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[PotatoFarmer1]

I don't know if this is screaming into the void but I've been playing rather a lot this update and I just wanted to get this off my chest.

1. Firstly and most obviously I believe that there is no reason NOT to have combat skills and logistics/support skills split apart.
It is just not fun to start the game blasting away from your flagship and then eventually feel like you just have to give up really even playing the game because you acquire lots of high level officers and your own player skill points are far more impactful in support and logistics areas.
Maybe it shows that I've never really been too great at ship piloting but I don't even bother trying to learn it because simply with the support doctrine skill I am statistically worse at piloting anything than even having no pilot at all.
Because of this every campaign I command either from a Drover when I take coordinated maneuvers with wolfpack tactics or a Heron if I take support doctrine, either way I stick the command hullmod in the flagship and ECM or NAV hullmod if I have the spare OP and just set the ship to autopilot. This is also arguably about the most value I can get from even actually fielding my main character into battle instead of having them command from a bloody Atlas freighter or something (which just feels stupid and wrong). This is because I love fighters and just can't help but take one or both fighter support skills on every playthrough and they benefit more from having a pilot so at least I am arguably saving an officer slot from having to pilot a Heron (although a fully skilled officer with missile spec and combat endurance and point defence and so on is still more efficient piloting my favourite ship in the game the Astral -which I wish I could pilot btw-).

2. The first point leads onto the second point and that is that I DESPISE the Mario Kart "Blue-Shell" nature of many of the skills.
What I mean by this is that the skills are enormously more powerful when you... DON'T USE THE THING THAT THE SKILL BUFFS?

So in every single other RPG in the universe, if I spec my general into cavalry, then it would incentivize me to use cavalry, and build cavalry and maybe even allow me to force cavalry slightly into the niches of other units like spearmen or knights or something. So a general that did not have my cavalry buffs would have a more balanced army over all and thus be more versatile on the battlefield, having a good mix of units that could deal with most opponents with relative efficiency; unlike me who spec'd so heavily into cavalry that my army composition has become something of a one trick pony (pun intended)!

As a result in this hypothetical my army would be really really good at dealing with whatever unit type the cavalry countered (maybe slow and vulnerable archers or something). On the other hand my army would be a lot weaker against the majority of other compositions; to some degree the fact that I spec'd into cavalry would allow me to perform slightly better against the 99% of other match ups that such a skew build would suck against and therefore actually make this skew build viable, instead of a joke one trick pony.

So returning to Starsector for a moment; I want to play out the fantasy of a carrier group commander that dominates the airspace. Currently the skills simply don't support this. The optimal (and imo only) way to run carriers is to run an Astral with a skilled officer and then take fighter uplink + carrier group. There are no longer any officer skills that buff fighters (except PD but that doesn't matter if you run bombers for example), and the fighter support skills simply make your Astral perform basically like 2 Astrals. In a game where (at least in vanilla) your biggest limitation is squeezing out every last drop of value you can for your very limited DP getting basically 75-100 points of extra Astral for 2 skill points is a no brainer (not to mention arguably saving an officer slot on the second Astral). What was I going to do with those skillpoints anyways? Invest 5 just to get missile specialization on my character when an NPC officer can start at LVL 1 with that skill and I can have 10 officers plus mercenaries on top???

What I am trying to say is that the support skills seem to incentivize you into running one of bloody everything. I must first say that I understand the balance reason for this that each skill point across all 4 trees should be relatively balanced against each other, but here is where separating combat skills from the rest would solve this immediately. I understand that trying to balance spending 5 points on missile spec for yourself compared to spending 2 points to make your whole fleets fighter performance double or more as powerful, or to get just flat 10% more flux is pointless and stupid, so don't even bother imo. Reduce the insane bonuses on the fighter and phase skills to something more reasonable and remove the blue shell scaling on the skills please!

The fact that I spec into a carrier captain and my fleet has a whole whopping one single carrier makes no sense! The Tempest is probably my number 2 most favourite ship in the game after the Astral and you just can't run both in one fleet. The terminator drones do benefit from refit time but entire second skill the fighter uplink is COMPLETELY pointless on them.

The fact that I make my captain a carrier genius and only run one carrier in the whole fleet, or a phase coil tuning madman... who only runs a single phase ship like the Doom in his whole damn fleet is just BEYOND infuriating! This is the worst roleplay experience I have ever had. It would be like if you played Space Marines in 40k and all of your armies where cheap horde conscript chaff and one unit of actual power armour Space Marines and your friend who played Orks most optimal build was elite killer cans because the massive buffs to the ONE UNIT that was supposed to be their factions identity defining unit like the Ork boy only applied if you had a single unit of ork boys!

inb4 yes I've tried spam builds, in fact my most recent playthrough of the game was derelict operations + support doctrine where I just released all my pent up frustration and ran nothing but carriers, all my ships either had built in fighters, were carriers, OR I STUCK BLOODY CONVERTED HANGARS ON THEM AND MADE THEM CARRIERS.
ofc I took carrier group + fighter uplink but when you have 45 fighter bays in your fleet the bonus was bloody pathetic. At some point when you have 10x more carriers than the skill intended and you've already reached the floor of the bonus at like 16 fighter bays or whatever it is then adding more on is no longer penalizing, but of course the skill is 1.5x more effective on ships with officers so even that kinda sucked cause I don't have enough officers to make it work, and even if I did 10% faster refit compared to 15% is not even noticeable in gameplay.

My conclusion from my extremely wide carrier playthrough was:
-That converted hangar sucks. Even if it didn't cost waaay more OP than it was worth, you can't fit expanded hangars (but you can recovery shuttles for some reason) so after just a few launches the fighter reserve is bloody nothing and the ship takes the next 15 minutes of battle to refit a single Khopesh.
-The spam was fun but the fighter performance just sucked, like in most fights my Apogees would have won the fight anyways with their Tach lances and Squall spam and the fighters where kind of just there to look pretty. I guess that the Claw fighter was kind of useful but again, if the enemy ship was unshielded and had no point defence, and wasn't backed up by friendly ships with point defence, then it was kind of already dead in the water so the fighters didn't help.
-The bombers really struggle without a high fighter uplink bonus. The bombers are slow but at least their bomb are deadly and can kind of carpet an area and create sort of a kill zone for a little bit, but the torpedo bombers (Perdition and Cobra) just really really really sucked. I get that they make up for it in spam, but watching them miss what must have been a hundred million dollars of nuclear warheads in one single battle just killed my soul.
-Finally the losses from fighters where unfathomable, adding the recovery shuttle hull mod to my converted hangar ships was something I just kept bouncing back and forth on but honestly this whole build sucks so bad and it costs so much OP that I just don't know why I even bothered.

The result of my experience playing wide was that I want to go back to playing tall with the single Astral. It was just so much more efficient, the fighters could actually land their torpedoes and the bombs didn't move in slow motion, plus the missile support from the ship itself is nothing to scoff at, plus it wasn't a pain in the A$$ to manage D-mods on the carriers that made their fighter performance EVEN WoRSe, and the rest of my fleet wasn't a low CR scrapheap that died if someone farted on them.

This entire playthrough I kept thinking that instead of Claws I should just pay 3 points more and run Xyphos and not even bother with any fighter skills, and run Gryphons with Perdition and Reaper launchers instead of watching hordes of underpaid overworked crew get turned into mincemeat by the slightest inkling of point defence fire every battle (seriously I think I spent more money on crew than on fuel this playthrough which is impressive since all my ships had the erratic fuel injector D-mod).

TL;DR:
I wish the skills didn't incentivize you to build tall in a game that already overwhelming seems to favour building tall instead of wide. 
I wish the combat skills where separate from the logistics and support skills.
I wish the support skills incentivized you to play themed and flavourful fleet builds/compositions, instead of having a bland same-y fleet that is just leveraging the support skills to make the best most optimal DP efficient one-of-everything capital/subcapital build.

[Grievous69]

Honestly feels to me like you've convinced yourself there's only one way of playing the game and that everything else is just worse/weaker. Not much to discuss here since there are examples of so many different playstyles and all of them can be very strong.

I can understand how you feel pressured to pick fleet buffing skills, this is a common thing for those that are not good at piloting. You see that as a problem, I see that as a natural way of investing in your strengths. After all it's a game where player's mechanical skill also matters, like in other games, you're probably going to invest points into something you can get most out of.

Also fair point about skills becoming "weaker" after getting more of that hull which uses the bonus. I said "weaker" since you're still getting the same bonus, it's just spread across more ships. Otherwise it would be a braindead strat to just spam one ship type and overwhelm everything. The suggestion to make the skill give less buffs but don't have a limit would pressure you to only use that certain ship type, to get the most out of the skill.

Converted Hangar is used so much I'm surprised you got to that conclusion. It's even popular in tournaments where it sees a lot of success. And imo you really shouldn't run bombers with it.

EDIT: Did you know that the skill system got reworked 3-4 times now already? It's inevitable that someone won't be a fan, and I can assure you this is the best implementation so far, it just needs some minor tweaks.

[PotatoFarmer1]

Honestly feels to me like you've convinced yourself there's only one way of playing the game and that everything else is just worse/weaker. Not much to discuss here since there are examples of so many different playstyles and all of them can be very strong.

Trust me I know there is more than one way to skin this cattle. I have been playing this patch for so long that I've already gotten bored with broken a$$ REDACTED builds, and neural link 15 combat skill cheese and so on. I want to play my damn fighters and bombers and like I said in my post 1 Astral is the only way to run it, going tall is just leagues better than going wide with carriers. Otherwise just don't even take fighter skills because they are only there for tall and frankly I think the skills give such an enormous benefit of +50% refit and target leading and +20% speed which is even further multiplied by 1.5x for having an officer that I would consider this a broken exploit tier build anyways. To my eyes it basically almost gives you a free second Astral so you are always up 50 DP compared to your enemy. I hate how the skills are either game breakingly bananas stupid OP or completely useless, sometimes even in the same damn skill due to the scaling!!!
Also the problem is that the carrier skills don't differentiate that different hangars have different impacts!!! The hangar on a Venture just should not be counted under any circumstances for any bloody skill, the Tempest like I already mentioned has problems, and that leaves us to pretend that the hangar slot on an Astral has the same value as a hangar slot on a Condor which is laughable.

In my frank and humble opinion if I chose to build my character for fighters, then if I am playing the campaign and I come upon a choice between two nearly identical ships then it would make absolute and perfect sense that I would chose the one with the fighter bay! The skill IMHO should work exactly opposite to how it does! you should get MORE bonuses the more fighter slots you have. Maybe the Venture would see some play in player fleets! Maybe when somebody on the forum says "I took X skill" it would actually mean something! Maybe people would be theory crafting creative compositions to squeeze the most amount of fighter bays into your fleet where such builds would have been wildly too inefficient to consider before!

A phase fleet should have phase ships! A carrier fleet should have fighters! If Alex ever goes in this direction then a bloody ballistic fleet should focus on ballistic ships and weapons and a laser fleet on those weapons and so on. If you balance this right you could make the game so much more fun and interesting because every single fleet you build wouldn't just be the same handful of ships of hyper-efficient meta defining ships!

I can understand how you feel pressured to pick fleet buffing skills, this is a common thing for those that are not good at piloting. You see that as a problem, I see that as a natural way of investing in your strengths. After all it's a game where player's mechanical skill also matters, like in other games, you're probably going to invest points into something you can get most out of.

The way I see it is even putting my personal piloting skills to the side for a moment, unless I am going with a 1 capitol ubership build (either REDACTED or Paragon, or Odyssey) with the two broken tech skills then I get more value out of giving the benefit to all 240DP of my other ships and not just me. For one this basically means that it will never make sense for the player character to pilot something like an Apogee because if you can add massive efficiency to an apogee then why the heck are you not adding that efficiency to a capitol ship??? Plus you can still set your flagship to autopilot so it's not like me running a super busted ubership build will even matter that I can't hit the broad side of a barn because I can give command of the super OP ship to the AI anyways.

Also fair point about skills becoming "weaker" after getting more of that hull which uses the bonus. I said "weaker" since you're still getting the same bonus, it's just spread across more ships. Otherwise it would be a braindead strat to just spam one ship type and overwhelm everything. The suggestion to make the skill give less buffs but don't have a limit would pressure you to only use that certain ship type, to get the most out of the skill.

Converted Hangar is used so much I'm surprised you got to that conclusion. It's even popular in tournaments where it sees a lot of success. And imo you really shouldn't run bombers with it.

Well IMO that should be the bloody point of the skill!
Converted hangar sucks and fighter spam in general sucks, so the skill should compensate your lack of versatility due to running a skew fleet by improving the effectiveness of what you are spamming. There should honestly be a skill in either leadership or industry that just flatly removes all the negatives for converted hangar, no matter how many you have. That would make me happy.
I'm shocked that you say converted hangar is meta in tournaments but I haven't watched one in years and from what I remember they don't allow S-mods or officers. Not only that but logistics are a non factor, so efficiency overhaul, solar shielding, recovery shuttles etc. are never used right? Also coming back alive is a non factor so things like reinforced bulkheads and blast doors are not used either, on top of that since there are no skills you aren't artificially limited to 8 fighter bays to have double the bloody efficiency of your fighter; so as far as I'm concerned if you have 10 ordinance points to spare on your destroyer slotting in a mining pod for literally free to soak up a few errant Mauler shots and help with PD is not the worst value. If not mining pods and not bombers then what the heck are they using? 40+ points for a Xyphos? I doubt it.
Plus I'm pretty sure that in tournaments not having officers significantly reduces both the damage and survivability of the ships participating, a Claw or a Talon could probably have an impact, but in campaign when you can come against fleets with 2 or 3 times more DP than you, plus a large high tech station plus a dozen plus high level officers in command, your stupid little converted hangar Talon isn't going to do anything except get killed and waste your crew and supplies.

I almost wish that officers and skills weren't so powerful in the campaign but they are. If I had 2 or 3 times more DP than you in a tournament then I would always beat you no matter what build either of us was using, on the other hand in campaign my S-modded and officered ships are so efficient that they can EASILY take on multiple Ordos of +50% exp fight difficulty, not to mention the trash the pirates or the path are running.

EDIT: Did you know that the skill system got reworked 3-4 times now already? It's inevitable that someone won't be a fan, and I can assure you this is the best implementation so far, it just needs some minor tweaks.

I know I played through 2 of the iterations that I could remember before and my favourite one was when you could add multiple levels to a single skill. I don't like this simultaneously dumb down and yet incredibly busted and OP skill system we have now. It feels like a Chinese mobile game and I really really hate it.

[Megas]

I dislike Converted Hangar Expanded Deck Crew because the minor boost is not worth the huge OP hit.  After trying to make Converted Hangar Expanded Deck Crew work on ships without Leadership skills (which is why I tried EDC), I noticed most fighters still died too quickly and drained to 30% too fast, while my ships after Converted Hangar did not have enough OP to build a viable warship-lite or battlecarrier loadout.  In the end, I gave up on EDC and threw Broadswords, Claws, and Talons on battlecarrier loadouts because they were the only fighters durable enough to for no-Leadership carriers to work.  Fighters on such ships were meant for anti-small ship because some bigger ships have difficulty catching the cowardly AI.

Converted Hangar Expanded Deck Crew recently has 40% of the bonuses it used to have, which was much back then before carrier skills were compressed and got bigger bonuses (at least with officers).

As for skills, my biggest complaint is Industry beyond tier 2 does little or nothing for combat, unlike Technology (which is designed similarly to Industry, except it is more relevant to combat).  I notice many only get enough for the combat skills or just dump it entirely because it does not affect combat directly.  Even then, people complain about needing to get one non-combat before getting the combat skills (which I think is justified because Ordnance Expert is near or at capstone tier like Missile Spec).  I like to see all non-combat Industry skills be tier 1 (i.e., Containment Procedures, Industrial Planning, and the other one) and a third tier 2+ skill on the way to capstone or the capstones buffed more for combat.  Maybe swap one of the Industry capstones with Ordnance Expert (and join the likes of Systems Expertise and Missile Spec).

Also, skills that have a high DP limit for combat ships (Crew Training and Flux Regulations) should drop it all together because the DP limit in combat already limits what can be deployed.

Edit:  Was thinking about Expanded Deck Crew, not Converted Hangar!

[SCC]

Trust me I know there is more than one way to skin this cattle. I have been playing this patch for so long that I've already gotten bored with broken a$$ REDACTED builds, and neural link 15 combat skill cheese and so on.

Wasn't Neural Link hopelessly underpowered and a very niche option (OP expensive, you want different skills for different ships, Radiant works well enough with the alpha core it's not worth to take NL to fly it)? What is the cheese?

Maybe it shows that I've never really been too great at ship piloting but I don't even bother trying to learn it because simply with the support doctrine skill I am statistically worse at piloting anything than even having no pilot at all.

Plus you can still set your flagship to autopilot so it's not like me running a super busted ubership build will even matter that I can't hit the broad side of a barn because I can give command of the super OP ship to the AI anyways.

Similarly, there's no use for carrier skills for people who can't wrap their heads around carriers. There's no use boosting carriers, if you build them badly, or can't protect them, or have other issues with them.

What I am trying to say is that the support skills seem to incentivize you into running one of bloody everything.

It's actually meant to make the benefit you get from skills constant. Though at the same time you dislike flagship skills and fleetwides sharing the same skillpoint pool, so you probably reject the same argument, too. Even then, that does still discourage spamming Paragons or whichever ship you find best. You don't have to field best or biggest ships, or fear missing out on the potential power that could have been acquired, if you fielded those ships.

So in every single other RPG in the universe, if I spec my general into cavalry, then it would incentivize me to use cavalry, and build cavalry and maybe even allow me to force cavalry slightly into the niches of other units like spearmen or knights or something.

The skill IMHO should work exactly opposite to how it does! you should get MORE bonuses the more fighter slots you have.

It used to be closer to "spec into carriers/phase ships enough and you can defeat literally everything in the game without losses with carrier spam/a single Doom", so perhaps Alex overcorrected a fair bit. For the former, once you had a critical mass of fighters, the enemy could never thin them out quickly enough before dying to reach your carriers. For the latter, Mine Strike is one hell of a system.

That converted hangar sucks. Even if it didn't cost waaay more OP than it was worth, you can't fit expanded hangars (but you can recovery shuttles for some reason) so after just a few launches the fighter reserve is bloody nothing and the ship takes the next 15 minutes of battle to refit a single Khopesh.

I don't use Converted Hangar much, so I don't know if it's still broken, but it used to be really, really good, if you spammed it. Once you achieved critical mass, the enemy couldn't handle both the ships and the fighters at the same time. Though you don't use bombers for it, but either good support fighters (like Xyphos), or cheap ones just to get fighters.

Also the problem is that the carrier skills don't differentiate that different hangars have different impacts!!! The hangar on a Venture just should not be counted under any circumstances for any bloody skill, the Tempest like I already mentioned has problems, and that leaves us to pretend that the hangar slot on an Astral has the same value as a hangar slot on a Condor which is laughable.

So... Exactly like every other ship in the game? Using officers or Crew Training on bad ships will make them better, but it will not be optimal.

Not only that but logistics are a non factor, so efficiency overhaul, solar shielding, recovery shuttles etc. are never used right?

I never use them in campaign, either. Sans for Efficiency Overhaul, it's neat for my flagship to regenerate CR faster.

I know I played through 2 of the iterations that I could remember before and my favourite one was when you could add multiple levels to a single skill. I don't like this simultaneously dumb down and yet incredibly busted and OP skill system we have now. It feels like a Chinese mobile game and I really really hate it.

Hey, let's be fair now. Derelict Contingent is gone, phase ships (and Doom in particular) are nerfed and SO can no longer be built-in. It's now harder to remove any difficulty from the game.

[Megas]

I consider Efficiency Overhaul mandatory for Radiant with alpha core (and 45% or 50% max CR) or Ziggurat (-50% CR deployment and slow CR recovery even with Efficiency Overhaul).  Having the main assault ship broken after a single round of fighting is not a good situation, especially if there are more enemy fleets nearby to destroy.

Also, Solar Shielding has become a combat mod that has a campaign benefit.  Just happens that most enemies use ballistics, except Ordos, but then again, endgame is mainly about Ordos that are significantly stronger than every other recurring enemy.

[Doctorhealsgood]

I personally think that skills that lose effectiveness the more you have should at the very least have a floor so they do not become useless at some point (I do not know if there is already one). That being said some of the diminishing return points could do with an increase (a 8 bay limit for the carrier fleetwide skills on a fleet of 30 ships feels very stingy).
It is not like i know or the game has any disclaimer of how much you lose for every X you go past the limit making it hard for you to consider how far you are willing to push the limit so instead of trying to see how much you can get you (at least in my case) either try to never get past the limit no matter what or you outright do not pick the skill because your fleet is past the point it has a benefit worth investing a point on.

[Megas]

Wasn't Neural Link hopelessly underpowered and a very niche option (OP expensive, you want different skills for different ships, Radiant works well enough with the alpha core it's not worth to take NL to fly it)? What is the cheese?

For me at least, Radiant is not worth piloting without Systems Expertise.  It is about as clumsy as Paragon, but lacks the shot range and defenses, and the skimmer does not recharge fast enough (which means I need to save charges for escapes like teleport scrolls in Angband), so it is basically reduced to a missile platform, but Conquest or Legion XIV is 20 DP cheaper if I want a capital-sized missileboat.  Radiant flagship is only good with Systems Expertise, when skimmer recharges quickly enough and enables teleport spam, but it locks nearly all skill points in three capstones (and no or very little Leadership/Industry).  Even then, if I want an overpowered flagship, Ziggurat does it better than Radiant, and does not need as many skill points to get online.

Alpha core in Radiant is good enough for AI use, it is about as many skills the player will get if he does not go all-in for personal skills.

The only reason for me to get Neural Link is to either fix Quantum Disruptor on a Harbinger duo or to install an alpha-core equivalent into an NPC human battleship (especially Onslaught).

[Lortus]

I was originally going to type out a response to each and every bad take but there were so many from OP and grievous that I can't. I can only suggest that you try out some good fleets and builds instead of what you are doing.

A broken watch is still right twice a day though, and I agree that it's a bit strange that the skills that buff a playstyle incentivize you not to play that playstyle. I hope Alex changes this to make some sense next patch. Also like SCC says I hope he makes neural link usable or just removes it.

[Jackundor]

I personally think that skills that lose effectiveness the more you have should at the very least have a floor so they do not become useless at some point (I do not know if there is already one). That being said some of the diminishing return points could do with an increase (a 8 bay limit for the carrier fleetwide skills on a fleet of 30 ships feels very stingy).
It is not like i know or the game has any disclaimer of how much you lose for every X you go past the limit making it hard for you to consider how far you are willing to push the limit so instead of trying to see how much you can get you (at least in my case) either try to never get past the limit no matter what or you outright do not pick the skill because your fleet is past the point it has a benefit worth investing a point on.

iirc the skills do have a floor, though idk how much sou need to spam to reach it

[Serenitis]

iirc the skills do have a floor, though idk how much sou need to spam to reach it

I'm not sure they do have a floor (aside from 0), just a very aggressive diminishing returns thing going on.
To get your fighter bonus down to 1/5 of normal (ie: +10% replacement etc) you need to have ~42 fighter bays.
And having 50 bays only pushes it down to +8%.

It looks like the bonus drops off like:
8 bays = full bonus (+50%)
10 bays = *0.8 (+40%)
16 bays = *0.5 (+25%)
20 bays = *0.4 (+20%)
42 bays = *0.2 (+10%)
50 bays = *0.16 (+8%)

You probably could get the bonus effect down to 1% (or less), but you'd need a lot more bays to do it than you'd ever realistically have.
Certainly much more than I have on hand rn.

[Thaago]

As others have pointed out, this is more a misunderstanding of what the skills actually do than a problem with the skills themselves. In regards to the point of the skill system incentivizing running 1 of everything: the skills make it better to run a fleet with at least some mixed tactics than just a pure type. That's intentional and in my opinion a very good thing. That doesn't mean that fleets that run very heavy towards a type are bad though, because in general the more you have of something the better it is per thing (this is very true for fighters and true to a certain extent with phase ships too).

Fighter heavy fleets are still very good right now, and 1 Astral is not even close to optimal, so it's really weird to me that you have insisted multiple times that it is. There is a balance between DP/deck, quality of the deck (both from DP available and ship system), and officers per deck that favors as time goes on using fewer raw decks if going for an elite carrier fleet. Converted hangar is a top tier hullmod and builds using tons of them are extraordinarily good. Yes it is possible to have so many decks in a fleet that the bonuses get diluted down (in which case its time to use the easy replacement rate fighters), but there is a LARGE region in the middle for many fleet compositions that are fighter-centric in the middle.

Maybe it shows that I've never really been too great at ship piloting but I don't even bother trying to learn it because simply with the support doctrine skill I am statistically worse at piloting anything than even having no pilot at all.
Because of this every campaign I command either from a Drover when I take coordinated maneuvers with wolfpack tactics or a Heron if I take support doctrine, either way I stick the command hullmod in the flagship and ECM or NAV hullmod if I have the spare OP and just set the ship to autopilot. This is also arguably about the most value I can get from even actually fielding my main character into battle instead of having them command from a bloody Atlas freighter or something (which just feels stupid and wrong). This is because I love fighters and just can't help but take one or both fighter support skills on every playthrough and they benefit more from having a pilot so at least I am arguably saving an officer slot from having to pilot a Heron (although a fully skilled officer with missile spec and combat endurance and point defence and so on is still more efficient piloting my favourite ship in the game the Astral -which I wish I could pilot btw-).

This is a prime example of a self fulfilling prophecy - you are worried that your character will not have enough impact, so you don't take combat skills, don't learn how to fly, and fly ships that don't benefit from player piloting very much. Since you consistently make choices that neuter your character's impact, you don't see the character doing much.

For players that invest in a decent set of combat skills - say half of picks in solo skills - their ships will be fighting at 2-3 times the impact of an AI ship (much more for "playerbait" type ships) thanks to how much better a moderately experienced pilot is than the AI. A pure combat build in a capital can be doing the vast majority of damage to the enemy side (including some people soloing entire top level ordos in a odyssey for example).

[BaBosa]

iirc the skills do have a floor, though idk how much sou need to spam to reach it

I'm not sure they do have a floor (aside from 0), just a very aggressive diminishing returns thing going on.
To get your fighter bonus down to 1/5 of normal (ie: +10% replacement etc) you need to have ~42 fighter bays.
And having 50 bays only pushes it down to +8%.

It looks like the bonus drops off like:
8 bays = full bonus (+50%)
10 bays = *0.8 (+40%)
16 bays = *0.5 (+25%)
20 bays = *0.4 (+20%)
42 bays = *0.2 (+10%)
50 bays = *0.16 (+8%)

You probably could get the bonus effect down to 1% (or less), but you'd need a lot more bays to do it than you'd ever realistically have.
Certainly much more than I have on hand rn.

Interestingly, the total bonus stays constant when you go over the limit. At max +50% with 8 bays, the bonus is 50%* 8 so 400%, at +40% with 10 that’s also +400%, 20 at +20% is +400% again and so on though the rounding can mess it up.

So you’re not actually penalised for going over the limit, it is just spread out more. You’re only penalised for having less than the limit.

[ANGRYABOUTELVES]

Interestingly, the total bonus stays constant when you go over the limit. At max +50% with 8 bays, the bonus is 50%* 8 so 400%, at +40% with 10 that’s also +400%, 20 at +20% is +400% again and so on though the rounding can mess it up.

So you’re not actually penalised for going over the limit, it is just spread out more. You’re only penalised for having less than the limit.

What this means, essentially, is that you can get a maximum of 4 extra decks worth of replacement speed out of the Carrier Group skill, 6 with officers. When you have 8 decks of support interceptors only for contesting airspace, that's a lot. When you have 60 decks and that's your whole fleet, 4-6 more decks is tiny, and that skill point is better spent elsewhere. Opportunity cost is a serious issue when skill points are as limited as they are. Carrier group fleets end up not wanting the Carrier Group skill at all anyway because it requires having an officer in the ship to get the full bonus; what they want is Support Doctrine and Derelict Operations, to spam officerless carriers at 50% DP cost. Double the flight decks per DP is way better than the tiny boost to replacement rate you'd get from putting officers in that many carriers, and you wouldn't be able to get 20 officers for the 20 Moras/Herons anyway. Better to spend the three tier 1 leadership points on Wolfpack Tactics, Coordinated Maneuvers, and Crew Training, so you can have 40 DP of really good officered frigates to capture points so you can actually deploy those 20 Moras.

[FooF]

After seeing the math, my main takeaway is “For a T1 skill, you’re getting 4-6 extra flight decks” which seems pretty impressive to me. If you only have a few carriers, it significantly increases their effectiveness at cost of a single skill point.

That the game doesn’t really let you lean super hard into a carrier fleet is a good thing to me, as carrier gameplay really isn’t as robust as warship play.