@Megas:
Thanks for clearing up the details I had forgotten so everyone has a correct foundation for the discussion (in case they weren't there at the time).
What I miss about direct control of fighters pre-0.8 was the ability to use them to scout and capture points. To be fair, this kind of limited the role of frigates in that regard, but that is a separate topic. It was also useful from a modding perspective to select a single wing and a single opposing wing in the simulator and really be able to fine tune exactly which wings typically beat which opponents. Having the carriers present muddies the waters a bit- though not enough that I would want to go back to pre-0.8.
Here's why:
1) First and foremost for me, I didn't like the inability for fighters to be assigned to a specific carrier. *EDIT* (Both in the sense of fleet setup and variant files since that wasn't clear in how I worded it.)
The global hangar stat and the soft and hard limits that were tried didn't feel very good to me, and you couldn't predict which carrier would replace the wing's individual fighters- sometimes leading to fighters spawning from a carrier already under attack and immediate getting destroyed. Or, if your carriers near the front lines had their bays saturated with replacements already building, you could get the replacement wing you really wanted to spawn close to the battle instead spawn in another carrier far, far away.
2) Fighters also didn't spawn from the carrier. They burned in like the rest of the fleet. That felt really weird to me.
3) Carriers became supply vacuums which made them uncompetitive compared to warships.
4) Fighters had infinite range, and tended to ball up and mass on targets even more than now. I think that would exacerbate the issue we are having with critical mass. At least right now far off carriers can't send their wings to attack anything within vision on the map.
5) It would require so many additional changes to so many things, including all the AI changes I've mentioned. Not worth that kind of effort for the pros to me, and definitely not worth it when the pros could be implemented in the new design, which I think they can.
6) I actually like the trade-off balance of weapons vs fighters in the 0.9 system. I don't think the balance is quite there yet as you have said, but I think its fixable without a reversion back to pre-0.8.
Off the top of my head:
Give all carriers a hullmod like the Legion that reduces weapon costs and makes them feel more competitive. I'd even be ok with making that hullmod completely take off the "base" cost of the standard weapon of each size. Then only "upgrades" actually cost any OP. It's similar to the idea of the talon being free so there wouldn't be any fighter-less carriers acting like warships.
OR
Reduce fighter OP costs across the board to make both weapons
and hullmods feel more competitive in the sense that you have more room to work with.
OR
Increase the OP of carriers. Same concept as the one above.
I think the main concern with any of those is that fighters still seem more preferable than weapons due to their range, correct?
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I wonder, what do you all think of giving them limited ammo ? It would reduce their staying power as they need to return to the carrier to rearm but they would still keep their alpha strike potential. Of course they should have enough ammo to at the very minimum engage a target for 20 seconds.
In Archean Order, its around 5 to 6 seconds, but again there is clip regeneration to account for the current AI limitations. The window between reloads is around 12 seconds, so about double the time of the attacking window. That would of course change if fixed ammo could be possible. 20 seconds seems reasonable at a first glance.