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In my experience carriers work well against every enemy except Omega's - I've used them up until the late game vs multi Radiant Ordo's just fine. They are like most other ships: if you want them to perform well in endgame they need an officer (for reliability engineering and one or both fighter skills) and like all other ships they receive a large bonus from S mods. Omegas just have the nasty feature of spawning EMP arcs all the time, which fighters can't handle.
For skills: Boosted CR is unfortunately better than carrier group, simply because it provides other bonuses to the fighters (speed, damage, defense, autoaim accuracy). It also helps all the other ships in the fleet. I think Carrier Group is a fine skill and its scaling isn't much of a problem for 240DP mixed fleets - but Crew Training is just stronger. EW vs Fighter Uplink is a closer call. EW is generally a better skill, but Fighter Uplink is extremely good too (better than Carrier Group for most battles). This is especially true for fleets where every ship has ECCM for missiles (and every ship using decent missiles should have ECCM). For non-missile fleets the range penalty is more severe and I think its still worth investing in winning the ECM war.
For the skills: for a bomber carrier, reliability engineering and strike commander. For an interceptor/heavy fighter carrier: reliability engineering and maybe point defense but I honestly don't think its worth it. Fighters go after other fighters and missiles only incidentally so its mostly a wasted skill: interceptors are their for killing frigates, heavy fighters are for killing destroyers and raising shield flux for other things to get in a killing blow. Something like a low level merc would work, but its also nice to put on the missile skill and a few defensive ones as well to keep the carrier alive if things go wrong.
You're really hyping my low tech carrier fleet before fighting the
Dorito Gank Squad aren't cha huh?
I personally ditched the carriers in my second Campaign because I did not have all three carrier focused skill tree picks. You can reasonably reach them all with
just 11 skills (going up the Leadership tree once and up to level 3 a second time), then going up to the level 3 technology skill) and then set your skills up as you wish.
I'd suggest having BOTH Point Defence and Strike Commander on your carrier officers (it really helps to have at least the level 4 leadership skill allowing for level 6 officers with 2 elite skills) since some bombers have very good PD (Longbow being the best one) and it both allows flexibility to your carriers and the ability of "spam bombers" like Piranha and Khoopesh to really wipe the floor with fighter swarms if they happen to go thru their ordnance.
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Carriers can have their uses - mostly because they aren't meant for the front line and don't have to have deep flux reserves. They can take potshots with the longest-range gun you can fit on them, provide anti-fighter cover to other ships (I often skip on point defence for some ships, and they'd need to run for cover once swarmed by enemy fighters), provide some fleet-wise bonus (ECM, ECCM etc), or pressure enemies using missiles.
For some reason, I also find 2 Herons to be more useful than one Astral.
An Astral with 3 Integrated hullmods can fit 4 Longbows, 2 Tridents, Expanded Deck Crew, Two Hurricane MIRVs, Expanded Missile Racks and ECCM. It's absolutely disgusting if it also has an officer with Elite Strike Commander, Elite Missile Specialization and Systems Expertise to spam the Recall ability.
It packs volumes of disgusting firepower two 3-smod herons would only dream of, and that's why it costs 45FP. The "only" problem with it being it's quite a slow ship and it does not fit all that well on fleets with high mobility and not enough staying power to hold the enemy away from it, unless you make covering for your Astral(s) the main focus of the rest of your combat force.
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I get considerably more performance out of my Legion XIV's two Hurricanes than I do out of its four fighter wings. Is this where the Legion XIV is supposed to get most of its power?
The two large missile turrets
are indeed the main way for the XIV Legion to deal damage. This for example is my setup I'm currently using:
Officer (it now has Elite Point Defence and Elite Missile Specialization)
Ship setup (it now has two normal flaks instead of the duals and 3 Heavy Needlers instead of the HVDs)
Broadswords are your best friend in an XIV legion spamming the best large missile weapon in the game. They not only are a wall of HP and armor holding the enemy back, they even deal very high damage to shields, distract enemy PD and even deploy flares on their own for the target ship to be almost completely powerless when the
double Hurricane of death comes in to finish the job.
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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...
Well, damn. I guess it does. That'd my bad.
Kinda unintuitive. Why in the world would a hullmod intended for point defense actually be the the most powerful fighter v fighter skill in the game?
It does sound unintuitive at first, but then I figured out a lot (if not most) of fighters actually use point defence weapons as armaments (broadword/Talon just to name two), while some like the Xyphos even ARE glorified PD platforms that generate no flux and have a free Ion Beam. I have not yet fully observed my Elite Point Defence XIV Legion to see if its Broadsword wings actually have 100 more range on their light machineguns, but I would not be surprised if they actually did.
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If the AI wouldn't send them head-in first into the thickest blob of ships it can find, then maybe they would be better.
The fighters simply deploy way too early for starters hitting each others mainline before anything even happened. On the flanks it would be more reasonable.
Fighters legitimately being kamikazes that dont return unless they die while on engagement also raises some sanity questions.
In general they die way too much to stray fire, which has to be, because the AI ships aren't "smartly" built.
AI sends fighters and bombers on either the first enemy that's in range or the one you told it to "Fighter Strike" (if it's in range) by selecting an enemy and pressing the S key over it.
My suggestion? Stick to Broadswords, maybe even Warthogs (if you get the skill improving fighter speed, they
really need that one) since they're the most durable fighter LPCs we got at the moment and they even drop flares. Every other fighter LPC (aside from the Lux, maybe) palse in comparison to these twoìs staying power.
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Right now I'm evaluating retiring the XIV Legion. It's too slow to keep up with the fleet and I'm not sure it brings enough for its massive logistical profile. Astral was even more disappointing. Doing trial runs of Double Cobra Drover again. As for fighter Condors, it's really hard to justify the 10DP for what it brings to the fight, though maybe I should return to using the pilum instead of resonators.
It does not need to "keep up" with your fleet all that much if you set it up with Hurricanes and Broadsowrds. Hurricanes have 2500 and bth the main missile and its submunitions go
up and over your allies while Broadswords have 4k range. Deploying a XIV Legion with (for example) double Hammer barrage/Reapers and quad Longbow would instead require it to be in direct line of sight with the enemy and quickly drop in effectiveness as the rest of your combat ships get faster and get in its line of fire more and more.
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In 0.91, I was a carrier guy. Loved piloting the Heron and Legion. In 0.95, I tried really really hard to make the carriers work. Nothing I did felt remotely effective. I don’t see the point in flying a Heron anymore when I am significantly more effective in a Tempest or Fury (or hell, a Shrike). The fighters are too slow, have all the impact of a wet noodle, and die way to fast. Carriers are over priced, OP starved, and suffer from brittle bone disease. Would be fine if there were some wow skills, even if player only, to bring them up to par...but there isn’t. Carriers are dead to me until the next update.
Have you tried Overridden Moras with triple Perdition/Khopesh, double Sabot SRM pod with Expanded Missile racks and an Officer with Elite Strike Commander, Elite Impact Mitigation, Helsmanship, Reliability Engineering, Missile Specialization and, uh...that other skill reducing hull damage taken? It's one of if not the best low tech overridden ship in the game. It's disgustingly hard to kill with the officer spamming damper field and hits the enemy back just as hard as a standard capital would since point blank Khopesh/Perdition is
disgusting and SO does not even reduce fighter replacement times like Unstable Injector does.
It's been a while since I tried Overridden Moras but I think I remember them lasting around 3 minutes with SO, Hardened Subsystems and Reliability Engineering (you don't want to make the Systems Expertise Skill elite before Strike Commander). If you're not going to be happy with that or 3-Smod Longbow/Trident Herons (with both Nav and ECM package) or 3-Smod Longbow/Trident, double Hurricane (with ECCM and EMR) Astral then I don't know how to help ya