Rixx Javix over at EVEOGANDA made an interesting point in his post Death to Titans. I highly recommend giving it a read, but in short, he suggested, at the least, giving titans a severe nerf, or getting rid of them entirely. In the latter case, he suggested replacing them with what amounted to a mobile station, providing some services such as repairing ships, clone storage, and limited hangar space for ship and ammo storage for subcapital ships.
Now, me, personally, I've never seen a titan. I've never tried to fight one, I've never done a titan bridge, so were I to see one in my overview I'd probably need to change my underwear. But Rixx identified a problem that I think actually runs rather larger than he made mention of in his post. I think capital ships have gotten too numerous, and it seems that unless you have a carrier or a dreadnought, in larger fleet battles you're almost incidental.
Granted, I've been in exactly one large-scale fleet, and the enemy declined to engage us, which meant we just flew around and killed SBUs for an hour. I was in a sniper-fit Rokh-class battleship, and it felt like we were flying cover for the capital fleet. Don't get me wrong, I understand why, and it makes good tactical sense. But we had several dozen long-range battleships covering an equal, if not greater, number of mixed dreadnoughts and carriers, with a smattering of smaller ships covering the gates as scouts and tacklers, mostly.
Perhaps I'm too hung up on real life, but a group of private individuals, even organzied, shouldn't have that many capital ships. Hell, the United States Navy only has ten Nimitz-class and one Enterprise-class supercarriers currently in operation - what most navies consider capital ships. More, the Gerald R. Ford-class, slated to replace the Nimitz-class carriers (there is no plan to replace the Enterprise, either numerically or in name), cost $14 billion in research and development costs, and each carrier will cost another $9 billion and construction on the Ford itself started in 2007 and isn't scheduled to end until 2015.
Since I've thrown all those numbers at you, there has to be a point, right? Sure. It's this: capital ships and supercapital ships are too accessible. Just for me, it'd take about a year (and I don't even want to know how many millions of ISK) to train just the bare skills needed to fly a Phoenix-class DN. And, granted, most of the time it takes the resources of an alliance to afford a supercapital or a titan, but there's nothing stopping someone from building dozens of the damn things. CCP's even said that they hadn't planned on having as many titans as there are in the game.
Capital ships, supercapitals, and titans shouldn't be commonplace on the battlefield. There should be major time, effort, blood, sweat, and tears to even build one, let alone deploy one. Destruction of one of these ships should hurt, not be a common thing. Make them threats on the field, not targets.
Therefore I say, CCP, jack up the requirements. Make those skills take longer. Make it cost much more to build the damn things. Make them own the goddamn battlefield in response. But you shouldn't see hundreds of capitals and supercapitals fielded at a time by just one alliance. If capsuleers, who hold non-capsuleers' lives in as little regard as you say they do, had that much firepower, we'd own the goddamn cluster. We'd just roll right over the fleets of the Empires with sheer weight of numbers, especially if people banded together like the Northern Coalition did, or as BoB and the Goons for their wars lo those many moons ago.
Yes, I know none of this will ever happen. I'm just saying.
