thats like saying its okay to increase the effect of artillery versus calvary/tanks when calvary/tanks are in a sense the anti-artillery

Seige caps are the artillery of sins able to deal out heavy damage to many units and planets and SC are their nemsis so increasing their effect versus SC is not correct. Now I will admit that certain things on the Siege Caps (especially Vulkoras) are needed to be buffed or changed but increasing the SC is not one of them.

everyone else thinks the current setup is perfect

This point is not a matter of game balance, in fact your argument of few to no lvl 10 caps ever happen in MP is a good one. On the other hand it won't help either. All the Battleship caps get 1 SC by level 3 (lvl 2 for the Radiance) which can help and you can get here quickly (either by militia clearing or paying for or a small battle or two). If the other side tries to bring in a dual carrier you can easily tech up to getting flak support just as quickly and have enough flak to stop even the bombers, they to are vunerable just not as much. The SC set by the devs for the battleships has never been a problem even now.

You know, the main problem with PMS is not the damage. The damage is respectable. It's that the missiles fly where they want.

Yesterday my Vulkoras was defending my planet from pirates. I didn't take into account that they would bring 15 pillagers !!!!. They dropped my planet from 2500 to 200 HP in a split second. As a last resort, with 5 pillagers left and my planet about to die, I used L2 phase missile swarm against them. I had 5 pillagers in short distance ahead of me and 8 cutthroats/corsairs far behind the vulkoras.
Guess what - all five PMS salvos turned around and flew towards the corsairs on the far edge of the PMS range instead of the pillagers. One might have flew towards my main target (hard to distinguish a PMS salvo from a regular one), but sure as hell none of the other four went towards pillagers. And sure as hell the corsairs have regenerated before I was done with the pillagers.

PMS should be a regular AOE, like rad bomb. Or it should have a greatly increased number of targets so that the chance is not minimal that it will really hit what you want hit. Or it should cripple the hit targets in some way. Or should deal greater (e.g. double) damage to the main target.

SOMETHING to make it reliable. Right now, the missile damage is not only mitigated, but it goes towards the last ships you'd think of targetting and it gets regenerated before you fire at those ships.

Some people say "make sure you position the vulk correctly noob". Well, fine - only that the PMS range is far greater than Vulk's missile range, which means that if I want to do anything in that fight except spamming PMS (i.e. shoot something), then Vulk's PMs radius will automatically cover at least some remainder of the enemy fleet (unless you're fighting one ship, lol).

GRG: If we buff it to even insane level, but without giving it's AM/time reduction, people still will not use it. why? Kol have very limited AM reserves and using AF is always better option. If you buff GRG above AF usefulness level, nobody will use AF... As long as Kol AM reserces almost don;t exist AND Kol abilities are draining tons of AM I see no way of fixing this cap.

You do realize that if you increase damage to caps from LF that it will make tier 0 spam(LF and scouts) even worse than it is now?  You are also suggesting removing even further the reason to build lrf to counter the LF.  Ever have your cap surrounded by 50 or more scouts and LF and see it die from a thousand paper cuts because it can't move to even jump out of the well?  You are suggesting to make that much much worse.  Just FYI.

[_]-Greyfox

I said the same thing.  I don't see a need for buffing LF damage to caps at this time.

Don't ignore effect of Battleships and Supportcaps DPS/HP/Sh buff, many abilities buff and global regeneration/shield restore buff on all caps. Purpose of this buff (LF 75% from 50% vs caps) is keeping LF-Cap interaction near unchanged (especially vs battlecruisers and supporters) while caps become stronger vs everything else.

My buffs/nerfs ideas are connected to each other, please don't focus on impact of one change while you are ignoring impact generated by other changes.

- HP restore rate and shield regeneration rate increase at early game is worth a lot (bettles are longer, enemy, if he is rushing, won;t get infinite LFs...)

- Battlecruisers get ~13% hp/Sh increase

- All Battlecruisers front damage increased by ~50% (+10 front DPS to Kortul, Kol and Radiance)

- Armor increase by 1 mean ~5% extra HP

- Buffed abilities are worth something too...

So: Battlecruisers will not be weaker vs LFs... They will be even slightly stronger vs them, LFs damage to caps buff is completely compensated by mutliple Battlecruisers buffs.

LFs do 50% more damage to battlecruisers, but Battlecruisers do 50% more damage to LFs (because of weapons buff) too AND also  get health/shields/regeneration/armor increase

Buffing DPS on 1 or 2 caps is insignificant standing against the 50 percent increase(from 50% to 75%) to their current dps that you are suggesting to the much cheaper and abundant LF.  The infocard on disciples give it 10 damage (all front).  You are proposing it does 7.5 compared to caps compared to 5 that was previous.  An increase of 50 percent(to front only) to a cap will get you maybe 10 more damage.  THat is 4 disciples to make up for the increase you gave to caps.(the 10 on the cap divided by the 2.5 difference you gave the disciple).  Thats 16 supply of ship and a grand total of 1000 credits and 160 metal and ZERO research or crystal outside of more fleet supply to negate your sheer dps buff.  You have to make up a lot in abilities to balance that if you were balancing caps against LF(which I don't necessarily think is a good idea anyways).  Caps are generally there to support the fleet not to beat the fleet themselves(outside of a big ability such as marza missle barrage).  I think your suggested changes in your global section are unnecessary and game breaking.  Changing LF damage against caps from 50 to 75% is a HUGE difference.  Fiddling with abilities is a totally different thing.  I am not saying that tweaking modifiers is a bad idea but your suggestions are by no means a balanced offering.  Again, just my opinion.

[_]-Greyfox

Much better, I would like these changes (still reserved about the cap carriers though I see your point somewhat), though as always I enjoy seeing what other people say so as to expand my view of things

Well, I haven't been responding to the last page, but N3, I must say that you have done an excellent job arguing everything I would have.  I too am a predominantly Vasari player, so I can see where you are coming from on a lot of stuff and agree.  PMS definitely needs something so that the Vulk has some sort of military application in battle, not just afterwards.  Currently, it has Disin, if that.  PMS just doesn't cut it.

Increasing targets would be nice, but what if you did something else..  I have no idea if this would be overkill or not, but I'm just throwing it out there because it sounds interesting..  What if you made it so that PMS knocked down resistance to normal phase missiles for a while?  Basically, you end up with a reverse AF effect.  By increasing the odds of PM's bypassing shields, you would make Assailants more valuable and would make the Vulk better earlier.  Currently, I only ever use it late game when I am going after my enemy's planets and hate wasting time doing so.  If you made it so that it increased bypassing chances by say 10/20/30%, then PM's would become immensely powerful against those targets.  This could make it an option earlier and would aid late game when you already have upgrades to PM's so you have 60% odds of punching through.

If you need a reason for lore, its not so much that the ability itself is a PMS, but rather that it is the signal to start one...

As for your suggestion earlier that POH would knock down mitigation, that wouldn't be bad..  When I originally suggested the idea, I suggested that you would deal 400/800/1200 damage to shields, but when the devs put it in game, they made it 200.  That was at least a step in the right direction, but if you made this a shield breaker..  You went from a mediocre interrupt to a great ability.  Honestly, I would think that you ought to get some amount of shield breaking occurring while it is out of play due to natural mitigation degeneracy.  However, if you actually knocked it down by 2.5%/5%/7.5% or so for the next say 20 seconds after coming back in, you just increased your damage to the target by about 30%.  

This ought to help you out some and would give it some tactical benefit.  If you made it stack and made the duration longer...  Hehe...  You really are going to end up with a big time shield breaker..  Its mitigation would be down by 45%, nearly tripling your damage to the target.  That would be one nasty ability that would really give the Antorak a very big punch late game, or even early game when you are facing capital rushes.  Combined with a Skirantra, it could easily help take down dual Halcyon rushes and with proper support might be a decent choice for countering a single Halcyon rush.

1. Read on for more information...

2. Except that it also drastically increases ability cooldowns.

3. Its a battleship, and it has Power Surge.  And for the record, you seem to be obsessed with the combat ability of battlecruisers.  The Akkan is a battlecruiser.  Doesn't mean it needs a ton of damage, its an economy ship.

4. It kills the ability of enemy ships (and multiple ones at that) to use their abilities.  And last time I checked, wasn't DS an interrupt?

5. No its not...  You are suggesting a rather large buff to an ability that sure as heck doesn't need it.  No one is going to get DS without PS which makes DS very very powerful.

6. It doesn't need it.

2. Again, it is not meant to show up an annihilate everybody's casting with a snap. You underestimate the ability clearly. Reducing the AM pool steadily forces a choice upon the enemy - use up all the AM now or never use it at all. Skirantras are denied the choice when to use repair cloud best, cause the best moment will come after they're out of AM. Progenitors can't keep a battle of attrition. Marza won't keep spamming rad bombs and most importantly, it has to use its MB NOW or never, which means the Vasari player is ready to deal with it.
Further - the cooldowns. They may not be too impressive, but they quickly stack. No more steady chaining of rad bombs, adaptive forcefields, GRGs, SRs, ions, emps, shield recharges (dunov's) and so on.

So yeah, DS does not deny the enemy the right to use a one-shot ability once at the start, but the enemy's ship will very soon recharge its abilities twice as long and find its AM reserves empty even if he saves them.

3. No need for AM restoring ability when kortuls above level 3 can chain PS for 10 minutes straight, while the enemy is steadily losing antimatter so as not to be able to use any ability after 60 seconds at best. The Kol can use finest hour at the beginning of the fight, that doesn't matter - it will regenerate AM very slowly if at all, cooldown reduction will be offset by DS debuff and the HP regeneration can be negated by a 60 second 30% damage increase (VN) if the Kortul feels nasty.

4. As of 1.18/1.04 entrenchment DS acts as an interrupt.
Moreso, again - you underestimate the power of this inconspicuous ability. You say that other abilities are way more powerful. DS makes them naught. It doesn't sound like much, but when you can keep the enemy progenitor from SR'ing the whole day through just by shooting at it, it really is good.
It is not direct, but still powerful. Just use it some more, you'll feel it serves its role well.
Moreover, it fits the Kortul's general role as a "no-u-don't" ship. No-u-don't hurt me (level 3 PS regenerates 1350 shields over 30 seconds woth a 10 sec interval), no-u-don't use strikecraft against my friends (weapon jam), no-u-don't blob (VN) and no-u-don't spam abilties (DS). Plus, Kortul can chain any of these (except VN) for AGES, so a slow-and-steady AM drain is fine with it.

5. No, the buff you suggest is quite big in fact. DS can steadily drain AM from the enemy ship but at the same time it negates the constant AM regeneration. Increasing the effect by a third will not reduce the enemy's regeneration by anything more, but will instead greatly increase the AM drain.
When you're driving side by side with a TGV train and are overtaking it so slowly it seems a crawl, increasing your speed by a third will not increase the crawl by a third - it will cause you to move 60 miles per hour faster than the TGV, which is a MUCH greater relative speed increase. The same with DS - it offsets the sizeable cap AM regeneration by a small margin, increasing the drain by a third will cause the AM reserves to plummet.
I say again it's a passive ability that allows you to chose an enemy ship an nerf its casting ability by slowly reducing its AM pool and increasing cooldowns, inevitably draining it completely while you are free to whatever you want. It should not be able to shutdown the enemy's casting completely just by being there.