First off, these are just some personal thoughts of mine, thought up during the past weeks when I've been unable to play, but have been frequently lurking the forums. I'm sure some people will disagree. I'm sure some (all?) of these ideas have already been brought up before. And some of the ideas may be entirely unfeasible. I don't really expect any of these ideas to be implemented in the future, though if they were that'd be cool. So, please, lets keep things friendly in this thread.
Battleships. Battleships should be tough. So tough that they should be practically indestructible to anything short of another battleship, several cruisers, or a whole horde of gunboats or bombers. The way things currently stand, there is pretty much no reason why any faction would construct a battleship. With skill, a single (or, at most, a pair) gunboat or bomber can take one out. They cost 10 times as much (or more) than a gunboat, they have a crew 10 times the size of a gunboat. If you were going to war and had the choice, would you prefer ONE battleship, or TEN gunboats? Or even FIVE gunboats? The answer is pretty obvious.
I think this needs to be changed.
Here are my thoughts on "buffing" the battleships. First, remove their shield. Capships in vanilla Freelancer don't have shields, there are even rumors talking about the fact. No shields also make flying a battleship into battle (or through asteroids) EXTREMELY expensive, as it should be. So the battleship no longer has a shield, how does this help? Well, multiply it's armor by a factor of, oh, 10, maybe more. Yep, thats a frakload of armor, especially when you take armor mods into consideration. Make them SO tough that the only way to have any real chance of destroying them would be another battleship, several cruisers, or a whole fleet of gunboats/bombers. Also greatly increase the toughness of battleship turrets, but leave it so that a skilled bomber pilot might be able to blast them off. They might not be able to take down a battleship, but a really good pilot might be able to cripple it somewhat.
So now we have a ship that's nearly impossible to destroy without another battleship or cruiser. This obviously wouldn't do much to help the capwhore problem, and would probably make it much, much worse. Solutions? Well, first would be making battleships more expensive... Around a billion credits or so. But this wouldn't stop people. It would require some rules that I was rather reluctant about when I first started playing, but they've grown on me. Make battleships faction-only. Specifically, allow each faction only ONE battleship, period, just one.
Ok, so now we have even MORE people starting up hundreds of silly factions just because they want their own shiny battleship. Here's the big thing I used to think was a bad idea, but now I think it may be a good one after all. Make factions (true factions, not just groups) Admin-approval-only. If you want a faction, get at least five members, write up your RP story and faction status, and submit it for approval. Maybe have a "RP-Faction Board" to decide rather than just the Admins.
Ok, now you have the uber-powerful uber-rare battleships. What about the other capships? Well, for cruisers, do the same thing as battleships. No shields, more armor, more expensive. But don't limit them to factions-only... They'd be the largest ship an independent could get their hands on. Might still want to limit their number in factions... Say, one for every five members (round down, so ten members gets you two cruisers). Cruisers should be powerful enough that a pair of well-flown cruisers might be able to take down a single battleship, but it'd be a close call.
Gunboats, leave them unchanged. Same armor, same shields, possibly same cost (maybe a bit more). A few gunboats, maybe with some bombers as backup, might be able to take out a cruiser, but it'd take awhile and there would probably be some casualties (unless the cruiser pilot sucked). Same with transports, leave their shields/armor the way they are.
Alright, so how would these changes affect Discovery, specifically the Discovery RP server? Well, a LOT fewer battleships, but they would actually MEAN something. They'd be a ship to be feared. Two fleets are fighting and one brings out it's flagship, that would likely turn the tide of the battle (unless the other side brought out it's out flagship). Probably fewer cruisers in factions, but possibly more independents (except for their cost). Only way to prevent that would be to make cruisers faction-only as well, but I'm not sure I like that idea. But it might give factions at war a real reason to hire independent mercenaries. Overall, I think we'd start seeing more fighters and gunboat combat.