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[FunnyScope]

In a lot of discussions about balance or skills, carriers come up, often negatively. People seem to disagree quite a bit on how carriers are performing and what their issues are, so I was wondering: are carriers actually weak? And if they are, what are their problems?

In my experience building fleets for double ordos recently, carriers are not necessarily weak, with some exceptions. Namely the condor and the drover, which, in my experience, function as a good way to field fighters in the early to midgame, but seem to fall off later in the game. Other carriers can pull their weight just fine. So I don't think carriers are weak overall, but I'm curious what people think.

[FooF]

The pendulum has swung a few times on carriers and right now I think they're in a good spot. A couple patches ago, they were obscenely OP once they hit critical mass. There are mechanics in place now that curb that to some degree. Mixing a few carriers into a fleet, to me, tends to work as a bit of a force multiplier since fighters can fire over other ships. However, if you go carrier-heavy, there's a lot of diminishing returns and there's very few ways to get fighters to scale up relative to Officered ships because directly boosting fighter damage is limited to a few ship systems.

I see carriers as viable alternatives to line ships but only up to a point. I generally don't go above 8-10 wings even in endgame fleets.

[ubernoob]

If you get SD+DO and decent D-mods you can spam carriers + some missiles and do well for most of the game. Once you get Flashes from Remnant farming you can deploy them en masse from Herons and steamroll most enemies.

Biggest complaint I have about carriers, actually bombers specifically, is that it's only a matter of time before you're stuck on 30% replacement rate even if you've taken no losses since returning to rearm drains replacement rate. It's also better to micro them in big fights since fighters can decide to suicide into blobs and it drains command points fast.

If you count it as a carrier, Legion is very good now with nice bonuses from Leadership carrier skills and being a decent combat ship on it's own and some other ships are good candidates for Converted Hangar and cheap fighters.

And Afflictor buff + Heron damage buff lets you burst down just about any target if you have the bombers for it.

[Lawrence Master-blaster]

They are weak. Even the on-paper DPS of fighters is completely anemic, and then it's dumpstered even more with travel time and the fact they can be destoryed. They scale inversely with battle size(as power and range of weapons on the field increases) and replacement rate always ticks down, which means carriers get worse with time. Officers practically do not benefit them at all.

Supposedly the advantage of fighters is that they don't take space on the frontline like ships do, but this is something you can eaily manage by upsizing ships.

[Princess of Evil]

Fighters are missiles with a lot less rate of fire. Meaning they get better with spam just like missiles, but the baseline is much worse, so what can be done with like three Gryphons needs ten Herons at least. And these two are the absolute best ships of their archetype.
And one Gryphon is still a lot of firepower. One Heron is like a Falcon: does quantifiably something, and probably won't get caught, but you're much better off putting the DP somewhere else. Like into LP Manticores, if you really want a lot of missiles.

[Doctorhealsgood]

They are weak. Even the on-paper DPS of fighters is completely anemic, and then it's dumpstered even more with travel time and the fact they can be destoryed. They scale inversely with battle size(as power and range of weapons on the field increases) and replacement rate always ticks down, which means carriers get worse with time. Officers practically do not benefit them at all.

Supposedly the advantage of fighters is that they don't take space on the frontline like ships do, but this is something you can eaily manage by upsizing ships.

At least officers make the two carrier skills in the entire game better. Granted if they are not combat carriers i have no idea what kind of skills you would put on them that they would make good use of them.

[majk]

For me the biggest problem with carriers is that low tech has so much pd it swats your fighters like flies.
Second problem is carries support skills lose their power when you have more than 8 fighter wings out.
Third problem is that giving broadswords to non carriers is enough.

I have to say fighters are amazing vs. Ordos since they are suicidal and charge right at you so their pd is much less of a problem.

[PixiCode]

The pendulum has swung a few times on carriers and right now I think they're in a good spot. A couple patches ago, they were obscenely OP once they hit critical mass. There are mechanics in place now that curb that to some degree. Mixing a few carriers into a fleet, to me, tends to work as a bit of a force multiplier since fighters can fire over other ships. However, if you go carrier-heavy, there's a lot of diminishing returns and there's very few ways to get fighters to scale up relative to Officered ships because directly boosting fighter damage is limited to a few ship systems.

I see carriers as viable alternatives to line ships but only up to a point. I generally don't go above 8-10 wings even in endgame fleets.

In full sized battles (240 DP) I’ve found its pretty awkward (but like you say, viable) to get value out of wings. That said, I think wing/carrier gameplay is probably in the best state it has been where it’s not massively OP but also not worthless. Anyway here’s why I think that;

The more enemy ships are on the battle map the better they naturally counter fighters since all ship weapons can fire at wings. I’m not suggesting normal weapons should ignore fighters, just making an observation.

Although wings get worse the bigger fights you find, there’s no good way to mitigate that issue. Fighter uplink might help with improved ai behavior but as it is right now it’s inconsistent since they can just more quickly run into enemy weapons for silly reasons. Carrier group is in a similar boat, but at least it helps prevent the replacement rate death spiral. These skills feel pretty weak for taking a whole skill point each,
Imo. I wouldn’t want them to apply to more wings since spam is something that needs to be carefully mitigated but maybe the benefits they give could be better.

Wings don’t get half as many benefits that other ships get or even missiles get. This means they fall off the more bonuses the enemy fleet have compared to your other options. This mostly applies to ordos for now but it could apply to any kind of fleet if they get to have more officers or even smods.

Wings behave a bit too bravely. Correct me if I’m wrong but I swear wings prioritize going into the line of fire for their carrier even if it’s just a single annihilator rocket. They also don’t seem to care about firing arcs of their target whether on regroup or engage. I think it makes sense for them to behave this way if the carrier is active venting but not otherwise.

One noteworthy exception to this is how well wings combo with missiles. the CH Nerf made this a bit more awkward to do but mixing in talons, wasps, broadsword, Gladius and the like sometimes go hand in hand with certain missile spam builds. I know some of the best missile fleets might use no wings, I just know some others I’ve seen are better with wings than without (namely pure gryphons)

[F4RST4R]

I am getting to the point of amassing an ordo hunting fleet in this playthrough.  Need more alpha cores and exploration is mostly done. 

At this point I have no carriers active.  I have 3 Herons in storage.  Mostly they just cost money to drag around and not sure they do anything at all.  Also hard for me to tell which fighters/bombers are good for what as there are so many.

Carriers and missile boats I always want in my back-line - but they always end up in combat at some point.  So I don't use them anymore.

Maybe I'll break them out and try them against Ordos, as my High tech fleet currently doesn't do so well against even a single. 

[Megas]

Legion is good.  It counts as a carrier for fleet doctrine, but it is good enough to not need any of its fighters.  (I have used guns and missiles with mining pods for fighters before on Legion.)

The rest, they are okay against typical human fleets, but I probably would not use them against the likes of Ordos, at least if not specialized for fighters.

[TheMeInTeam]

Fighters are missiles with a lot less rate of fire. Meaning they get better with spam just like missiles, but the baseline is much worse, so what can be done with like three Gryphons needs ten Herons at least. And these two are the absolute best ships of their archetype.
And one Gryphon is still a lot of firepower. One Heron is like a Falcon: does quantifiably something, and probably won't get caught, but you're much better off putting the DP somewhere else. Like into LP Manticores, if you really want a lot of missiles.

I disagree that heron is the "best of their archetype" for the reason you say.  Heron is 20 DP for 3 bays, which is okay, but it is lacking something other carriers deliver: missile volume alongside those fighters.

Condors deliver more fighters per DP, and double the missile count.  They can also front-load launch those missiles, creating an alpha strike of harpoons and fighters that's difficult for most fleets to survive in full.  Once they're out, their concentrated DPS goes down...but so has the number of potential targets on which to concentrate fire.

Moras are a similar deal in terms of DP cost to missile volume, although they're a bit less capable of just unloading everything instantly.

Legions are less fighter spammy by a lot, but can carry way more missiles and are a bit better with sustained fire of their own.

With discount for SD+DO it's probably worth putting converted hangar on buffalo mk 2 so that they spam some fighters for flares + kinetic damage behind massed harpoons.  These would probably get out of hand if not for fleet limit.

I think if your goal is to flood with stuff against PD, condor or mora are probably best?  I'm not sure on the optimal ratio of broadswords vs bombers though.  Kinetic pressure + flares are great for the harpoon alpha strike, but ideally they still have enough output after expending missiles such that concentrating fighters + bombers on 1-2 ships continues to blow them up, making it hard for the enemy to re-mass and punish the lack of missiles.

Basically, fighters can serve as a substitute for missiles in terms of interacting with PD, but only to a point.  The volume you can get from daggers or w/e just can't come close to what harpoon spam from a gryphon can do, but broadswords CAN make it so you need fewer harpoons to get through shields and destroy hull.

[SCC]

Second problem is carries support skills lose their power when you have more than 8 fighter wings out.

They don't lose their power, their bonus just gets spread thinner among more bays.

[Thaago]

Second problem is carries support skills lose their power when you have more than 8 fighter wings out.

They don't lose their power, their bonus just gets spread thinner among more bays.

This! For replacement rate in the regime where all ships are regenerating fighters (IE there are spread losses) it acts as +4 extra bays (no officers at all) or +6 bays (with officers in all ships). It is possible for its 'replacement rate death spiral' effect to become too diluted, but this can be ameliorated by using lower replacement time options when going full spam mode (Khopesh are my bomber of choice here. Not as good as daggers, but still good and only 30 second wing rebuild).

[Killer of Fate]

I disagree that heron is the "best of their archetype" for the reason you say.  Heron is 20 DP for 3 bays, which is okay, but it is lacking something other carriers deliver: missile volume alongside those fighters.

Heron is good cause it has a ridiculously overpowered broken system that doubles all fighter's damage for 66% of the carrier's existence (it has 20 sec duration, 10 sec cooldown. I omitted the 1 second ramp up and ramp down for simplicity's sake)

It's super fast and its weakness of lacking firepower doesn't really matter. Neither does its low peak operating time which most players can just s-mod around. As carriers don't have anything to s-mod anyway

Mora is an underequipped in OP gimmick that can't move.
Condor was designed to troll players.
Drover got nerfed into having the worst system in the game.
Gemini is laughable.
Astral is a piece of crap that is getting nerfed again this update to have even less durability. Because it having a strange niche of fighting swarms of Ordos was too good. And we clearly have priorities here

The only other functional carriers are Legion. And Scintilla. This is because Legion is swarming with firepower for low DP cost. Because it had to be good in comparison to the Onslaught. And Scintilla is a Remnant. Which means it's nigh invulnerable. Due to very high flux and shield stats. And is also for a carrier flooded with OP

The 100% damage bonus on Heron does translate to it not only having 3 additional fighter wings in theory. But also said fighter wings having significantly higher hit strength. Causing them to be able to deal damage faster and more effectively due to bypassing armour. Also more fighters is kinda less fighters cause 90% of good PD in the game is AOE. Or spammy enough to be considered AOE.

Second problem is carries support skills lose their power when you have more than 8 fighter wings out.

They don't lose their power, their bonus just gets spread thinner among more bays.

This! For replacement rate in the regime where all ships are regenerating fighters (IE there are spread losses) it acts as +4 extra bays (no officers at all) or +6 bays (with officers in all ships). It is possible for its 'replacement rate death spiral' effect to become too diluted, but this can be ameliorated by using lower replacement time options when going full spam mode (Khopesh are my bomber of choice here. Not as good as daggers, but still good and only 30 second wing rebuild).

It doesn't matter how quickly they can be rebuilt if they all die instantly to Paladin PDs or Devastators.

You can have 5 Herons worth of Cobras, Tridents, Daggers, Longbows...

Or Warthogs, Broadswords, etc. And they will have their fighter wings instantaneously wiped out by a few Devastator barrages enhanced by a PD skill paired with Vulcan and Flak Cannon fire.

You are about to find that out the hard way once the dev gives Brilliances Paladin PD
An insult to injury of nerfing your personal Afflictor + Harbinger strat which serves nothing but to bully you and all the players that attempt to break the capital ships spam meta of the game

As Afflictors were in my opinion never a problem in the game in NPC hands. And their nerf only serves to punish the player. For no reason other than spite

I am so sorry for being so blunt about this. But I must admit that I am deeply disappointed with the direction of balance that has been taken most likely ages ago. The nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf balancing philosophy is only leading to gameplay becoming more and more shallow. And frustrating. Especially considering enemies have been nothing but buffed in the recent updates. Such as expeditions being ridiculous in size now in the form of hostile activity. Remnants receiving far more powerful elite skills. And Omegas receiving more unstoppable weapons. Even though there is no actual reason to get the Hypershunt, because the reward it offers doesn't matter in the face of the game's non-functional economy. Due to the fact that it's not properly balanced. And allows the player to just print money...

But who cares? I guess

I have elaborated to my coworker today at the factory about the issues of Starsector balancing. And because he was completely alien to the game. I had to explain it via CS GO terms.
And I explained it like this.

50% of things in this game are as strong Galil
40% of the things in this game are as strong as the CZ75
And 10% of the things in this game are as strong as the pre-nerf AWP

And the dev instead of either making the CZ75 things stronger or AWP things weaker
Is choosing to nerf Galil elements. Removing more and more actual interesting strategies from the game in favour of controlling the playerbase's ability to enjoy it.

[Doctorhealsgood]

Snip

Forgive me for saying this but i put into question your reasoning when the astral is getting built in ADVANCED TARGETING CORE AND EXPANDED MISSILE RACKS but because they got a 0.1 increase in shield/flux damage it is an overall nerf.