I mean they can be expensive to fit onto a carrier. You can pump a lot of OP into it if you're looking to have a Heron with 2 bomber wings and a Broadsword escort. The OP costs encourage a certain way to play which involves more or less spreading out the expense over all your carriers. I.e. each of them gets a Talon, a Broadsword, a Dagger.
Ah I see. You wish this was less taxing on the carriers' weapon systems in general? Or, alternatively, are you saying you prefer the flexibility of choosing an all-OP-heavy build at the expense of weaponry, and, choosing an all-low-OP-cost strike craft build to have better carrier weapons? Each have different considerations.
It also makes the pool of viable fighters and carrier loadouts smaller.
Due to the above? If you don't mind, some detail would help there. I have some thoughts in that area based upon previous suggestions:
Give carriers two separate OP pools for fighters and for itself. Make these OP pools able to be exchanged for the other at a 2:1 ratio or something like that. So a carrier with 40/60 OP who only uses 38 OP for fighters gets 61 OP points to use for itself. The point of this would be that carriers across the board can get more OP (because they need it). At the same time, fighters can still be made weaker.
What about setting a max op per hanger bay? Separate from the weapon, vent/cap, and hull mod general pool. Say, 30 OP per bay for the astral, and maybe 24 OP per bay for the heron. This will limit smaller carriers to fielding smaller fighters. If you elect to load smaller fighters than the max bay size, shuffle the leftover hanger OP to the general OP pool at a balanced ratio, or even at a variable rate as you move more hanger OP into the general pool. This gives a design choice to put less fighter power in return for diminishing increase in regular warship capabilities. You can have your close combat Astral with an all mining drone loadout.
Maybe create a hull mod that adds hanger OP and allows smaller carriers to field larger wings. Or a hull mod that removes a hanger bay in return for increasing the OP size of the remaining bays.
It'll require a bit more balancing but will add more design freedom with additional constraints on the maximums. Not sure how to balance it against drover/sparks spam but it'll give us a few more ways to nudge it into balance.
I think these have potential to be a good solution. I'll mull it over at work today.
I've been thinking about this particular grouping of suggestions. So, weapons currently come in three forms: small, medium, large. Could fighter bays also come in the same format?
This way, small carriers can be limited in their ability to deploy higher tiered strike craft. This can be by tech level, or by overall combat performance depending upon the situation. It remains flexible that way.
This is similar to the idea of OP limitations on fighter bays by hull size.
Re: Expanded Deck Crew. I don't doubt it is good. What is bothering me is that I never use it and find it unnecessary. It is perfectly possible to build a fleet of 2 Moras and 2 Drovers and just overwhelm every single engagement with high-performance fighters that never run out of steam because the more fighters you have, the less fighters you lose.
It's more like the slower you lose fighters, the more fighters you can afford to lose. Carrier fatigue does favor survivable squadrons far more than expendable ones. As long as the enemy lacks a critical damage rate to push replacement rates down, they're doomed. Shields take things to the next level because the more shield fighters you have, the more damage they can cover for each other and vent away, so the less fighters you lose, so your carriers never get fatigued, so any small losses are quickly replaced. One synergy is fine, but shields do create a double stacking synergy.
It depends upon the numerical amount of the wing vs each wing member's total "hp". The equation, very, very roughly, is: The wing number is two craft per wing and the factored hp- considering flux, dissipation, armor, and hull- equals roughly 1000 total hp per wing member. Then, as long as the total hp- per wing member- equals 500 total hp per member of a 4-craft-wing, the replacement rate will decrease at the same rate assuming no distractions, and, also assuming the PD is focus firing each individual member at the same damage distribution of total PD damage capability... this is obviously so variable that it will be mostly impossible to calculate reliably, but, what I am saying here, is that its more that the more wing members you have, the weaker each wing member has to be to reduce replacement rate enough to prevent reinforcements, yet if stronger hp craft rely upon a fixed damage strike then get to retreat, it seems like they are stronger than they actually are. Similarly, burst anti-fighter damage like the Locust are great until they run out of ammunition, and area of effect PD can demolish swarm behavior due to reducing the number of craft below the threshold, yet remain mostly inconsequential to low member high alpha strike bombers because their AOE effect is less punishing there.
With shielded craft: once you remove most of the dissipation it can actually become a detriment to the craft due to fast overload that prevents the strike craft from attacking for a variable amount of time- determined by the hit damage to the shields at the time of overload. Less dissipation also improves beam weapons' performance since soft flux cannot be dissipated as easily and much of the pd beam mitigation is lost.