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Aeson -> RE: On the validity of only fielding carriers (1/12/2016 7:49:07 PM)
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Carriers are very strong against immobile targets and things that they can outrun (assuming that you've set the carriers to evade or standoff; while I'd like to recommend evade due to it resulting in the carrier trying to remain beyond enemy weapon range, evade has some flaws - most notably that ships set to 'evade' will close with enemy ships to be just beyond the range of enemy weapons, and since turning isn't instantaneous this can result in your carriers getting caught). Fighters also tend to be quite strong when you're not watching the battles, as it appears as though some form of less complicated resolution system is used when the engagements are not within view on the main screen.
However, against similarly-advanced (or, often worse, more advanced) opponents using decent ship designs, carriers can fare quite poorly in observed engagements if they cannot control the range or did not invest heavily in shields. With most drive components other than Turbo Thrusters, Starburners and Vortex Engines, you need to spend 30% of a ship's total size to get cruise speeds up to around 25 to 30. This means that a carrier using an early- or mid-game standard drive component will need to spend roughly half of its available size on sublight drive components simply to match speeds with similarly-advanced standard warships (a full-size carrier needs to spend 50% more size on drive components to match speeds with a full-size standard-limit ship, so it needs 45% of the standard size limit to be spent on thrusters and has only 90% of the standard size limit to spend on components other than fighter bays, with additional losses incurred through the need for additional life support and habitation modules fitted into that space and through issues with how well the fighter bay requirement meshes with the carrier size limit). This can be quite problematic if you do not want your carriers to be slow. Further complicating matters is that going heavy on the defenses is not necessarily a good alternative; protracted engagements against numerous enemies can break even strong defenses, and a slow ship, particularly if caught in an interdiction field, has difficulty escaping.
It should also be noted that carriers tend to have relatively high static power requirements, which mean that if you do not have energy collectors on them or if the carriers for some reason cannot make use of their energy collectors (e.g. the carriers are in deep space or maneuvering), carriers can burn fuel relatively quickly and have somewhat more limited range than similarly-large standard warships (though since standard warships can usually burn a lot more fuel in combat, this tends to be a bit of a wash).
There is also the issue that carriers are quite expensive if built to full size (roughly 50% more expensive than standard-size ships), and it's not clear that you can really afford to have less of them per fleet action than you would have had in other ship types, especially early in the game when individual carriers are not all that strong.
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Running Ackdarian lets me put up 414 size carriers after researching the first researchable size tech.
Kind of. Be aware, however, that there are a couple of reasons not to build to full size. The obvious one, of course, is cost. Less obvious is that a size-414 carrier requires 4 standard fighter bays (200 size), leaving it with 214 size for other components, whereas a size-375 carrier requires only 3 standard fighter bays and has 225 size available for other components, and so the smaller carrier can be faster and have more powerful defenses than the larger carrier (though obviously at a cost to fighter capacity; note that which size of nearly full size carrier has the most space available for non-fighter bay components can differ depending on the exact size limit and whether you use all standard, all advanced, or a mix of fighter bays). Also not obvious is that a size-375 carrier requires 5.95 unupgraded life support and hab module pairs (so really six, making full use of 5 and 95% use of the sixth, or about 99% efficient use of the support components) while a size-414 carrier requires 6.55 unupgraded life support and hab module pairs (so really seven, making full use of six but only 55% use of the seventh, or about 94% efficient use of the support components), so at least with unupgraded support components there are some efficiency gains to be had in using a smaller carrier. This is not a particularly wasteful example, as that seventh life support and hab module pair still bought you 33 size for non-support components (or 36 relative to using the smaller carrier), and it should be remembered that changes in support size can change which carrier makes more efficient use of its support modules. A far more wasteful example can be seen with Ackdarians that have a standard construction limit of 300 (so max size 360 for standard warship types) and the first upgrade of support components (so support size 85). As support components do not count against the support size limit (though they do count against the overall size limit), a ship with 4 life support and hab module pairs can be built to a maximum size of 352. If you want to build out to the maximum size of 360, you need to invest 3 more size into life support and hab modules and so only gain 5 size for other components.
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