r/SoSE•
Hellhound636

Should Capital Ship Limits Come Back

Question is in the title.

I'm not quite convinced either way yet. On one hand, I never really feel pressed by the capital rush strategy. Per supply point capital ships bring less firepower than a similarly priced and supplied fleet of frigates/cruisers/corvettes and have clear weaknesses to anti-capital spam. Missile boat spam, Kalev frigates, carriers, lots of way to deal with capital ships in the early game. In the early game being the operative phrase here.

Late game it's a whole other story. The prevelance of extremely powerful item upgrades and the level scaling of capital ships advances them leaps and bounds beyond what any other ship type can match no matter how many there are. A critical mass of capitals switches quickly from liability to unstoppable. Why build Kanrak Assailants en masse at 60% shield mitigation when a Desolator hits that item activation and has a far more lethal phase missile swarm with 100% mitigation. What use are cruisers/frigates to the Advent when I can stack Psi upgrades to give a pocket of capital ships unlimited shields/Antimatter/no weapon cooldown etc. TEC capitals may be worse off, but they can still be tuned up beyond their rank-and-file and produced by the dozens.

Is the game better for having the endgame be capital deathball rolling around, or should factions make use of a wider range of ships even towards the end? Not quite sure yet myself given how much of the game is decided when capital ships are at their weakest. So throwing up a poll to get a reading.

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Posted Aug 24, 2024, 1:30 AM UTC

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