Now CCP and a number of players/alliances have acknowledged a issue that the end-game super capitals and to a less degree capital ships have become too easy to acquire and become too common.
To fix this it could be controlled by running costs. Sure there’s fuel costs to jump these ships around, but what I’m suggesting is take this further.
Option one;
For every hour of operation these ships use fuel equal to 1 unit per 100million tons of mass.
This could taken a step further, where every warp costs the same amount of fuel as the hourly rate.
These could/would add an new fleet role in the form of fuel tankers to resupply capitals on long operations.
Option two;
Limit number capable of being in fleet actions by reducing cryos mass capacity. This would mean one Titan could use a cryos before it collapses and has to remake. This means large fleets will take longer to form in systems or more cryos generation ships will be required for fast formation.
As part of this set time on jump gates based of mass, to the point it requires 5 minutes for a gate to accept the next Titan, and maybe 1 minute for capital ships.
This would mean fleets would have to organize forward defense groups to protect the other side of gate as caps and supers jump through, same for cryos.
Option three;
The simplest, but no as effective option. Increase repair costs. Problem with this is logi and nanite paste, as these can do out of station repairs on ship and modules, so this in effect would have limited effect.
This is a rough thought of possible fix to over population of supers and caps.
Another way to solve the overpopulation and overuse of supercapitals could be have a spool timer on using a cyno jump so that there isn’t an instant delivery of the super to any arena giving capsuleers the chance to pop the cyno before the super appears. It would also make titans and supercarriers or even just ships with bridge capability more strategic but make the demand for more less as fleets would have to choose whether to try and commit (and fail) or to hamper their own fleets by using multiple cynos to try and confuse the enemy to prevent them from sabotaging jumping them in
when it comes to capitals the solution of addressing them is very simple and straight forward. All you need to do is remove their ability to target sub-capitals and then move their pve content into fights with other capital based ships (npcs).
This will remove afk ratting from them, provide ccp with the option to streamline and control their income rates (say at 150m/hr instead of 500m).
Capitals should be used for cap vs cap engagements and supers should be used vs supers/stations naively. imo, this means that sub-capital fleets need to support them, or their caps will potentially be killable to sub-cap fleets (Especially bombers). This also implies that things like smart bombs on capitals should be removed as well as titan-aoe weapons.
from here buffing stations to be nasty vs caps and supers would be the go-to. Titans should act as the “station dread” for upwell structures. The battle around stations should be cap related, carried out by them. This implies massive buffs to the defensive, offensive, and health systems of stations themselves to make them a much bigger scene then they are, while sub-caps battle and defense the chokes when they do this.
This changes will perfectly balance the classes of ships, with out radically altering their current state to much.