A quibble: seven capital ships?

Capital ships seem to have fairly low DPS-per-fleet-supply. Observe:

• Disciple vessel: 2 DPS per supply
• Level 1 Radiance (closest analog): 1.14 DPS per supply

Consequently, I tend to look at capital ships primarily as ability sources rather than sources of DPS -- I get only as many as it takes to get the job done and provide me with the abilities I consider crucial to supporting my fleet. In general, I try to accomplish this with four capital ships.

Does this jive with your experience?

@ frostflare

Seleuceia has already spoken my mind, so I'll just leave it at that.

I do, however, want to point out that I never suggested that you pick seven caps (it is not a bad idea, as Sel explains, it just wasn't what I meant). I just said that one could treat a Radiance on Animosity as a seveth cap to choose from. Imagine your cap factory having seven options: DA Radiance, Animosity Radiance and the 5 other caps. You will want to have a DA radiance, that's for sure, but at some point you might consider picking an Animosity radiance as well.

Am I the only one that thinks Rankulas works wonders as a tank? I usually have all capital ships in my fleet (mix em up), and the Rankulas can tank a lot, and usually dies second last, second to Kortul of course. As far as damage though, I wouldnt know.

I'd call it semi-trolling, semi-having fun. The point is that a really good player can open with a Rankulas, upgrade it to level 3, and have some megafun, either using the anti-structure swarms (as a rush strategy against frigate factories) or the repair upgrades (to build a starbase on enemy's homeworld). But the caution here is that it has be a really skilled player to pull these off without the whole exercise ending up in defeat and embarrassment, and furthermore it has to be a really skilled player against a merely very good / good player. In an even match, I very much doubt Grimm would open with a Rankulas, but then there are just a few players active at present time who are even to Grimm.

But for that matter there are a lot of capital ships that are fun to open with when semi-trolling, semi-having fun, especially if you're lucky enough that your opponent is a lower skill level than you. When I am in unbalanced games, I open with all sorts of different capital ships just to have fun. But when I feel I am in a balanced game, you'll know I have an egg for Vasari, a progenitor for Advent (possibly carrier cap if I am in 2v1 on 2 side), and an akkan (suicide/eco) or marza (frontline) for TEC (possibly carrier cap if I am in 2v1 on 2 side). When semi-trolling, I love the corsev; I also like the maurauder as VR for possibly level 6 phase gate deployment and jumping sbs; the radiance for mixing it up, or the revelation if I am drunk and really intent on having some fun; and of course the dunov just to see if I can finally figure out why Doci likes it; the Dunov is theoretically good but always seem to leave me in disappointment in practice.

^Shows what you know about online multiplayer Sins...

Tasty, tasty sarcasm.

You say rankulas is good for "tanking". You even claim it's better than kortul. I call it bullshit. Reasons:

1. Rankulas' tanking comes from an ability that spawns tiny weak healers once a minute. Kill the healers (they die in a split second to any 10 ships) and there is no healing for the next ~50 seconds. Without the healing, Rankulas tanks as good as an egg. And you need a hell of a lot more than a dozen ships to break through Power Surge.

If only the healbots were spawned every 10 seconds and generally needed constant changing of targets to prevent them from building up in numbers and healing all the damage.... then yeah, it could be a tank. But diverting fire once a minute to shoot down one little weak piece of junk is not a problem at all.

2. Rankulas does not pose any threat by itself. If you want something to TANK, there needs to be good reason to make the enemy focus the tank. The are at least two reasons to kill a Kortul - disruptive strikes fucking up your ability casts (AS LONG AS HE IS SHOOTING, even if you drain his AM!!) and weapon jam fucking up your strike craft. All you need to do to neutralize a Rankulas is to kill the couple weak swarms he spawned... or drain its AM. You don't need to shoot the RANKULAS at all. So it's not a good tank.

The support ships are used more for helping with SB rushing, not the ranky itself....I also have seen the assault ships used to deal with my own SBs that I was using...

Rankulas or Kol ?

Kol is actually a very good ship late game...it is the best cap for tanking at lvl 6+ with AFF and finest hour...even at levels 3 and 4 it is useful, flak burst deals with the SC while flak burst and the splash damage from finest hour contribute to dealing with corvettes...only problem with the kol is that it isn't useful early and probably not even mid game...

Unlike the Ranky, which is never particularly useful...

Personally I think the devs made a mistake to add capital ships in rebellion.

Why?

The current capitals we had were not balanced, adding to them only made it worse.

With the current fleet balance = LF/Corvette spam you rarely see more than 1-2 capital ships per player anyhow as they are a pain to keep alive long enough to be usefull.

I miss the 3 cap starts we used to have

And IMO the Kol (the one on the box ffs and the toy you get with it) has been worthless since the beginning of time.

Its the noob spotter ship, as alot noobs seem to build a kol first with tec.

If you read the manual, it makes it perfectly obvious when the Kol is most effective - as a reinforcement to established front line TEC battlegroups. The Kol with a level 6 Dunov is ridiculous. I do suspect that it is best suited to longer games though. 

TEC would probably benefit quite a lot from antimatter transfer. . .

The Ragnarov appears to fulfil a very specific niche, which is to be a balanced capital ship until you find out what capital ship your enemy has . . .

That's a debatable point....I'll just say that skilled players are split on the issue, with some believing it's the best titan and some believing it's one of the worst...

You are assuming a lvl 6 capital ship, which is not something you can mass produce...you can however mass produce lvl 3 or lvl 4 capital ships...

Late game, the marza is only good for dealing with corvettes...unfortunately, late game fleets are almost certainly going to have massive amounts of SC, which will drive your marza off or kill it outright...even if you were somehow able to MB the carriers themselves, late game bomber swarm would probably kill the marza before it killed the carriers...I've actually tried it once against a Vasari fleet, the carriers jumped right into my marza and I fired MB instantly...their bombers killed it in 2 passes, carriers lost shields and a little bit of hull...I'm not sure how an akkan is going to help here -- if it is lvl 6 then I guess you can save your marza with armistice, but that just buys you time to retreat it and cancels any active MB...

However, you spam 2-4 kols late game, and pay to level them up to 3 or 4 (so you have at least lvl 2 flak burst), they at least can actually do something about the massive amounts of SC...spamming lvl 3 or 4 marzas, meanwhile, isn't going to accomplish anything...

The only time I've seen MB actually useful late game is if you are dealing with a massive corvette spam that (for whatever reason) is not coupled with carriers....and that only tends to happen if some frontliner or suicide player has been running their early game fleet around the map....