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[Argylas]

A couple of questions for all carrier fans in Starsector:
1. What do you think is the best fighter/bomber combination for carriers after the changes to Sparks and Thunders in 0.95?
2. Is the Drover still good as a carrier hull or was the nerf too much?
3. Has anyone experimented if a carrier only fleet is still viable for end-game content or was the 0.95 update the end of carriers battle groups?

I'm doing a carrier only expermental playthrough, but I haven't had much time and I'm still in the early mid-game, so can't draw any definitive conclusions for now...

[Sutopia]

Fury is probably the best carrier at the moment?
Other than that maybe heron and astrals
Since now fleet carrier skills are gone, bombers die like flies, rarely worth using

[TaLaR]

1. Imo, only Sparks are even remotely useful as far as interceptors go.
2. No. It's replenishment will inevitably drop to 0 due to system use and rather quickly. At best you could try to use double Cobras for some early kills.
3. Didn't try to commit to it, but it doesn't look like carrier fleet would be viable. A frigate with officer can now stalemate a Heron (ofc depends on exact builds, but it would have been an overwhelming victory for almost any build of Heron in 0.91, so...). And enemy fleets have officers almost on every single ship.

I think at most you want 3 Herons or 1 Heron + 1 Astral. Astral is always using bombers, one Heron may use sparks, rest bombers. AI tends to use fighters purely for escort, so having more than 1 interceptor carrier just means they will over-escort.

[Wyvern]

The Drover can be okay if you're not using bombers on it; bombers will inevitably crash its replenishment rate, but for non-bombers the extra fighters actually give you a temporary shield against losses, allowing replenishment rate to at least somewhat recover.

[intrinsic_parity]

I've stopped using carriers pretty much completely. I think drover nerf was too much, hard to justify using it over a heron now IMO.

I think I can sum it up as this: there are only 2 skills that benefit carriers now so officered carriers are not very good, and enemy officered frigates/destroyers are stronger and also very common, so un-officered carriers are much more vulnerable to those ships flanking and killing them easily. In addition, the fighters are nerfed and the replacement rate is less. They just don't feel worthwhile to me anymore.

I'm also pretty confident that a carrier only fleet would not be able to beat everything. Maybe some astral/legion spam could work, but it feels like the replacement rate falls off and then you are done. End game stuff is very difficult, even for a very optimized fleet. If you count tempest and odyssey as carriers, then maybe lol.

[Warnoise]

Carriers now are balanced as they should be. Bombers are still useful. Interceptors however need a speed buff because they always get outrun by frigates

[Thaago]

I think two major strengths of carriers as support units is their flexibility: they can be anti large craft, anti small craft, or somewhere in between depending on what the fleet needs. And that that they don't need officers to be effective. They get better with officers, but because they aren't engaging in straight flux duels like gunships, they don't need officers.

Example of flexibility: I used a pair of condors as heavy strikers with flash bombers for a while, and they were moderately powerful and useful for cracking heavy armor and stations. But once I got heavy missile ships to carry my BOOM I swapped the flash's out for interceptors as the bombers had become obsolete but I needed more small ship protection. They also have ECCM and Salamander Pods for going after engines, which helps to keep them alive. They are still a bit slow and fragile and will explode if caught by any enemy, but also I really don't care when they do.

I haven't tried Drovers yet as I'm role playing hegemony low tech at the moment, but just their enhanced speed might be worth it compared to condors. Depends on if the battle line gets scattered or holds. Sad to hear their system seems to not be working correctly with bombers though.

[Arcagnello]

I am using a single Heron in my current fleet right now, looking to get another one. Their job is to solely spam triple Longbow for by Champion laser line to melt the enemy and my two harbinger phase ships to have an easier life against big targets. The Longbow may be one of the most survivable bombers in the entire game thanks to its burst PD laser and shield so that is probably why I have not found my heros hemorraging fighter replacement time just yet.

[Sutopia]

I think two major strengths of carriers as support units is their flexibility: they can be anti large craft, anti small craft, or somewhere in between depending on what the fleet needs. And that that they don't need officers to be effective. They get better with officers, but because they aren't engaging in straight flux duels like gunships, they don't need officers.

Flexibility doesn’t exist. You need to equip them for a certain duty PRIOR to encounter just like how you would fit guns on any other ship.
Their replacement is terribly slow as of current version and losing half the fighters in the initial exchange basically renders the carrier wasted DP for the rest of the fight.
They’re not like regular ships that can dish out sustained DPS as long as they’re alive. Losing a fighter exchange is death sentence. Their peak DPS is not even that great, only slightly better than ship of the same DP.

[shoi]

They're a lot weaker now, but certainly not useless. I think people are just too acclimated to their insurmountable fighter deathballs.
I haven't used drovers much so can't say anything on that

[Thaago]

...
Flexibility doesn’t exist. You need to equip them for a certain duty PRIOR to encounter just like how you would fit guns on any other ship.
Their replacement is terribly slow as of current version and losing half the fighters in the initial exchange basically renders the carrier wasted DP for the rest of the fight.
They’re not like regular ships that can dish out sustained DPS as long as they’re alive. Losing a fighter exchange is death sentence. Their peak DPS is not even that great, only slightly better than ship of the same DP.

Needing to be equipped in advance doesn't mean that they aren't flexible. If I know my fleet needs more protection from small craft, I equip interceptors. If I know that my fleet is lacking in the sudden burst needed to kill heavy targets, I equip bombers. If I know I'm fighting ships with strong shields, I take longbows or broadswords. If I'm going to hunt a bounty of low tech, I'll take ion damage. Thats flexibility.

Gunships can be modified somewhat along the same lines, but not to the same extent. A Dominator is never going to be a good small ship hunter. A Wolf is never going to be able to be equipped for shield busting because it doesn't have kinetics. A Hammerhead is only ever going to have 2 small missiles and can only do so much burst damage. Etc.

[intrinsic_parity]

I equipped interceptors and it didn't seem to do much against small craft, or at least not as much as spending the same amount of DP on other things (my own high end small craft or dooms are the best IMO). I was watching my unofficered herons die to officered frigates/destroyers quite regularly (and there are a lot of officered frigates and destroyers now), even when they were hiding behind my big ships. I was deploying 2 herons and losing one semi-consistently in big fights, while officered frigates seem to almost never die (and are pretty cheap to restore if they do). I think a lot of the time, the fighters would be off elsewhere while the carrier died. Maybe carriers need to prioritize protecting themselves more with their own fighters.

Bombers seem ok, I think because they deliver their payload and leave so they are less likely to die and reduce replacement rate, plus there is a damage boosting skill for them still.

Interceptors feel kinda bad since they are very likely to die and kill replacement rate, and they also don't seem to do that much damage now that all the fighter damage boosting skills are gone.

[Megas]

The problem with fighters is they are no longer useful enough to clog DP with carriers.  I used to deploy big ships and carriers until I made it to late game, and now I am forced to dump carriers for more frigates.

They did their job early when hunting pirates earlier in the game, but they do not do enough late when I need frigates to cap points and big ships to tank and hammer stuff.

[speeder]

I am doing a diable avionics playthrough and starting to regret it.

Often when savescumming I win fights if I reploy my non-carrier ships, after failed attempt with carriers.

Basically what happen is that the AI just spam 20 frigates with 1 officer in each of them, then they run from your fighters while shooting wildly until all your fighters are dead, then... they keep running until you run out of CR.

Then finally they come back and kill your carriers by death of thousand cuts.

[silfidum]

I don't use pure carrier fleets so can't really say how do fighters scale en masse. I usually look at carriers as either support or bombers. In this update due to changes to xyphos I tend to shy away from carriers more often then not since I can have a consistent spread of ion cannons in the fleet since AI no longer puts them all on the same ship because reasons.

Mixing bombers and fighters on the same ship is kinda weird, to be frank. Fighters with flares work well as PD deterrence and can lower the deployment rate to stay higher depending on relative wing sizes however you also loose a bit of damage output from bomber wings which may lead to ineffectual runs that accomplish zilch. Some pairing allows the AI to keep fighters on target while one bomber wing goes back and forth delivering payloads as soon as a bomber is rearmed, but in a big fight this doesn't work as well since one or two carrier is not enough to keep fighters alive. Engagement range can be an issue as well if the carriers back off or go away from each other too far, so having many flight decks is more optimal for fighters but ships that have many decks aren't that great for fighters. So something like astral with 1 broadswords wing and everything else as bombers is great.

As pure fighter carriers, pairing broadswords and single thunder wing produce a very good hard flux pressure and decent EMP, but they are vulnerable to EMP and flameouts from stray shots. Not ideal for big fights or station battles unless you mass them in tens of wings.

 Plus thunders have longer engagement range so AI can throw them separately from broadswords which tends to lead to quick losses of thunders. Also a major issue for warthogs since if you pair them with anything else they will stay behind since AI don't like to be in that 2000 range while piloting a carrier with no decent armament or while having wings with longer engagements range, which is most of the carriers.

Reserve deployment got hit fairly hard due to deployment rate cost of the ability so pairing it with fighter wings is almost guaranteed to deplete it quicker than it would on other carriers. As such I can't say that it's competitive in a big fight and the cost of deployment on ships with it isn't worth it, IMO. Even for bombers.

So I kinda end up with xyphos on converted hangars on relatively fast destroyers and heron full of piranhas (piranhas got some weird stuff going on with all those speed buffs since they tend to unload slower then they reach the target, on a bright side it's a lot harder to evade them). Was thinking about switching heron to two scintillas for faster bomber turnout but they don't house any manned wings so... Still farming some flash bombers. Tons of mods really, really don't help with this. Initially I was considering broadsword spam but they are a little too squishy on converted hangars and I never fielded pure carrier fleet so... Idk. Might work but with fairly high crew cost?

As far as PD duty goes, currently wasps seem to be doing the most decent job but by mostly face blocking projectiles and dropping mines everywhere. They aren't as good at clearing out large quantities of fighters as compared to locust. Thanks to new skills gryphon can have triple the base ammo pool and rearm twice so he can fire it pretty much non-stop until he gets to 0 CR.