Yes, my bad on this during the interview. We have adjusted the balance on several of the capital ships to better fulfill their intended roles.
That's exactly the one thing that scared me during the interview. Good to see my fear was unfounded.
IMO though, the problem of certain capital ships is not exactly in whether they can fulfill their role well, because most of them do.
The problem of certain caps is the combination of the following factors:
- The opening cap is usually Carrier for aggression or Colonizer for expansion. Other choices are very risky and less effective (with some being outright absurd in a competitive game), which forces many support caps to be built later.
- Only the first, the second and maybe the third cap actually get the chance to level up at any sensible rate; the latter caps will most likely enter a big fight at level 3-4 (if you purchase levels for them).
- You most often get no more than 3-4 caps in the regularly sized games.
- Support caps suck at low levels.
It's the combination of those factors that make certain caps underwhelming: you can't get them at the start cause they're useless in militia/pirate shootouts or in rushes against players SO you won't get them early BUT they need to get a few levels to be really useful, which levels they won't get the chance to aquire if you don't build them early.
I believe that you should probably consider giving the underused caps either:
- better survivability and utility at low levels (which would make them more useful when they get to a big fight at level ~4 in later game) OR
- stronger early game (so that picking them early doesn't make it an instant suicide; they should be worse choices than carriers or colonizers in their respective scenarios, but not as bad as they are now. For example, Antorak Marauder is useless as an opening cap... BUT if Phase Out Hull gave 40AM per use if used on a friendly frigate, it would synergize very well with colonization frigates early game and would allow the antorak to maintain a decent expansion pace when followed by a single colony frig.)
PS. I too agree that this interview was indeed very good and informative. 