Build a cap factory right away and the first cap you build from it is free.

Building your capital ship factory is the very first thing you should do in the game.  Then queue up a build for a capital ship, preferably a Mothership (one that can colonize planets).  Then send it to the asteroid that's attached to your starting terran.

Unless you want to. I always find it fun to have lots of capital ships. (Course I only play single player, where you can get away with it more often.)

I dont know what Cap ship you use but if you have a decent attending fleet with it, they tend to do well. But to each his own.

I use Cap ships online and do just fine. It could be the "bang for your buck" is only calculated with total hull points and damage in mind, rather than abilities, seige damage, and hit and run techniques,

I hereby put forward a motion to make the position official. It's just the coolest sounding title. You have to submit a picture of yourself with pom poms, though. You know, for authenticity and all that good stuff.

Or the Advent Carrier that us increasing the firing rate of every ship in his fleet.

The size of the fleet doesn't really matter (as far as the capital ship's survival goes) if your opponent has a large fleet and he's ordered it to focus fire on your capital ship.  It isn't necessarily the smartest thing for your opponent to do based on what kind of capital ship we're talking about and the composition of the fleets, but capital ships are great big targets and people will focus fire on them.  It's always a little demoralizing when one of yours goes down.

I like the suggestion - don't like the idea of him with pom poms

its called a comp stomp... A lot of the "pros" don't like it as it is still vs AI. But it does help people get wet in the shallow end of the pool before jumping in to full human vs human MP games. So Centurion and I decided we will start promoting it to people who only play SP...

Yes - a high level Kol can take a lot of damage, and you can often run it away when it gets to 50% and still have enough health to get out of the system to repair. But some ships (e.g. Vassari egg) can strip alot of that armour away (get the nanites to lvl3 and some ships/structures have negative armour...). And at the end of the day - if their are enough ships putting enough DPS into it, it will still go BOOM. It will just last 5-10 seconds longer....

If you get theirs at the same time I don't feel so bad  - especially if I get more of their fleet then they get of mine - both lost, but I lost less, therefore I won

The one thing losing a cap does do (unless you have a spare somewhere) is force you to get seige frigates to pop planets until you can afford to build a new one. And even then, you want to train it to lvl 4 before sending it out into the world. So it ends up costing 7500 credits + 400 metal + 250 crystal plus the cost of the research to get lvl 4 training upgrade...

Dude, capital ships are actually some of the best ships if you use them right. Even in multiplayer.

If you use them in sector fleets, like i do, then they really pack a punch. Group them with at least two carriers (i.e. percheron), one command cruiser (i.e. cielo), two heavy frigates (i.e. kodiak), and about seven other frigates, then they make a formidable and versatile fast moving attack force. In one multiplayer game, i used them to great effect. In fact, i won that game through the use of my fast response sector fleets.

My command statagy is to build one of each capital ship as a fleet then 30 little carriers as it's own fleet as strike crift support. I then build up a fleet of frigs & cruisers to suport the capital fleet as necassary. this brings the game to a Fleet Commander feel that I love. My Nest and I play up to 8 at once with 2 AI as bait for the first strike. The stratagy is to enter a Planet G/W with Cap Fleet to draw the defences to them like CenturionJixra stated.

This brings them open for the Strike Fleet to swarm their orbital platforms making the Structures vulnerable to the Frig/Cruiser attack, thus bringing every planet we encroach upon ours.

If you play Advent, the Guardian can help spread out some of the focus fire damage and if you have a Radiance Battlecruiser capital ship you can use Animosity to direct the focus fire.  (If you have a Rapture capital ship then you could have it cast Vengeance on the Radiance.)