Armor is being ignored
I dont get how people can measure only CapHP without considering CapDPS at all.
Armor is more important than you think. In fact, the armor system we have is very cool, its just implemented badly. The units are assigned arbitrary armor and arpen values, resulting in complete chaos.
But anyway, armor is important for high-cap ships. Look at infiltrators. Why are they so useless? Maybe because they have 1080 damage per shot? Loads of units have 900+ armor at MKI and more at MKII+.
Bomber MKI has 1200 armor, Infiltrator has 300 arpen. So 1080-900 armor gives us under 200 damage per shot, thats below the floor so the actual damage will be 216 per shot. A full cap of 274 infiltrators would take almost 8 seconds to kill just ONE bomber.
For MKI frigates it would take under 2 seconds, for fighters - 1.4 seconds.
The overkill vs. focus fire effect.
The overkill effect is minimal in AI war. The overkill effect becomes noticeable when a unit is killed in less than 3-4 hits.
There are just a few high-cap ships with around 30k HP per ship, most have 40k or more. There are very few hard-hitting ships that deal over 10k damage per shot. And if you buff the HP, the effect will be even weaker. If a unit has 31k HP and the attacker has 10k damage per shot, it will waste 9k damage every 4th shot. So out of 40k damage 9 is wasted. Real DPS is 31k per 4 shots, or 7.75 per shot. Thats 22.5% DPS loss due to overkill.
Compare with 50-80% DPS loss due to enemy armor for high-cap ships. And this kind of loss happens more often than the loss due to overkill.
The diminishing DPS effect
The significance is also minimal unless the cap is REALLY low. Like it is for starships or SSBs. At 20 the effect is already pretty low but noticeable, and at 48 it becomes completely insignificant.
I think the reasons high-cap ships are weaker are different:
- Low individual DPS and armor
- Weak to AOE damage
- Low CapHP and high CapDPS make them high-priority targets
- In addition to their general low Cap-HP, there are ships (like missile frigates) that have huge bonuses against them. Bombers make almost unkillable units possible to kill. Frigates turn already weak units into complete rubbish.
So yeah. Making high-cap ships have 2x or 1.5x higher than of the triangle ships is probably really going way overboard, but the reason i suggested that was that i thought they had decent CapHP right now. Most of them have 10mil HP against triangle's 15mil HP. So doubling their current HP would just make them have 30% more HP than the triangle.
When buffing the HP, just dont forget to increase their costs a little as well.
