Not a bug. Assault Carrier modules are nearly twice the size of Guardian/Interceptor modules, which is why the ships are weaker (you can either add more of them to compensate, or you can better arm the Carrier). Further, only Tiny ships will be designated Guardians and Interceptors by the game. Ships larger than Tiny with similar loadouts will turn into Escorts and Assaults, respectively. Only ships larger than Tiny can be Assaults.

Naturally, you can change this yourself, but based on the rules the game is assigned, Assault carriers are certainly supposed to have Small ships and not Tiny.

Personally, I think the main factor in how powerful Carriers are is how defenses work, plus the fact that ships never focus fire except by accident. Every point of defense absorbs one shot from that weapon class, regardless of that weapon's level. Because of this, defenses will be reduced faster if more guns are shooting at it.

What do carriers do? They add more ships to the fight. What happens when there's dozens of ships in a fight? Every ship picks a different target. When the enemy fleet has 3 ships in it, and yours has 20, the enemy's fire is going to scatter, and yours is going to focus.

I bet you anything, if the combat AI focus-fired, everyone's problems with carriers would be instantly solved.

Quoting Sansloi37,

reply 2

Fair enough! In that case my only remaining issues are that:

             a ) It seems counter-intuitive that the better fighters come first in the tech tree; I have to spend more time researching worse ships?

             b ) The balance seems off, to me. Assault modules are only about 50% larger than Interceptor/Guardian modules. So I can have 9 tiny fighters (135 mass) or 6 small Assault fighters (140 mass), and the difference in firepower/survivability between small and tiny is (or seems to be) far more than 50% better.

But I could just be looking at it all wrong. It's been known to happen.

The reasoning here is that you could put the smaller modules on Medium ships without sacrificing their armaments. Assault Carrier modules almost require a ship to be dedicated to being a carrier until you reach Huge hulls. But yes, Tiny ships are fragile as hell, and don't have enough space for many defenses, so they tend to get massacred unless your miniaturization is ridiculously good.

The last line of the carrier upgrades are absolutely amazing. Those fighters in that last tier module have all three weapon and defense types based on your empires current tech. 

Got 3rd tier of all weapons? Each fighter in that module (5) will have all three 3rd tier weapons!

Also keep in mind that ships labeled as 'assault' will bypass escorts and guardians to focus fire on Carriers and Support ships. This is important to know. I figured if you want to kill carriers you have to design your own medium 'assault types. I would add one or more thrusters, a bit more armor and focus one or two weapon types. These ships will RACE past all the other ships focus firing on Carriers.

Also

If you do this you will see the AI use your ship designs. After 1 or 2 new games YOUR own Carrier killers will make it to your game against you.. be prepared.  The AI will use your  designs but it takes time to get them cycled in. During Beta I found the Drengin using my prized personal proto missile designs against me. Shocking and very fun at the same time. 

I think that the fighers should be nerfed heavily.

1) Tiny fighters are basically air superiority type, IMO they should use beams or kinetic weapons.

2) Assault fighters are bombers, they should use missiles. 

Carriers are totally unbalanced at the moment and the fighters having all 3 weapon systems is why.

So you think the current system where fighters are the most powerful and effective weapon systems in the game is ok?

Carriers should be supplemental, not the end all be all. Assault fighters will still be fun, but they will follow a more realistic approach. They fly in, and drop off anti-ship torpedo's. Rather than just open up with the most advanced and damaging weapon systems from all three classification of weapon with no regard to hull size and capacity.

My point is we are talking about a single player game. Rather than looking to nerf things why not have ideas to counter the currently strong abilities of carriers? 

I know carriers are OP. We discussed it at length right after they came in Beta. Still I would call for discussion of counters before we call for nerfs. 

So if they never changed Carriers, what would you change to counter them?

What if we gave a module that only Assaults or capitals can equip called 'chain guns' or AAA? It would be the only weapon with a very short range that can do say 3 dmg in a 360 field around the ship at a high rate of fire but it has a very short range..

I have spent some more time looking at the actual game files, and tweaking and testing various entries. A few notes:

1) Assault Fighters (first and last carrier modules) are coded to have (at least) one of every type of weapon and defense. Also, every Race Assault Fighter class definition (as noted earlier) is coded as Tiny.

2) Drone fighters will have lots of beams, some shields, and thrusters. That's all that they are allowed to have.

3) Guardian Fighters get Kinetics, Armor, and maybe shields/point defenses (if they fit).

Seeing this, it really makes me think that the intent was to start out with a general all-around fighter, then you could specialize depending on your own weapon focus (beams or kinetics). I do wonder why there is no bomber-class, which would allow missile heavy players the ability to specialize their fighters too. Too powerful maybe?

I'd really like to hear from the developers if the Small/Tiny issue is intended.

Regardless, I have now modded my own game so that all fighters are tiny, Assaults prefer missiles, and the High Capacity carriers no longer add fighters, they multiply whatever other carrier modules you have (so high capacity works for drones and guardians, not just assaults). So far fighters are still pretty powerful, but not as insane as they were!

Edit: Part of my point that I forgot to make, is that the differences between fighter types are not just hull size; weapon type and defense load-out significantly affects their effectiveness.

Would you mind uploading your modded files somewhere? I'd like to put it into my own growing mod

Thanks

Any chance of a link that doesn't require a sign-in for the downloader? e.g. drop box.

What was the second file modified?

Once changed, does it work for a game in progress or only for new games?

Thanks for that.  Looks like I now have a second game on Suicidal when I'm quitting the game just because one of the AI's is building Carriers with ridiculously OP small assault fighters.  The only counter is Carriers and as no other AI is building them, they won the game the moment they started building them (even though they were clearly going down at the time).  Obviously I can start building them myself but it makes the game rather one dimensional i.e. everyone should rush to this OTT exploit.  

The problem is balance and variety in strategy.

Carriers become the one and only strategy, everything else is strictly inferior.  I might as well as scrap every other military ship design or research approach at that point in the game.

Putting an Alpha strike ship behind a tanking ship is not a counter, you'll still get hammered, I've tested it.

Frankly just using Carriers every game (because you have no choice if the AI does) is boring.  I enjoy Gal Civ 3 and don't want it to be boring.  If it's not going to be changed, I would rather Mod it.  As for Brad, he also said "I tend to fix exploits that are too tempting to ignore".  This most certainly fits that category, although if you are playing lower difficulties you probably won't perceive it that way, since many inferior strategies can still win.

I highly doubt Galactic Carriers was the design intent.  Gal Civ would also be inferior to it's strongest competitor, Distant Worlds, where I can play with a wide range of fundamentally different weapons and with Mods they are balanced well enough that every weapon offers a viable in-game strategy.  There are exploits still but nothing so out of balance it makes everything else a waste of time.

Let's not confuse defensiveness about the game with obvious balance issues.  The game has just been released, of course it has some balance issues, no problem.  But let's be a little more objective please.

To me, it is not a matter of "nerfing" them because they are an exploit. Rather I would prefer that they be rebalanced to be more of an equally valid option. I personally LOVE the idea of carriers, of rolling up and unleashing dozens of fighters. But if I do that in an unmodded game, I will just demolish the AI (and vice versa if the AI builds them and I don't)- they are simply too powerful, especially the small-hull Assault Fighters. And I don't want my battleships to get an inferiority complex.

But that's the great thing about GalCiv: we can mod the balance on our own to fit our own preferences, regardless of the "official" balance put out by Stardock. I have spent a lot of time over the past few weeks adjusting how carriers work in my game, experimenting with a bunch of different ideas. I'm still not completely satisfied yet, but I'm getting there.

Right now (in my version) I have huge carriers with 18 to 24 tiny fighters with custom load-outs, and against an AI at comparable tech they are powerful, but not overpowering. And, more importantly, it is fun without completely destroying the other ship options.