that was the battle I was thinking of when stant123 made his commentary, but I believe that they had to sneak in close under cover of darkness and use of land masses of the islands to disrupt the radar used at the time, by modern standards, short of extreme stealth technology the battleship has little hope of holding it's own against a carrier

USS Gambier Bay - Escort Carrier (aka light carrier) - Only US carrier to have been sunk by another ship.  (Read that as, only US carrier to have been sunk by something other then bombs or torpedoes dropped by aircraft.)  Though a battleship (The Yomato) did hit the carrier, what killed it?  Three heavy cruisers that got in close and turned it to Swiss cheese.  =]

Awesome battle though.  Has my favorite war quote of all time and several other awesome quotes.  Good book  3rd paragraph down, starting with On board White Plains,

Yeah if anyone is ever curious as to why I continue to fight with everything I've got even after my fleet got it's ass handed to it a long time ago, this is why.  My favorite quote ever: An officer in charge of anti aircraft guns was trying to motivate his crews as they watched destroyers and cruisers approach their ship, he said "Just wait a little longer boys, we're sucking them into 40mm range."

Further down the page is another great one.  After the Japanese had stopped firing and turned their ships away (read that as gave up kicking the crap out of the US fleet because of other information given to the Japanese Admiral) a signalman on the flagship for the severely damaged US fleet yells, "God damn it, they're getting away!"

Those are just some funny ass quotes. 

I would never expect a Sova to win a punch match. I just wanted to show the numerical difference post-battle in case it assisted in any tweaks.

And yes, carriers do win the majority of the time for the obvious reasons. Granted, carriers are most affordable as escort carriers, developed by the British. The Cruiser Carriers of the game would be akin to that and thus why people spam them. Obviously, production in the game does not resemble any historical experience.

Just some thoughts on the whole thing:

Kol: Making it's shield ability (IDK what it's called ATM) Passive would be BEASTLY, maybe even OP, but it'd make up for alot.  Increasing the Cap's range by a factor of 1.25 would also be interesting to see work out, other than that, no other major changes.

Sova: my only complaint is how underwhelming Heavy Strike Craft is compared to the Halycon's Adept Drone Anima. IMHO: Making Heavy Strike Craft the same as or similar to Adept Drone Anima would be a massive change for the good, but also might make the Sova OP.

Just some thoughts.

Xer0 \^/

If you think it might make it OP, then it probably will be.

I've been comparing the numbers, does anyone find the Marza to be lacking?  The Marza has worse numbers in everything except for lasers, antimatter pool, and planet bombing damage.  It only beats out a Kol in those areas by a tiny bit as well...

I just played a game where I turned off the autocast of flakburst and the Kol performed much better antimatter wise.  Only plain fighters are killed off in a single shot of it at level 3, and most strike craft are so spread out when they make their passes that you don't even hit half of them.  Add in the fact, strike craft rebuild, instantly if a Sova has that ability in use, it makes it even more of a waste of antimatter.  Coming from an ability that fires every 12/10/8 seconds and costs 100 per use, it's a huge savings to not even fire it unless you're right at the very beginning of a fight when all of the strike craft are still clumped together.  The autofire doesn't even wait for the best use of it either.  As soon as a few strike craft are in range, it fires off, whereas when I'm in control of it, I wait for most of the strike craft to be inside it's range and let it go.  Then the Dunov and flak frigates mop up.

While I'm on the subject of abilities, I may as well toss in the turning off of the autocast of the gauss railgun while you're playing.  It has an extremely fast fire rate as well (6 seconds on the recharge) so it just wipes out the antimatter pool 75 points at a time, and the damage caused by it is nice, however the -100 speed lasts for 10/15/20 seconds which clearly causes an overlap in affect with how fast it fires when you're pounding away on the same ship, and since ships are all pretty much stationary in battle anyway, it's kind of useless to be using it unless you need that big punch in an instant.  The bonus damage it puts out is nice for massive quick damage, but isn't really worth it in my opinion to be blasting away with it at any point in the battle except for right at the end when your enemy's cap ship is on the run and your akkan can't stop it.

All I can say is try it out, turn off the autocast of the flak burst and the railgun when you add in those upgrades and let us know what you experience.

Good point on autocast. Like Dunov's Flux Field, it's best micromanaged. I could see the shielding being passive, but it would also be brought down a bit to compensate. As for Heavy strikecraft, I think that since the Advent have a focus on strikecraft, it would make sense that they one up everyone else. Range I don't want to mess with. That's an Akkans job. The Marza is underwhelming, hence why I use only one or two for their barrage. More than anything, I think their defense is on the light side, especially for a ship originally built for combat (unlike the Akkan and Dunov).

Marza's were originally a mining vessel turned military application (they helped mine big asteroids). They are more of a support/bombard cap then a frontline unit. But yeah, take off autocast (I do when using Kol) for both Flak and Gauss and you have no issues on Kol's survivability. As for the Sova's Heavy SC, let's consider two things. First, with this ability maxed out, the elite bomber as more armor than a Kol (maxes out at 23, Kol goes to 21 makes both higher then any other moving vessel). Second the damage increase is massive but not seen in the infocards. I believe it makes the TEC elite bomber the strongest in firepower, even over the Vasari elite bomber (not counting phase missile ability of passing shields).

Huh, I thought the Marza was straight military. Well, nevermind. I still use it as cruiser suppression in my support line.

Well, that's what the manual states. But yeah, the Marza is more of a cruiser suppression cap then a hold line battleship ship like the Kol.

Specifically, the manual states "With modest beginnings as a small planetoid destruction and recovery workhorse, blah blah blah, TEC military retrofitting, blah blah blah, newest addition to the TEC arsenal."

paraphrase paraphrase

I would make Heavy SC like the old adept drone anima. Give it an extra SC per squadron per level. That might not be OP.

No it would make it OP. As I pointed out, while its damage is not modified on the info card, it is still modified and putting in another craft of similar strength would give it more firepower, making it stronger than a Vasari elite bomber with phase missiles fully researched.

Correct me if I'm wrong (such as I was with the Marza), but doesn't Heavy SC also affect fighters? Think about the hell that the gunships unleash with that upgrade and the extra survivability the EWS get. I know that the Vasari and Advent have equivalent craft (which I wouldn't mind trying to change in the future) but my gunships rarely get dispatched when I have a well-equipped carrier.

I think that aspect is good. At this point, the thing I'm interested in seeing happen is the Adaptive Forcefield nerfed and made passive to free AM up for other things, if we change anything at all.

Heavy SC affects all SC on the Sova yes, so you would have some very nasty SC groups with that implementation. I was just using the Elite bomber as an example. About the only one that wouldn't be OP would be the Elite Fighter tbh.

So I'm digging through the files for DS prepping for work on more updates to the vanilla version and I open up the one that states the population loss for the planets that get shelled by a Novalith.  Now I've always assumed the loss was permanent since I've never really paid much attention to a planet that's been hit 3 times creating a 0 max population cap, so I stopped building them because what's the point?  I want those planets, shelling them to 0 pop makes them worthless to me unless I can trade port them up really quick.  Turns out, to my amusement, it only lasts for 30 minutes, so in my best Mexican gangster accent (which is really good if you ask those who've heard it before): "Oralé!  Death from afar, bitches!"