I just wanted to discuss the role of Heavy Cruisers in a thread and get some experienced opinions on them.

Now in theory the Heavy Cruiser is the ultimate Warship.  They have heavy armor/shielding, they deal significant damage with their weapons, and to top it all off, they do full or extra damage to almost every ship type in the game.

On paper, they just sound awesome.  But in practice, I'm starting to wonder how effective they really are.

The first thing to note is that they accelerate and move very slowly.  This means that an experienced enemy player can easily kite you around the map rendering your HCs almost useless (almost every unit is faster than these).  But barring that, even in a "toe to toe" battle, they seem weak.  Sure, they are hard to kill, but even in numbers of 10 or more, they seem to have a hard time taking out their targets.

The first game I played, it was a 1v1 and I rushed HCs and flaks.  The opponent built a ton of Carrier Cruisers and even though I did a good job of keeping the skies clean, the HCs just didn't have the DPS to kill the CCs in any reasonable timeframe, especially with Robotics Cruisers in the mix.  It was nice that they themselves took forever to kill, but they just weren't doing anything.  When I started to focus a cap ship, he would immediately start running, making the HCs run around chasing him like a pansy until he finally left with 100 health left.  Needless to say, I eventually lost because I just couldn't kill anything.

The second game I played, it was another 1v1 and my opponent rushed HCs.  He probably had about 15 of them (Kodiaks), but this game, I didn't even RUN from them.  I just sat that and took the damage they dealt out.  I had about 6 Carrier Cruisers and while it took awhile, eventually the bombers just overwhelmed the HCs, who weren't even getting my cap ships into critical condition (not even sure WHAT they were focusing).  If I had spent more time kiting the guy around, he probably would have gotten stomped even harder.

The point of the whole thread is this:  When is it a good idea to build Heavy Cruisers?  They seem good on paper but they are very easy to avoid and their DPS is low enough that they can't "spike" something faster than you can react.  It seems like it's more appropriate to build lesser ships who can actually get their targets than to waste huge resources on a unit that doesn't really do anything.

Maybe if I used some kind of "snare" ability to prevent my enemies from fleeing it would help?

What do you guys think?