[Fyron]

Not the way You do Fyron, You are the Champ.

Yeah, whatever.

I have faced numerous opponents making good use of fighters, and have never lost more than token battles against them.

If you look back at my post, you will see that I directly refered to them being useful in the very early game, which is most of what you described. In the rest of the vast majority of game situations, they are not useful except as distractions.

125k minerals is a turn or two of production, though hardly a relevant figure because it gets paid over a long period of time. The amount of resources invested to get the fighters and carriers strong enough to actually require extra PDC easily match or outweigh that figure. Their effects on economics are trivial at best, except in the very early game, which rarely has wars that will lead to your victory overall, except in the small percent of MP games that are just 1 v 1 affairs.

Late game fighters are most certainly not virtually immune to PDC fire. Late game fleets have huge numbers of ships, and PDC Vs have good range, allowing for a lot of ships to stack their firing ranges over single squares, resulting in lots and lots of PDC shooting down fighters (not as fast as low tech fighters, but still fast enough) before the fighters ever get a chance to fire.

Again, I will state that fighters are nearly useless. You may think that phrase equates to a lower degree of usefulness than I do, but that is not my fault.