How To Win Every Game 101: Carriers and missiles.

Missiles are unbalanced, they do triple the damage of mass drivers and cost less... where is the reasoning in this? It should be the opposite, mass drivers should do the most damage as they're short range weapons, while depending on thruster speed of your ships you're likely going to be struck twice with missiles and at least once with lasers before you can even get in close enough to fire. It makes mass drivers totally pointless bulky and weak, in comparison to lasers which are slightly stronger but take up much less space. The AI also seems to understand this because the AI never uses mass drivers.

it's not even just that carriers are OP.   as long as you have a higher logistic fleet, they will take barely any damage, especially if even just one of your ships has missiles.  so you can go around with a 30-50 logistics fleet and basically conquer any size map as fast as you can get from planet to planet with transports.   I sent a fleet of 8 ships to dozens of planets, conquered them all, never lost a single vessel.  

basically, if you grind fleet logistics and transports and sponsor your starting shipyard with 5 planets that have decent manufacturing levels, you will be able to stomp the entire map every single round with just one single fleet.    

your enemy probably won't even be close to transport research, meaning they can't do anything, and even if they were, you could easily retake your planet because they probably won't have fleets large enough to defend.  

I actually only looked into fighters because I guessed they would be the only counter for the over powered missles (and not the reason you might guess). each ship can only target 1 ship per refire, I noticed this when using my missle boat against enemy carriers. however if you have multipule ships they will each target a different ship to spread the damage, making fighters supieror to the 95% cdr missles.

on another note... I did end up splitting my 50 logistic carrier fleet into 5 (just 1 carrier per fleet) so each had 35 fighters and 100's of moves per turn... I destroyed 1000 power worth of enemy ships in one turn, only took 10 minuets of clicking.

1) 95% CDR missiles are when you load a ship with every missile cooldown reducer it can hold, which reduces missiles' refire cooldown to 0.4 seconds.

2) You certainly can, but there isn't really a point to using anything aside from default Assault Fighters. Assault Fighters that spawn end up being classified as Escorts anyway, making them defensive ships regardless of their intended purpose (which is why everything attacks them first; everything is programmed to always destroy the Escorts before Capitals and Supports).

If Assault Fighters were always programmed to be Assault-class, as expected, carriers wouldn't be nearly as indestructible as they are now.

1) how much is the CD for missiles to start?

2) Would you throw anything else on a carrier but carrier mods and basics (engines life support etc)?