I mentioned a similar idea of ‘capital hunters’ in this thread:
https://forums.eveonline.com/t/slowing-down-the-decline-of-eve/189205/260?u=kezrai_charzai
Battleships might be okay for the role, but there is a very large stat-gap between the battleships and the capitals. I think a new class of ships in between BS and capitals, with 3 types: one to provide fleet anti-sub-capital support, one to attack capitals, and one to provide utility/support roles or perhaps something like a mini-carrier.
Although in that case it wouldn’t hurt to also have a form of Battleship that is like the Assault BCs - bonused up to be able to mount some sort of anti-capital or at least ‘anti-Hunter’ (or anti-Arsenal) weaponry.
A new class of ships would allow them to be limited to Omega, would sell subs/injectors as people trained into them, would shake up a lot of stale doctrines, and could tie into some of the ideas coming out of EVE Vegas where CCP wants areas like wormholes to produce ‘new resources’ that would be required to built the new ship lines.
T2 battleships or whatever could also serve the purpose although the EHP gap and other issues would be a problem.
However these ideas would in effect be bandaids used to maintain interest a little longer. CCP’s real issue is that they simply don’t understand how to balance combat roles or even the nature of PvP in their game. Instead they’ve spent 10 years staggering from one notion of “What can we put in the game to make people buy more subs?” to another, without ever addressing the core design issues of the game.
Heck, they keep complaining about how hard it is to update their almost-20-year-old game engine. News flash for ya CCP: if you hadn’t thrown away literally millions of dollars and tens of thousands of dev-hours on useless side-projects that failed or went nowhere, you could have re-written your engine twice over by now.
It’s time to bite the bullet and do some real re-design, not just slap duct-tape on your Minmatar game engine and hope the rust holds it together a little while longer…