For singleplayer gamers, sub-optimal is just an extra layer of challenge.  For multiplayer gamers, sub-optimal means worthless.  You have to go with the strongest units and strategies or else you get creamed, so the experiences are quite different.

Hey, I'm mostly singleplayer myself.  Fact remains that with the AI you have the leeway to play with sub-optimal units and strategies because it just isn't very good.  This makes it more difficult to make precise statements about unit balance. 

As I said "sub-optimal" strategies in singleplayer is just a bit of extra challenge, but in multiplayer can be nearly unplayable.

I don't know, but I am very and extremely annoying when Dunov slowly turns against a target and shoot the ability, then turns to continue to shoot (remember, Dunov fires weapons from sides, not front) That's very unnecessary waste of time and micro/timing needed. And hey shield restore and flux field are not frontal while other two are; we have a inconsistency here and it really makes the whole ship somewhat unfinished. And as a support capitals, as far as I know there really isn't ability which can be only fired from frontal cone. Hey even ion bolt is not frontal!

Maybe Kol burst does not need any change, but Dunov's issue is the one must be addressed, IMO.

Hmmm, so you don't want to get a nice level 6 cap while I can get a whooping 30 heavy cruisers to rape your precious capital ships?

The survival issue on capital ships are broken in late game, since any concentrated fire (i.e +40 LRFs, or +20 HCs, or hundreds of fighters and/or bombers) WILL KILL your capital unless you don't bring your capitals to the battles.

See, the loss of the capital is virtually guaranteed; the next point is how to quickly recover from the damage.

In current state, it is very annoying and difficult; the money itself is not a issue... The issues are time and effort.

Buying level up takes too much time in current state and the max level is 4. Say even in level 6 we still can't use the capital's full potential and need to bring them to the battles to gain the experience.

Uh oh, the battles? you mean the battles where I bring 30 heavy cruisers to rape?

See, the problem is it is very hard to level up the capitals in late game because there isn't a neutral world around for the level up and capitals are so easy to destroy.... I once suggested to make capitals much more durable than current state, but it seems everyone does not like it.

I think then this is best alternative way to solve this issue; and in FFA, campers the ones who win the games anyway

Yes, something is dealy wrong with this... This is not I originally want to post.

It should be 'Fix autocast behaviour to prioritize capitals or always heal capital ships only on autocast' I will fix this.

Yep, we need to buff Mazda very slightly.

And I mean it.

Look I know people think Mazda as the ultimate capital in SOASE games, but the reality says it is not true.

Bring Mazda to me, I will ion-bolted it to death. Missile barrage will be extremely easy to be countered by cap disabler. Without missile barrage Mazda seems weak.

Raze planet does not rock at the low level, it is more viable in later levels.

Very few ships suffer anti-matter issue after the upgrades and level up, same goes for Mazda. It is not really vaild argument.

No it is not, let's do some math.

I have 40 units, you have 40 units. I use replicate force to make 5 more units.

The difference is 5 now.

You and I go into the battle. I use dominance to capture 5 units. And let's assume I lost 10 units due to battle and you lost 8 units as well.

The difference is whooping 8 units!

See, the point is the enemy actually loses his units while you gain the units. This makes the effiency at least 2x more than replicating the forces.

Hmmm, I indeed sense some cheese with the other suggestion I make (the level up part) it can be new RA all over again indeed.   But it does not harm the fact that it should be permanent to at least compete with dominance.

Woot, thanks for the input. I will wait for more responses and I will combine them to make Advent section.

i still maintain that the only real problem with cap ships is the difficulty of adequately levelling ships built in the mid-late game. 

it should be possible to buy training up to level 6. training should take less time (90 seconds is too long, maybe 60 seconds is appropriate). and training should be cheaper by a large amount (maybe half the cost). 

some cap abilities could be tweaked or rebalanced a bit but none of them are game-breaker broken right now, not even missile swarm. better to err on the side of slightly underpowered than way overpowered so i say things are basically fine right now. 

@Darwin3:

Hmmm, that's valid point.

Seems we have two choices for this issue.

1) We either fix the Dominance to work as intended (only 90 sec instead of permanent) and leave the Replicate forces as it is.

2.) We adjust the AM cost, cooldown cost and other things to make sure both Dominance and Replicate forces have both merits and flaws.

I'd say first choice is dumping down the capital; the purpose of my proposal is to make capitals as useful as teh EGG!, so we left with choice 2.

I'd say in current state Dominance extremely powerful (even more stronger than Mazda); I mean every 60 second a bunch of heavy cruisers are yours. It can turn the tide of the battle pretty quickly.

Well, I usually value offensive abilities higher than defensive abilities. So let me think about this issue more. Again if you (and other people who are reading this) have better solution for Replicate force (in current state it is not worth it) I'd welcome to hear.

For Mazda, Radiation bomb does not do substantial damage; even in last level it does 480damage total. While the effect is AOE, 480 damages are really small, and it is usually covered by regeneration of each ship when the Mazda finishes one.

This is the problem in general: Usually weak-AOE abilities in SOASE are utterly bad because ships do regenerate and there are simply too many ships in the regard. Even one can observe that Mazda's missile barrage's effectiveness got MUCH weaker when it just can't kill all ships at one use. For advent, with mothership's regen and guardians, with maxed HP and shield upgrade you even can't damage the hull of illuminators.

This is why abilities with solo target are more effective; teh EGG!'s nano does 600 damage (in first level!) and reduces the armour of 2. Unlike Mazda's R-bomb with full level (which do 480 damages), nano SURELY kills a unit.

Whether it is a scout, LF, LRF or wounded capital, nano almost always manages to kill stuff, and it is important.

Nano has much higher chance to be 'success' than R-bomb. R-bomb suffers, as described above, high failure rates in exchange of being able to target multiple ships. But in reality this does not work because we have regeneration on ships, making the penality of failure too much to make the ability useful.

At last, Nano's AM only costs 75, while R-bomb is 85. Maybe changing it to 60 is too much, but it still needs some slight nerf on AM cost.

I will post more in sometime later.

Edit: Woot!

I guess access to level 6 is not that great idea in the end, maybe level 5.5 (level 5 + some extra experience) is more suitable, but not 6.

I talked with someone and he pointed out even more wicked cheeses can be done, even more worse than multiple Mazdas or Vasari carriers producing free ships.

1. if you want easy leveled up capships, play advent. mass transcendance. nuff said.

2. Why buying level 6 is bad: play advent. build one of each ship, level all up to 6 with training. will actually need a second progenitor. scutlle all but one progenitor. build 15 ships. ressurect 'em.

the deterrent on getting additional caps after the first is simply that they underperform as freshly built level 1 ships when thrown into the shark-infested waters of midgame fleets. i legitimately think you would see ALOT more caps being built if they could be cheaply levelled up to 4 or 5, which is where they need to be to compete in the mid-game. as it stands now its just a bad investment because its equally(if not more) likely to get fragged by bomber squads or LRFs while its still a mostly harmless level 1 than it is to live long enough to become a big bad dream crushing planet destroying level 5 or 6 monster. 

the two solutions to this problem are 1) increase durability or 2) make levelling cheaper/easier.

i like solution 2 better because it addresses the issue head on and doesn't create a seperate balance issue for ships that actually DO make it to level 5+. 

I think the changes are enough to make sure caps can compete with teh EGG! in various regards. Hey, with this suggestion Kol can do much more damage than teh EGG!'s nano (but that's make sense since teh EGG! is colony cap while Kol is a battleship!)

We may have to test all the values in someway, but I think the direction is at least correct (I have written this about two months ago. So.... read my suggestion carefully if there is anything weird)

The most useful two ships in the game are definately #1) the Evacuator and #2) the Progen because they are both multipurpose colonizers that have powerful combat uses.  For this reason, they are the flagships of choice, and there are many polished strategies for how to use them.  TEC flagship choice is a lot more situational to playstyle and the kind of map being played on.

That said, there are a lot of ships with very useful, but more subtle abilities.  Some, like the Halcyon or the Skirantra, actually do a heck of a lot to sway the tide of combat.  Some are just not meant to be first ships off the line, like the Dunov, but they make for very powerful 2nd or 3rd ships.  Some ships become useful because they are there specifically to counter other ships.  Yeah, people don't use the Antorak much anymore, mostly because it requires so much attention, but if you micro well, it can be very useful and annoying to fight.

Even with some tweaking of antimatter costs, I think you'll find that most people will build exactly what they have already been building.  Why?  Because your first ship off the line has to either be a colonizer, or be a strong solo fighter so you can start expanding.  Do to the nature of single star multiplayer games, most players will engage each other and possibly even start winning or losing their local conflicts before they get around to making a 2nd capship.  Some ships also are easier to use...Dunov's are really useful, but I never use them because I am not as big into micro.  Kortul's are not as useful, but they are tough, and I actually kind of like them...personal preference.

There are some interesting strategies you can do with multiple capitals, but you rarely see these in multiplayer games because people are pushing very hard for a decisive victory in a time frame that doesn't allow for the cultivation of high level capitals.  Low level capitals are weak, but high level capitals with tech upgrades augmenting fleets are pretty strong.

That said, there could probably be some tweaking, but it probably won't change how people play much, unless the "tweak" is adding another "Missile Barrage" level fix to the game. 

And yeah, Gravity Bomb on the Evacuator is like the 2nd Cherry on the Icing on the Cupcake.  I have no clue why it is there...all I know is I loves me some Evacuator.  It does make a lot of sense on the Antorak, but at the same time, Subversion makes sense on the Antorak too.  The Antorak is a scout capital, the vanguard of the fleet.  Subversion makes NO sense on an Evacuator, because no one is going to use the Evacuator to go blockade running, which you can do pretty easily with an Antorak, up until midgame when people start placing PJI.