with no rapid fire is there any advantage cruisers have over battleships?
a battleship is cheaper than 2 cruisers and the BS has more weapons and shields than 2 cruisers so why choose the cruiser over the battleship?
is there another factor i havent thought of?

Fodder. I used to use Cruisers as secondary fodder. Bit more expensive, but it helps soften the blow a bit.

Thats about all, I think. That and they are uber-fast.

I dont buy cruisers, i only have 15 of them.
I dont think cruisers should cost deuterium, if they didnt cost deuterium i would have 100s of them.

It's only 2.5k. How can it make that much of a difference?

it can on my level of play, remember i still have only 14k points, so i dont have a lot of deuterium like you guys do, so it makes a huge difference to me.

Even a 1k deuterium is a large sum for a ship if you build thousands of it.
Cruisers are good in a world with Rapid Fire (taking into consideration it's speed and fuel consumption)

And currently, I don't believe in fodders. Ships with the least structure points go down first. They also go down more easier than a bigger ships (which equals it's cost) I only use fodder to protect my LCs on a raid (LF only).