After about 7 hours of play, I find the capturing enemy ships mechanic a little less than useful.
First, it is hard to do, at least with the “HP” size fleets I’ve been working with. Usually one captures, if anything, a stray fighter or seven. One might capture a frigate or two, occasionally, but they are often chewed up, and they can’t be fixed.
They’re not worth much as scrap, either.
As mentioned elsewhere, it would be cool to be able to fix them. If the process could be as automated as ship/fleet repair is now, it would be cool to be able to fix them, but perhaps in limited ways. Shield modules are pretty universal–in fact, any module that is shared among the factions should be replaceable. Alliance Lightning guns can’t be repaired by a player using the Federation, for example, but those “alien” modules could be scrapped and cruiser lasers put back in.
I find captured fighters are somewhat useful. Frigates and cruisers have at least one use - put them in systems with less than 100% loyalty, while you move your own fleet to capture new planets.
Also at some point you’re going to have to break through into the Northwest of the map. If you’ve saved up every fighter you’ve captured, they can be sent on a banzai charge to make the breakthrough there.
I would certainly like to see better use of captured frigates and cruisers. I would suggest the following:
Any ship item permitted to your own race can be repaired.
Other ship items can be replaced with items in the same category (weapons->weapons, defences->defences, etc) that don’t break the power/crew requirements. This is a once-only decision for each ship class; if I capture more than one of a given ship design, after the first time I repair one, they all get refitted the same way.
This is what I use my captured frigates for
You’ll only capture cruisers if there are over 10 cruisers in the enemy fleet, and you kill everything else first. I’ve captured ~5 different kinds of cruiser, maybe 25-30 different kinds of frigate and probably 30+ kinds of fighter. This may not mean much, as it’s only a few dozen ships a campaign, but in terms of giving you new builds to study, play with and modify? I could see capturing enemy ships becoming the only reason i play the campaign before long, esp. if i figure out a way to get bigger fleets (ie, those with 15-20 cruisers in them xD) to go up against!
Cool by me. Much better than having all those hollow hulls to drag around. (They do serve a useful purpose as pacifying just-conquered areas, but fixing the things will be much more fun.)