Are Praetors good at anyhitng?
They take up a lot of room. Of the 3 factions that can build them 2 of them can build Tectors and 2 tectors>1 Praetor (yes I know 2 Tectors are marginally more expensive).
That leaves the Pentastar Alignment and if I am going big ship with them you can run 4 SSD's and ISDs+ carriers seem a better boom fleet.
To an extent I agree. The Praetor is for most groups one of the worst value ships. It's expensive, but offensively rather meak. Defensively it COULD shine due to it's powerful shields allowing support ships (glass cannons) to work their stuff while the Praetor soaks up damage. Sadly, it's pop cost is so high that it doesn't particularly work for that, either, since you can't bring in enough support ships to really be powerful. The one time they do show some promise is in defensive fleets, as they're wonderful in a defensive posture when they don't need to move However, the game engine ruins that, as it puts other ships so far away from it that it ends up making all other ships easy prey for the attacking fleet due to being spaced so far apart and some ships setting in the enemies firing arc upon starting battle. In the end, basically it is exactly as you say, it's just not really useful for anything. I'm not really sure it's fixable, either due to the limitations with the game engine.