I empathize with what you are saying here. Strike craft are cool! And the cinematic feel is definitely still something I try and achieve. My considerations for the changes are more along the lines of two things:
- Feedback from many people that they are too strong and too centric to the battle - which is pretty much what you said you liked about them in the past.
Brick-post of my feelings on the matter:
Spoiler
I will say that from what I've gathered the community as a whole here seems... well, for lack of a better way of putting it, "anti-carrier" when you look at suggestions and complaints in the past. Despite several major reworks, carriers are still in a spot where they are just kind of there. They don't really feel unique to fly, and their strength in battle is either described as "so ridiculously good that I don't have to try anymore" or "why should I ever use them over an SO-modded ship?" and a lot of people say they are just plain boring no matter if they are strong or not.
People are also all over the map regarding which version of carriers was the best. There are a few who want to go back to 0.6 implementation! For my personal hot-take since I've been here awhile: I think that when people say "combat is the best part of this game" what they are really saying is they like controlling a ship arcade-style. They like zipping around dodging shots, tactically choosing their targets and hitting vulnerabilities where they find them while managing their flux, relying on allies to create opportunities, and using missiles as a limited resource. Carriers, therefore, are the direct antithesis to that kind of fun. If fighters can outrun you and are strong enough to be a threat, your ways as a player of dealing with them are limited. Either you have enough firepower to shoot them down or you die. The alternative is a personal pet peeve of mine where you "backpedal while targeting them until replacement rate means you can go for the carrier" and that has been what the AI has been developed around much to my chagrin. Personally, its not to my liking though I really enjoy the other aspects of combat and I've even had discussions with Alex on it. (Its really cool that the Dev entertains these btw. Its unique to this game in my experience.) I get why that behavior is good - especially when looking through the lense of what I've described above. If you are really digging the arcade part of combat, then you aren't going to do anything that would compromise it. I come from more of an RTS background - where trading ships in battle is part of the norm, and carriers should be both strong and critical targets to take down for that very reason. Unfortunately, those kinds of things don't mesh well with the way Starsector is set up for a lot of different reasons. Therefore, I've tried to come up with a way to both have an RTS-like feel and tactics without disregarding the core combat tenants of vanilla. Obviously, this has proved challenging and is still a very much ongoing process.
- They obsolete frigates and to a bit of a lesser extent destroyers early and forever. This is also a vanilla problem that there were attempts to address in 0.95 so it is not unique here, but its really hard to have strike craft be really strong and have smaller ships able to compete in any way.
However, I don't think the changes make strike craft, well, not good or anything! A lot of the lower tier ones are much improved from the past. In the current dev version I believe the high tech ones are less squishy than the current release. I increased the shields by a bit. Flak and large PD beams are still really good though.
The problem I run into is that if I make one carrier really good against a ship, then 4 carriers become overwhelmingly good due to force concentration. LRMs have the same issue.
Anyway, just know that I have my finger on the pulse of this issue as a whole and I'm trying to find that razor edge balance that will feel good. And I'm always open to suggestions about how to go about doing that. If it boils down to a mod setting that simply reverts damage reduction for strike craft and increases their health pool, then I'm willing to go that route to satisfy both ways to play. I can see both sides of the argument. On the one hand, its fun to watch a mass of strike craft rip through a fleet and each other. Lots of sci-fi centralize their universes around this concept. And then the other side of it is the tactical component of "set up a vulnerability to a strike and then capitalize with your strike craft" and
that can be really fun too when it works and also feel pretty bad when it doesn't since it feels like the carrier's wings were wasted in the effort.