Advent also has another tech in their military tree that offers +4% mitigation to all units, for a total of +10% along with culture.

Anyways, the underlying problem is that no matter how high you push shield mitigation, it always possible to launch that many more strike craft to basically kill the enemy in one strafe.  You're not going to solve the problem, just increase the threshold at which it occurs.  Advent still has an edge, as you'll need three times as much damage to fell them, but they'll still be vulnerable to the same sort of focus fire.

As I said, I believe a new mechanic is needed.  Shield mitigation on its own won't be enough.  An example of a possible mitigation is a time-based damage cap.  The maximum damage a capital ship can take over a 1 second period would be capped at, say, 300 damage.  Anything it takes over that amount would be cancelled out until the next time interval.  This would ensure there comes a point at which you actually cannot dedicate more of your fleet towards attacking a capital ship.  Clearly this is a dramatic mechanical change to the game, which is why I believe it's expansion pack material and not a balance tweak.

It doesn't matter whether its mitigation, armour, or health.  You're just going to increase the threshold at which this "sudden death" occurs, and not prevent it outright.

and the whole mitigation agrument confuses me... and 300 dmg time intervals!? these are horrible idea. for 1 thats not  even how mitigation works, and 2 why make capitol ships invincible!? i like caps how the are i rarely lose my caps its a micro thing. if you lose your cap to focus fire lemme instill some micro techniques before you go nerfing shit.

1 put your cap on hold position facing out of gravity well so i can jump out on a moments notice

2 support ships like hoshikos, guardians, overseers, dunovs, subjigators, motherships, skirantras, subverters, murauders. they all heal / protect your cap or disable / repel attacking ships. vs bombers flak burts and tele push

3 if your caps being chased by a fleet. tons of otpions jump into a system then directly back to trick fleets? use jump inhibitors and repair bays. as vasari if you upg the jump from deeper in a gravitywell tech you can jump in and out of a gravity well at semi-sharp angles much faster then the fleet your cap will completetly escape after 4ish jumps

i think if you experement with ALL the options you have and youll find capitol ships can be microed to a near 100% survival rate with proper judgment and sound micro. and if its very late game and your jumping your cap into a system with 100 bombers and 100 HC and jumpinhibitors spammed then yes maybe you should be on this thread begging for invicible caps because your stupid and you dont know how long to let your cap sit out of combat till its safe again

heres a list of problems with invincible caps you all surely havent considered

0 othership with tier 3 shield regen and anti matter tech will heal more shield faster than 300 dmg interval unless interval is 1 second ;l

1 Kol shield skill plus finest hour!? come on now hes got 120%+ invincibility 24/7 why dont we just heal it when we attack it ;l

2 imagine the raid tactics with a fully upg lvl 6 egg and some overseers!? it can get in bomb and colo your planet and get out before you can kill it, because overseers will heal it far faster than 300HP intervals

3 marzabation... need i say more? the last thing we need it 300 dmg intervals vs missle barrage supported by hoshis with a kol with flak and invinciblness and a dunov restoring invincibleness to 9999%

4 tier 3 shield regen on mothership!? 2 motherships tier 3 shield battleball guardians DIVIDING ALL DAMAGE TO CAPITOL EVENLY AMOUNG ALL SHIPS  with 95% shield miti and sujigators healing faster then 300 dmg intervals. nothing will EVER die.

After Tyr and Shadowhal post wich the later ut the finger on one thing. Capship slot are way to expensive and so are caps them selves for that matter.

Slot prices should be cut in half.

And for caps i would like to see them go from 3000/400/250 to 2500/300/200 would help alot.

I am gettins the forge files to see if there is any undocumented changes on capital ships.

Plus : I forgot who claimed that magnitize is not frontal firing.

It is indeed frontal firing, as confirmed in both my game experience and newly released reference file.

'needsToFaceTarget FALSE' setting is not found on both EMP and Maz, while shield restore has it.

i do agree that most capital ships are to weak  they should be more powerfull "even in singleplayer... dunno whats the problem there"

only the marza / evacuator stick out above all others (and Advent's progenitor + Halcyon   both having 2 powerfull abilities "shield regen , energy aura")

the game remains playable tough, and i do think other things should be looked at that seriously hamper gameplay before changes to capital ships are to be made,

You ever tried using a Radiance or Revelation to disrupt it?  Deals with missile barrage just fine.  Also, shield regeneration can heal up 500 points of damage across your fleet, giving you more time to work with.  It's brutal, but not unstoppable by a longshot.

The Progenitor mothership isn't an offensive capital ship like the Marza or Evacuator.  Its shield regeneration and strong colonization skill are what characterize it since the malice nerf.  Malice isn't even half-bad in its current state.  Not awe inspiring, but not have bad.

Then maybe you first cap should be a revelation. But honest even with a Progen you can easily counter a marza if you invested you points in sheild restor and got to gardians. 33dmg shared 2 tiers of sheuld upgrade and and 1 progen repping 600HP of sheild should make your ships survive. Because keep in mind the Marza does 3000dmg mitigates. So only 1700-2000 dmg with be abllied onto the targets in the end. And in 600hp from sheild restore that number is lowered to 1100-1400. Voila you TANKED missile barage if you had purchused sheild upgrade fully to tier 2. Add in gardians and tanking it even easier. How ever at that point a smart TEC comander will start targetign your damaged ships to wipe out as many as he can before you can repair them. The same tactic can and should be used at advent with malice plus cleansing briliance.

IN addition tot hat is you could build a fleet that was 3 time superior to his, you coudl have easily invested ina  2nd cap. A revelation or radiance would ahve garantied you victory at equal fleet under the situation you descrive. But that is only if you use your caps right, and that si part of the micro department and directly relevent to your abilaty as a comander.

As for that 2 possible things. Your dicciples are fleeted with slowers ships. So if you give a move order they will only move as fast as the slowest ships. Make them into their own fleet when you need them to be indeepend of your main fleet. 2nd possibilaty is that he had hoshikos with demolition bots. IF even 1 ship get hits with demo bots he will slow down the whole fleet as to the behavior I explained above. The way to counter this since you can't be bothered to search for the ship that have demo bots on them is to break your fleet. After that each ship will move individualy and always at their maximum speed.

you do know that ships grouped in fleets have VERY MUCH IMPROVED automatic focus firing behavior when compared to non-grouped ships. its so precise in fact that even ships with different ranges and weapon systems will switch targets at the right time so close to zero shots are wasted. the level of clickfest manual micro you'd have to do to replicate this precision of firing is mind-boggling and i doubt anyone could do it for battles involving more than 20 ships. 

you should definitely always form fleets just for the focus firing benefits, not to mention the side benefits of ships being smarter about auto-cast AI on support abilities and so on. 

for those specific cases where you want a ship to move at a different rate than the slowest member of its fleet there are two different extremely easy solutions. the first is to take off group movement (the green arrows in the command console, group move is 3 arrows, individual move is 1 arrow). the other solution, so fleet orders won't countermand an individual move order is to select whichever ships you want to run outside of the fleet and just temporarily remove them from the fleet. 

in the case given, where disciples were moving mysteriously slowly. the solution is just to switch to individual movement (single green arrow) that way even if one of them gets nailed with a Hoshiko bot the rest will keep going. 

ON-TOPIC:

I agree that the cap ships simply die too fast in mid and late game to focus fire.

My suggestions would be:

1. reduce the cost of building cap ships so its easier to replace them.

2. add a research that increases the overall hp of capships. something like 10-20% per research so they can get more surivabilty in the later game.

3. to prevent cap ships spam (in general and because of above buffs) increase the cost of the capship limit and/or make the fleet logistcs prequesite for it. so for example to get a second capship you would need to research the first fleet logistics technology.

and for the balancing issue...i think need to to seperate this from the overall tweaking of capships. Since i dont think that every ability has to scale with fleet sizes. they need to stay unique and while scaling abilities will be more powerful late game, non scaling abilities should be more powerful early game or when using multiple capships of the same type. the numbers still could use some balancing tweaks though. (i dont think that anything such radical like permanent replicate forces should be even considerd before someone tested it in a mod)

I would agree the Evacuator is good, but besides being a decent colonizer, the Progen is really weak.   The "good" combat ability of the Progen, Malice, doesn't work well against the strategic mix of abilities of other civs.    The very light hull of the Progen means it is easy to kill, and Malice doesn't seem do anything unless the ships it is affecting are being damaged by some other means.   Since typically ships are being killed one at a time (ie. focus fire), Malice is therefore mostly wasted anyway.   Malice only shows value when illums are being used, and multiple targets have a possibility of being hit.   Even then the usefulness of Malice is debatable since the period of time Malice affects a target is usually less than it takes to kill it, at least that is true in the first half of most games.   Later, presumably one would have a larger fleet and make better use of it, but since ships are ordinarily targeted one by one by a player, Malice is fairly inefficient most of the time it is used.   And it is catastrophically inefficient compared to other cap ship abilities of other civs.

For example, two or three applications of an Evacuator's nanodissassmble ability and the Progen is dead.   The Evacuator doesn't even need support ships to do it.   There is nothing on the Progen that can counter that at similar levels of ships.   Although in theory one could have a mix of cap ships to compensate for the inherent weakness and counter the overpowered abilities of other civ's cap ships, the Advent econ is so tight, more than one cap ship is effectively impossible to get early enough on most single star maps.   Anyone trying that (other than on a multistar map where you might get the time you need) would get quickly over-run and killed if they were playing opposite decent players.  

The Marza also easily kills off Advent ships like Progen easily since has an easy to upgrade fleet-killing ability also that is nearly impossible to counter in most combat situations.   That one ability alone is overpowered since it can completely cripple the military and economy of an opponent (economy because it could kill a hundred ships within seconds)...basically you could use just that one ship to win the game.   Again there is nothing comparable to it that is available to Advent's arsenal in most game situations.    Even a level 9 Progen with fully upgraded malice will never ever see the kind of fleet-wiping ability that ships like the Marza has.   Since it is easier for TEC to rebuild a fleet, if there was a fleet-killing ability anywhere it should be on Advent since once their fleet is wiped in a span of 10 seconds, they have zero capability to rebuild it in time, except maybe on very large maps, which are not played that often.   I would think TEC would be less affected by losing a bunch of cheap ships since they get trade early and have inexpensive ships (relative to their potential income).

The way it is now, Advent is much more challenging a civ to play than TEC or Vasari for the simple reason that it has been given a poor set of abilities.   The pathing and speed of the Advent ships seems more clumsy than other ships also, since I have chased Marzas across several gravity wells with disciples and for some reason the Marza moved faster and jumped faster than disciples (andno, the disciples were targeted on the path endpoint of the Marza, not the Marza itself, so they were not getting tied up within the grav well firing instead of jumping.  And no, they were not group jumping either, they just seem to hang up on the grav well edge more than the Marza did.)

Yes, that's the whole idea of cap ships.

And the problem is they don't do this well.

I don't mean to make them damage dealer or absorber. Capital ships NEED boost on ABILITIES so they can SUPPORT other ships well, as dev had intended to.

Notice there isn't any 'boost hp/armour' or 'boost damage' suggestion on my original thread? (with exception of Vasari Siege ship, which is unbalanced compared to Mazda in dps part)

Actually quite a few of these suggestions looks like they would make cap ships more valuable.. although I did have issues with a few.  Top of my list would be the Kol's rail gun and and the AOE buffs for kol and kortal.  For the rail gun to be boosted to such a high instant dmg with an area of effect, that would basically one shot most ships as the damage is dealt instantly.  Almost like shooting cleansing brilliance....just faster and repeatable with a disregard for the increasing mitigation due to the instant damage.  I think just a skill cost decrease would make it powerful enough as is.  As for the AOE buffs... I just see all sorts people crying foul there when Assailants start looking like they can use missle swarm or kodiaks start surviving 20 squadrons of bombers strafing them.

For targetting uplink, I wonder if they could turn that into a skill that turns it into small AOE of the Cielo cruisers skill...I think it was called designate target... not sure.  That ability is really weak sauce and needs a change.