I strongly disagree on carriers of any type bring useless in mid to endgame. They can be incredibly potent but the amount of effort required to reduce or even negate their drawbacks has sharply increased with the 0.95 changes:
So which is it? Do you strongly disagree carriers of any type bring useless or do they take a lot of effort to not have drawbacks?
If something is arguably all drawbacks in most cases you can't "strongly" say they aren't useless
You cant just say "THEY ARENT USLESS" and then say carrier groups are not seen as a viable endgame option
Hoping they wont be useless in future patches (as you have done); I really hope Alex is going to imitate them just a little bit in the future., isn't related to the current game state is it now?
It's..uh..both? Carriers can indeed falter from enemy pressure without integrated hullmods, commander skills and good officers on them but they can, at the same time, be incredibly strong and viable in endgame when said factors are added in and help them get over their limitations.
Carriers are not "all drawback".
They're essentially force projection across the battlefield in the form of either fighters immobilizing the enemy and distracting (or just being a wall of infinite HP that also does a lot of hard flux damage like Broadswords) or various bomber combinations providing pinpoint damage to the closest enemy until it dies, unable to do anything in return.
I'm running a low tech only campaign and I've now finally become able to take on [Redacted] forces with a mainly battlecarrier fleet supported by
oversized fighter jets frigades with officers. The enemy is unable to advance due to Broadsword spam with enchanced damage, speed and around 60% better fighter replacement rate while it is, at the same time, getting mauled by a combination of Hurricane Mirvs, Perdition wings spamming Hammer Torpedoes or backstabbed by highly mobile frigades sporting one Assault Chaingun and a Heavy machinegun.
You can do this a lot better with both vanilla midline and vanilla high tech ships. Especially if you use a combination os Longbow/Trident bombers coming out of Herons/Astrals, Hyperions and Odisseys.
Expended Deck Crew alone is not enough, which means player must get Leadership 3, and maybe Reliability Engineering. If player cannot fit carrier skills into his build, carriers as fighter platforms become useless late in the game.
This is unlike last release when unskilled Drovers with Sparks could solo an Ordos with Radiants (while skilled one could solo several).
P.S. Carrier skills have those annoying small limits that get interference from warships that happen to have bays, like Tempest and Odyssey. And that converted fighter bay hullmod only works for those bays with built-in wings, like Shepherd. (Tempest does not have OP to spare for that hullmod.) This is like civilians with Militarized Subsystems for +1 burn interfering with L1R.
I find that getting all the things to boost fighter damage, speed and refit/replenishment times is more or less mandatory now to keep said carriers effective throughout hard fought battles. You
need all the things in case you're going to fight an enemy that's going to push them to their limits.
And yes. Using Tempests or any other ship using fighter wings that's not a dedicated carrier/battlecarrier is something to avoid. There are frigade options like (Scarab or Monitor) that are as much if not more useful in a carrier heavy fleet than the Tempest.
I've tried some carrier with a modded game (Mayasuran Navy and Detailed Combat results) and tried out some of their Battlecarriers, the other mod letting me see how effective some of the LPCs are doing.
They tend to do alright. I usually just field Broadswords now after trying out the various other LPC, severely disappointed in the [REDACTED] interceptors especially. The Broadswords get reduced to just 1/2 a Light machine gun after awhile due to their absolutely pathetic Flux dissipation stats, but their flares and the sheer durability per OP you're paying for makes up for it.
They oddly still do about as much damage as Gladius and Thunders.
Still, they are more a compliment to the guns of my Battlecarriers than anything else. I can't ever seem to get the bombers to do any work, they just get shot to pieces unless it's against fleets I was going to bulldoze through anyway.
Yes [Redacted] and automated fighter LPCs in general are quite disappointing, even with officers and carrier skills. I know since I've tried. Spark would be a good point defence and close range alternative to the Xyphos support wing if it did not suicide into the enemy so easily. Lux is alright but it's got a lot less utility than the trusted Broadword as it both does less DPS per fighter wing, only deals energy damage and even has less total HP per wing.
I suggest you to only use bombers on carriers that either get close to the enemy (Mora, Legion) or ones that have special abilities making them more effective (Heron, Astral) to maximise their effectiveness and justify their usually higher OP cost. Having an officer on said carriers that also has Elite Strike Commander, Elite Point Defence or both also goes a very long way into making bombers effective.
With that out of the way, I find bombers like the Dagger, Longbow, Trident, Perdition and Khopesh to be the most useful and flexible across most bomber-focused carriers without extensive specializations of the latter.
Point Defence also applies to fighters and not just to the carrier ship,
No, it doesn't. The Point Defense skill effects apply exclusively to the parent carrier, the fighter craft don't receive the benefits.
(Hullmod IPDAI does the same, just to cover all the bases)
If a skill or hullmod does not explicitly say their effects apply to their fighter craft, it does not.
Doesen't the Point Defence explicitly state that it also applies to fighter LPCs tough? Wait let me just get a screenshot of the skill...