Umm - yes it IS!!! Human focus fire - AI doesn't!!!

About focused fire by strike crafts:

Why not add flak guns to cap ships? Scale the number with it's level, so a lvl 1 kol has no AA, a lvl 10 gets 3, carriers get 1-4, support ships 2-5 (for example).

This would strenghen the caps against the new mass strike craft tactics, would give battle caps the opportunity to stay in combat much langer and strenghen supportive caps in their fleet assistance role.

Against "regular" focused fire, a mitigation or range increase on higher level might do the trick. I agree that caps perform quite poorly against equal sized "regular ship" fleets. And remember: In WC3, I can revive my heroes. In sins, I can't.

i wish we had "Heroes" , Levelable crews that could go from ship to ship and bring their experience with them. And from game to game, so we wouldn't have to start from scratch after each game.  Anyway, I like your heroes thought alot.

-Teal

Maybe they could add in some escape pod system. The crew would be able to escape but need other ships them up.  The ships would need to be near the cap that goes down.  So you can move them to another cap, or to a friget (if no caps around). 

In the case of the friget you would be required to move the crew back to your nearest planet. (unless your in your grave well already). You would still take time to upgrade, but you would not need the battle exeperiance to do it. It could be set up so you could only keep part of your experiance and even less if your newly built cap is a different type.

Say you loose a lvl 6 kol.  You pick up the crew and jump back to a one of your planets.  Then you build a new Kol and it can upgrade to lvl 5.  Now if you build something else you could only upgrade to say a lvl 4.  I know you can already train the crew to say a lvl 3 or lvl 4.  But since you already have the crew you would not need to pay to train them.

The big restriction we can put on this is at least one of your ships must survive in order to pick up the crew. 

Something like this is the only way I can see revive fit it this game.

Utterly wrong, because you did not take this game's damage calculation system into account.
The cap may last for 7 seconds, but the frigates will last for way longer, because damage is not calculated instantly, but averaged every 2 seconds! Every single frigate will last for up to two more seconds than it should before it kindly vaporizes, which pumps in a ton of lost dps.

As for the cap ships, I believe a little further shield mitigation buff (for instance, a basic cap at 70% instead of 65%) with some anti-phase missile buff (reduces phase missile shield pass chance by 10%) would be good (so the missiles aren't totally OP).

Also, I strongly believe Kortul is way too fragile for a frontline tank. Its Surge is nowhere near comparable to Kol's shield boosting ability. It does increase its firepower by some, but let's be honest, its hardly noticeable. Surge should give him stable 30-50sp/sec for its duration instead of increased regeneration, which means he get some 100 sp every 5 seconds or something. Also, most AOE damaging effects take shields first and only the focus-fired target get his hull damaged, so shield restoring abilities outpower the Vasari healing aura by far as well (the shield restore lasts longer and gives 50 sp/s instead of 30hp/s from vasari carrier).

I think the answer is simple.  Increase shiuld mitigation and add some flak.  Perhaps they can allow flak to not only hurt fighters but help take out missels or intercept in the case of the advent lower its damage output.

We can go Battlestar galatica style where you change some of the weapons from offensive to defensive.

If this is the case I say add more weapons to the caps (lvls add guns). We all know you can change a fleets behaiver with the buttons ie. hold position or fight in grav well.  Well add in a some engament style for the caps.  You could have full offensive where all guns fire at the other ships.  Defensive where guns are used like a point defense and then a mix that uses half for offensive strikes and half for point defense.  I don't know if it would be possible to do in this game but it would fix this late game cap issue a little.  

And then some basic flak guns for fighters. 

"Conquest: Frontier Wars" had an interesting system for "heroes." Each race had 5 admirals that they could train. Once trained, the admirial would show up in a small shuttle craft. You could then assign that shuttle to land on any ship, from a cap ship down to a frigate. Each admiral had a different balance of skills (i.e. defense +10%, offense +15%, etc.) which were then transferred to whichever ship they had boarded.  If the ship becamse too damaged to continue, the admiral would abandon the ship (their shuttle would reappear) and you could then reassign that admiral to another ship. Of course, if the ship received too much damage at once, there was the possibility of the admiral being killed.  However, I don't remember the admirals receiving experience and leveling up to increase their skills.