Nope. If you want to play to win with 'quality over quantity' then play WC3 with it's incessant hero micromanagement. This is a 4x game. Economy is over half the game. Action gymnastics is typically how 'quality over quantity' occurs. Pfft. I get the sense that all this anti spam whinery is over the fact that capital ships aren't heroes. No, they aren't. Sorry. Ever play Supreme Commander, Total Annihilation? Now go whine that you're being spammed with Tier 1 tanks. geez.

Why would you even neglect your military in favor of better research anyways? Researching better ships is a key to the game, sure, but when your opponent outnumbers you 2:1, you've been researching a little too much. You shouldn't just "spam frigates" either. That last time I played a frigate spammer I owned him pretty bad. He spammed Assailants while I had a mixed fleet of koadiaks, LRMs, flak frigates and 3 capitals. I lost two of the capitals due to him focusing fire but the rest of my fleet was left intact because of that. End result, he lost his entire fleet while I only lost 2 caps and a few support ships. Coincidently, that was his only fleet and I marched right into his HW and he quit the game.

Know your counters, don't spam one type of frigate and get heavy cruisers ASAP. They pwn frigates hard, 10 heavy cruisers can take down 20-30 frigates easy.

The entire cruiser class is useless.

I will build 200 missile frigates and own your combined fleet of targets.

I never said anything about losing; I can frigate spam with the best of them. It just makes the whole experience boring and after 6 hours for a game it just isn't satisfying.

I predict multiplayer on this game will be dead within 8 months between the long game time and spam noobery.

I'm going back to CoH (:

First things first, this is NOT Starcraft, and I should know, been playin it 10 years.

There are some basic things you need to understand here.

1. Capital ships aren't the superheros of the fleet. They're used for their abilties more than thier firepower. IE: an Advent fleet capital combo using a force attack (making them attack that ship) plus an ability which deals 120% of the damage back to attackers (at max level, albiet) AND a 37 point sheild regen for the lowest level, means utter devistation to frigates, or any other ship. They aren't heros. They need to work TOGETHER, like any other fleet combo out there.

2. Cruisers my friend. Cruisers > frigates, even outnumbered by a hell of a lot. I've seen 3:1 fleets go down because of the amount of damage high end cruisers deal out and the damage they soak up. But don't think them god either, ever.

3. This isn't Starcraft, or any other RTS. You won't be counters a Seige tank and vulture Combo with pure dragoons, would you? Or you should know running into a battle with pure Zerglings while your oppenent went MnM (marines and medic) is just suicide. The same rules apply here, but not in the same sense. Yes, they're are combos, and they do work well, but this isn't a "as the game goes on use only tier 3 units" game. Use everything you have to fight off these frigates, which consists of mostly cruisers, and Long range frigates, AKA LRM's.

In Homeworld 2, a single battle cruiser could could only be countered by 5 destroyers or 21 ion/torp frigates, which is max of those unit types. Maybe it sounds unreasonable, but i would like cap ships to move more in that direction in sins of a solar empire. Not heroes, but definitely something worth the money spent on them

I think that the frigates should have about one quarter the hitpoints and the capital ships about 5 times the firepower for their standard guns. That would solve a lot of problems with the game.