I just finished my first 1v1, regarding capships. I did notice quickly they were far more vulnerable.

In Sins, I could just send one colonizing capship over to every single non-enemy non-pirate planet and know ingthat not a single point of hull damage would be taken was effective to me, so I could beef up the eco and Research at home, hell as soon as I had enough for a second one, killed my scouts and built the second one, and I'd be fine. You could go through a sins game against normal cpus without building a single frigate or Cruiser.

I was surprised at how vulnerable they were mostly because of the lack of battle regen which made them ridiculously op to start in the original. It's an interesting tradeoff, however when it comes to the player vs player battles in Sins 1 and there are multiple capships in play, a proper cap ship with a ton of regen was almost impossible to kill unless you held it down for minutes while it tried to run away. From my perspective dealing with them wasn't fun, and it was less punishing losing a group of Frig and cruisers compared to losing a level 5+ cap ship, now when there were four or 5 cap ships on the enemy side. It was just utterly painful You could focus down the level 1-3s but the others just had so much tankiness unless you had ridiculous overwhelming force.

I think the way things are now, Capships are more balanced supply wise compared to how they were in sins. I wonder if shield regen in battle might want to be reintroduced by default on all ships however, but I'm more than fine with no hull repairs in battle (Unless by ability of course)

One positive I did notice is, I always had the anti matter I needed when I needed to do an ability specifically colonizing. Expansion for me seemed to be limited more by economy rather than Cooldowns/Antimatter which I appreciated.

Well, if you go back to basics, which means WW2 ship combat (which is what most space RTS are based on), Heavy cruisers and "capital ships" were pretty close in size. Hell, all ships in-game should be capital ships to an extent, as normally you would have "screens" (corvettes,destroyers and smaller frigates) and "capital ships". Anything bigger than a frigate would fit that category, so no, I don't think heavy cruisers being so big is anormal. A battleship would be about the equivalent of 2 to 3 heavy cruisers. Therefore, one ship being attacked by multiple ships should be at a disadvantage, I don't think this is too far-fetched. But, I think we're missing some key elements here like armor that should play a significant role in ship survival. For example, frigate smaller guns would have trouble damaging a battleship armor, but if it was equipped with torpedoes, it could be a signficant threat.

I've always felt the ships in Sins were too small for their roles. A frigate should be pretty big with a main gun and multiple turrets (even nowadays, frigates are mostly about missiles), a heavy cruiser should be armed to the teeth and be almost as big as a battleship.  I hope the devs will take a more "realistic" approach, as opposed to an "arcade" approach, but we'll see.

Quoting Spacegal,

reply 5

Guys the cap ships in tech demo are indeed powerful

The difference between the 1st and 2nd game is that like you said in the first one CS are already strong at lvl1 while in SinsII you need to upgrade them.

I love this logic because I hate swarm attacks during early games: in SinsII it seems that they wanted to prevent that and to me they succeeded.

Anyway one liner answer to yours doubts: CS in SinsII are strong but by starting from at least lvl4. And yeah: now sending a CS alone to colonize or clean planet is more difficult

Yeah just fully agree. Get one Kol and one Akkan, keep them alive and upgraded, and they'll be able to support an entire fleet of Garda's and Kodiak's (the new name slipped my mind). Their buffs are very powerful and can improve your fleet by 100% I would say, but especially the Kol can hold its ground on its own (without missiles).