Your welcome.

I know its a lot. According to my math, with 4 huge hulls, you could get 140 fighters! That is 280 logistics worth of fighters on a 40 logistics diet. These numbers were generated with late game techs, but a fraction of that is still a big deal.

Unless this gets nerfed, or we get AoE weapons, I don't plan on using anything else. I don't know if a 4 huge hull could compete with such an opposition.

Oddly, carriers in the real world did the same thing to battleships.

@ Turkwise

*Whistles* Wow. Those were the results that I feared. I knew that I was being generous when I said I don't know if huge hulls could compete...

In GalCiv 2, I have said many times that larger hulls can stack HP and defenses in such a way to make them tougher nuts to crack than a large number of smaller hulls. Not only that, but larger ships also have an advantage in cracking tough nuts that small ships don't have. With smaller ships, you would need many times the firepower to overwhelm larger ship defenses and deal damage. Well, that carrier definitely has that right there (and then some). Not only that, but the battleship doesn't have the firepower to kill all opposing ships in the first round even if they all rolled zero for defense. I know who I would bet my money on.

Yeah, carriers did make things real difficult for the battleship (and other heavy vessels). If the devs decide to make carriers the thing that made battleships obsolete, then I'll adapt. For now, I'm assuming that how one sided things are is because of a mistake.

typingonphone

. I too have not reached carriers yet (other   ND life so far)

So noted.  Good test!  The most likely cause is that the numbers simply aren't balanced yet.  Remember that planetary invasions, AI valuing its own ships way too cheaply, and (apparently) 0.70 influence are similarly out-of-tune.  (Also, Combat Viewer II will add more detail, which likely would have changed carrier math regardless.)

In modern Earth tech, carriers do absolutely rule a radius slightly less than their planes' round-trip ranges (although we don't know how modern ship missiles, or next-gen railguns, will change this).  Future-fiction has conjectured that the same holds true, c.f. Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars -- probably because it keeps the spotlight of relevance on individual pilots, which is great for cinematics and heroic storytelling.  (Lucas deliberately modeled snub fighter dogfighting on his childhood memories of WW2 movies, so that's a deliberate coincidence chosen for storytelling, not an objective extrapolation based on tech.)  Some other SF franchises adopted the bridge-of-ship as the heroic subset, and they tend to de-emphasize individual fighters.  A few combined both, e.g. Galactica and Robotech (and the Japanese movie version of Space Battleship Yamato).

Two lessons emerged from carrier duels:

• The fleets may never even see each other; only each others' attacking planes.  (This holds whenever planes are much faster than ships; so in space, it might be false, e.g. in the later Star Wars dogfights.)  This already breaks GC3's "arena" abstraction.
• Plane combat is attritional.  If your planes are your only effective projection of power, and you lose most/all of your planes ... then your empty carrier has no further use, and must withdraw to port.  Then the rate-of-replacement determines the campaign.  GC3 Beta 4's "fighters for free" implementation is obviously a very different approach from this.  I conjecture that the "fighters for free, with automatic upgrades" was the simplest thing to implement in code, and so it might just be a placeholder for a much richer data-management capability that does track your individual fighters' histories.

You must now test carriers vs. carriers

Sounds like an early beta balancing issue.

I suspect that carriers are powerful enough to the point where you could downgrade it to 1 fighter per module and it would still be competitive.

I think that this was a mistake. Carriers should be competitive for sure, but I doubt that they intended for carriers to gain total supremacy over all other means of combat. It would be like strike craft in Sins gaining superiority over all else. Granted bomber spam is alarmingly close to that at times, but high end capital ships were still needed.

I had some time to think things over. Not only are the fighters a deadly source of offense, but they are also a powerful source of defense. The fighters get shot at before the carriers do, and they have the potential to kill the enemy units before the enemies get a chance to fire upon the carriers. By the time the carriers themselves arrive, the battle is probably over.

They're also better than normal defenses and hit points. Defenses has a risk of not blocking all damage but it is the fighter that will suffer the damage not the carrier. The hit points the fighters lose are hit points that the carrier does not lose. Further more, any fighters lost are quickly recovered, and any damaged fighters are replaced, so the hit points on fighter is better because they are recovered much quicker.

Hmm... Maybe if we went with drones instead of fighters, we could down size the ships that the carriers spawn. Less hit points, less room for weapons and defenses, make them faster...

I have noticed that these is room set aside on the tech trees for cloaking technology. Maybe cloaking technology should be the bane of carriers. If you don't know if the enemy is coming, then you can't deploy fighters before the battle begins. The carriers would then have to survive assault while deploying fighters after the enemy decloaks and starts attacking. Odds of survival might be increased if the carriers hold back on carrier modules and leave room aside for normal weapons and defenses, or if part of the fleet are battleships. I considered for a moment that maybe this would create a new problem of cloaked carriers, but I realized that if cloaked carriers start deploying fighters, then they are not cloaked any more and the opposing carriers would likely not be far behind in launching their own fighters.

Drones seem more plausible from a tech POV, but IMO using them also takes away a serious amount of coolness.

Please DO NOT lower fighter counts in a lazy bulldung way to do balance!  I absolutely love having large number of fighters! I am tired of all these games with carriers that have at the most 8 ships!  I love how it is at the moment but I agree it's overpowered and needs adjusting.

There are several problems / fixes

- Fighters should not have the range they have! thats a big part of the problem there.

- There is no aoe flak counter!  A specific weapon to counter tiny

Damage done based on hull size the larger the ship the less effective the damage.  

tiny full damage

small -15%

medium -20%

large -30%

immense -50%

- With the addition of flak being powerful I'd add a armor type to defend against this damage type.  Flak armor would also take up weapon space which would be needed as flak being a hard counter would decimate a fighter otherwise.

-  Though you have larger hulls, the benefit is minimal due to the fact that all ships can use all weapons as long as it fits.  They should really look into creating unique weapons for each hull size.  

- Ships should have passive bonuses based on hull size and research into refining the Hull size

tiny 10/20/30/40% evasion

Small 7/14/21/30% evasion 

medium 5/10/15/20% evasion, 2/4/7/10% damage absorption 

large 7/14/21/30% damage absorption,

immense 10/20/30/40% damage absorption

-Also in the engineering tech tree the ability to research specialized hulls underneath the generic sizes that fit multiple roles.  these special hulls would require mined resources to create such as the antimatter or creating new ones in mining fields.

Paladin  Offensive modules take more space while defensive modules take less

Tier 1 20% offensive modules -10% defensive modules

Tier 2 20% offensive modules -20% defensive modules

Tier 3 20% offensive modules -25% defensive modules

Dreadnought

Tier 1 10% range -30% damage

Tier 2 20% range -25% damage

Tier 3 30% range -20% damage

Ironclad (immense only) penalty to movement in and out of combat.  bonus hitpoints

Tier 1 -10 movement +30 hitpoints

Tier 2 -9 movement  +50 hitpoints

Tier 3 -8 movement +70 hitpoints

-Also could add support modules that affect the effectiveness of fighters somehow!

Obviously the numbers could be adjusted and so forth, but the general point is everything else needs spruced up and features added!  I feel a collaboration of these would truly diversify the game without punishing people who absolutely love the carriers in the game!  

I certainly don't want carriers to be a win all.  I do want a diversified fleet of warships that could take a fleet of carriers if they are properly equipped to do so.

TLDR buff everything else, tweak fighters, add counters.  Don't mess with there number count >

I apologize for not being eloquent with my post!

I'd be ok with the fix temporarily but not as a permanent fix.  I really love having a lot of fighters!  The underlying issue for me is that there are no other unique ships that you can build to counter carriers.  So it will still be kind of a race to get carriers still.

If you gave passive bonuses to hulls that you could research in a tree such as I posted

tiny 10/20/30/40% evasion

Small 7/14/21/30% evasion 

medium 5/10/15/20% evasion, 2/4/7/10% damage absorption 

large 7/14/21/30% damage absorption,

immense 10/20/30/40% damage absorption

It would add a lot more character to the ship hulls, Increase the amount of interesting tech to research, and make other builds viable against a character so it doesn't instagib other fleets.

Then you could add different specialty hulls you could research to fit different type of roles like the examples I made paladin, dreadnought, etc.  A paladin with tons of armor mods and support mods to debuff.  Fitting dreadughts with beams to snipe them with the bonus range.  This would further increase the counters to carriers.

Also the other problem is target acquisition from what I have noticed no matter how many guns are on a ship it will fire them all at one ship wasting a lot of that damage!  This is worse to me than not carrying production over on planets!  Cap ships in sins of the solar empire could shoot at more than one ship no reason not to do it here.  so example

tiny 1 target

small 1 target

medium 2 targets

large 3 targets

immense 4 targets

Also make ships smart in the sense of if they know a enemy will need to be focused fire they will.  But if a dreadnaught with 400 beams at say 4 different fighters at 10hp would instagib 4 fighters before they got close. maybe 8 before it even takes damage with bonus to range.

Also the possibility of support module increasing the amount of targets ships could fire upon to further flavor the fleets.  Also to increase range, add defensive regen for shields, point defense, and armor, damage mitigation, etc!

 I've always loved carriers and this is one of the first games I've ever played where there awesome and really fun to design.  I've never been passionate about battle in other gal civs.  To me it has always been bland in gal civs and an inconvenience.   With carriers though it has really added some awesome flavor to the mix.  I don't want stardock to beat the carrier with a nerf stick in a lazy way to balance.

 I truly believe if you diversify by adding hulls with a passive bonus, specialized hulls, target acquisition, and a variety of support modules you could design different type of fleets to smash carrier fleets!  Not only that but make the whole system much more interesting as a whole.

 Galactic civilization has a real freeing  mentality to it. They don't  restrict and limit the player usually and I want that mentality to flow into combat!

Carriers for me was the first huge step in adding uniqueness and vigor to a boring combat system.  

Instead of oh geeze blah overpowered make them BORING AND COST 23980423487 MILLION only one fighter cause I can't think of anything blah!  I want people to instead go ok well I can design a sniper fleet to kill carriers or a tank fleet to outlast the buggers with support modules or whatever!

Of course I'm sure if a designer sees my ideas would roll his eyes at the amount of work.  I do think they have the talent to do so.  I know they don't want to regurgitate the same boring combat system with a pretty battleviewer and not add viable depth to the battle system.  

I don't mean to be critical of your fixes in a harsh way but I've seen way to many games take an awesome concept and grind it into dust.  

 I've noticed that this community from what I've read has been pretty awesome and open minded.  I know a lot of you all are very intelligent with some great ideas and critiques. So  I'd love to hear your feedback!   

Prioritized weaponry is an interesting Idea based of your idea of capital missiles.  

I also agree that hulls do seem out of proportion I hadn't given that much thought but looking at it your definitely right.

Additional hull space would help the battleship but it would also allow for more fighter bays so I think more needs to be done.

thats why I posted the idea of passive hull bonuses and specialty ships that we could research to counter so there is more variety to what we can decide to build instead of a rush to the OMEGA AWESOMENESS ship that pwns all.

AA would be neat.  I thought about the flak and maybe each damage type could have there own version of flak.  I'd want it to not be effective against the larger ships at all which I specified more specifically in the above post.  

Also thank you for agreeing to keep the number of fighters Casorian! good post.