In the original Sins, trade routes will automatically pass through uncolonizable gravity wells.  This is a mixed blessing, letting you set up long routes early and easily, but potentially breaking longer more elaborate ones.

In Entrenchment and Diplomacy, you need a starbase with a trade port upgrade in order for a trade route to pass through an uncolonizable gravity well.  This means that they can be a major hinderance to early trade routes, but it does give you finer control for building longer and more elaborate routes later.

Somewhat stronger, and they give less XP when killed.  As I said, just keep them off while you're learning.  It will be an entirely different story once you get to the point at which you're fighting the unfair-difficulty AI.  What seems impossible now may be very reasonable later.

I'm now winning my current game, invaded the homeworld of my ennemy, the advent. They had 3 capital ship, and I had 4 in fight, I managed to lose 2 and almost lost a third before my Dunov support arrived with a small fleet to finish the job.

at the end of the fight I still had around 40 operationnal frigate with 4 carrier cruiser and 3 capital ship.

Fun as hell. Epic space battle !!!! I almost control all the map and that inactive pirate base is gonna be my next target just for the sake of it. I hate them !

I noticed that even thought the pirate were off my advent ennemy kept putting bounty on me. Is that the special skill I readed about who make them do that ?

Thanks again for all your help, I followed advice and readed the links you've provided me and I did learned alot. I also surfed the game manual that I was not aware of. Good informations to complete my reading.

Thanks again guys, nice community.

The advent do have a research called Karmic Retribution (or something like that) that causes any player that destroys there trade ships to get a bounty. Since the AI probably isn't smart enough to not research that if pirates are off (though technically bounty can still be used to encourage other players even if pirates are off).

One possibility is to keep your capital ships (and the rest of your fleet) on the edge of the gravity well if you can: if you order the capital ships to warp out once they get somewhat damaged you should be able to save them.

Entrenchment and Diplomacy are actually much, much easier than original Sins if you don't artificially gimp yourself...

play Entrenchment and find out how the AI handles starbases.

A good number play online, although not as many as you'd expect given the number of game sales.

Most are quite skilled.

If/when you're thinking about trying out ICO, feel free to talk to me, it's really difficult making it up the high learning curve in a reasonable length of time without help.

Build culture stations of your own. (Temple of Communion, or Media Hub, or Broadcast Center) Usually one culture station on your front-line planet(s) will take care of any incoming enemy culture.

And having caps present has a culture effect, so if you have culture beating through 1 or 2 stations, then the caps can be a quick reinforcement.

I won my game and beated the three cpu.

Now I started a new one on a medium random with 4 players and switched 2 of the 3 AI to normal, and I'm testing the advent at the same time, now that I'm good with the TEC. I really like their capital ships, hope the others capital ships will be fun. I like the one for bombing planet, his multiple missiles ultimate is awesome

I'm getting better, beating the easy cpu has become too easy.

I had some difficuly beating one of the Vasari flagship thought, the one that do recharge his freaking shield constantly What is the good counter to that ? I finnally got their two ships with a bunch of kodiak with 4 capital ships to beat them...

Ah, that would be the Kortul, the Vasari battleship. Its currently the best of its kind, and early game that shield regeneration can be a pain. However, like most battleships (except possibly the Kol), its best abilities can only affect a few targets at a time, making them less useful in very large fleet battles (it does actually have 2 AoE abilities, its ultimate and jam weapons, but neither are all that good).

That said, if you're having trouble there are two main things you can do against power surge (the ability that increases its rate of fire and restores its shields). One is to deplete its antimatter. If the fight goes on long enough this will happen naturally as only a very high level kortul not using any of its other abilities can keep power surge going on continuously. Thus you can just focus your fire on other ships (thus wasting the shield restore effect) until it runs out of antimatter and then hit it as hard as you can. Some abilities also allow you to delete antimatter, like the Dunov's EMP blast and as the Advent the Radiance's detonate antimatter or the Disciple's steal antimatter. Alternatively you could just use abilities that disable abilities like the Dunov's magnetize.

For quite a while the TEC were thought to have the worst capitalships actually, but they've been improved a quite a bit lately (except the Kol, or rather it hasn't been improved enough). The Advent in particular rely on their capitalships as the backbone of their tactics and the Vasari ones have many interesting little tricks like the shield restore on the Kortul you encountered.

I like using the Dunov against the AI when I have 1 Akkan, 2 Dunov, and 13 Sova in the end-game (making retreats often unnecessary due to Shield Restore) but in games against decent opponents (read: humans) the Dunov isn't that effective.

The Kol is best used in the end-game when there are 50+ strike-craft squadrons... that's the only time the Kol really shines.

The Kol is best described as a "brick".  It's very durable and with proper backup extremely difficult to kill, but its abilities have high antimatter requirements that quickly deplete it and leave it a glorified combat cruiser.  Compared to the reliable and powerful early-game combat power you can get out of a Sova Carrier, that leaves a lot to be desired.  I find the Kol is useless as an early-game unit for this reason, but in the late-game a high-level Kol is a very different story.

A level 5 Kol with maxed out flak burst can thin out massive swarms of strike craft in an instant, providing you deterrent against approaches and retaliation.  With antimatter upgrades researched and several levels of experience (antimatter regeneration improves along with everything else) the Kol's staying power is much improved.  However, this is always a capital ship you cannot leave on autocast.  The antimatter requirements of its abilities are just so high that you need to manually time them and conserve that precious resource.

Probably my comment.  My opinion as to "bottom dog" capital ship wavers between Antorak and Dunov depending on my mood.  Right now if asked, I'd say Antorak, but Dunov would be a close second.

Against the AI you can get a lot of mileage out of shield restore.  I personally don't think this ability merits the expenditure of a valuable capital ship, but it will function at very least.  In multiplayer... yeah, don't waste your antimatter on this ability.  It'll buy you an extra 2 or 3 seconds of longevity tops, and with an 11 second cooldown and the inability to target itself (meaning that an enemy needs only attacking the Dunov directly to circumvent the ability) that leaves it pretty useless. 

Investing in two Dunovs is absolute suicide in multiplayer unless you're up against a tightly-packed Advent with a shield combo (which EMP works wonders against; only situation I'd ever build a Dunov seriously).  The problem is that this capital ship has abysmal damage output and its support abilities don't scale effectively as fleets get larger.  This means that you're almost always better off with more combat units than a Dunov.

The problem I have with this kind of fleet is that experience points are divided evenly amongst your capital ships, so having too many will slow down the rate at which they gain levels.  I find Advent is the only faction that can seriously entertain maintaining more than 10 capital ships (due to Mass Transcendance).  In multiplayer, I've never gone above 8 capital ships as TEC or Vasari.  As Advent I have hit the 16 cap in multiplayer. 

We're talking about the bottom three here.  I'd say the sheer power of Reverie puts the Revelation above these other two, but it's arguable.  The bottom line, however, is that we're nitpicking the who's who of worst capital ships in the game, which isn't flattering to them no matter where they end up on the list.

Generally speaking if you can reach a 2000 command fleet, you have the AI beaten.  You shouldn't need to make it an upgraded 16-cap fleet to roll the AI.  Against a human opponent, such an approach is so absurdly impractical as to be irrelevant.