Carrier Battles Mod

[Suicide Junkie]

Fired up a live-combat exercise just now, with some anti-fighter cluster missiles.

Interesting stuff...
The two carriers were optimised for defense, and were loaded with lots of anti-missile and anti-fighter weaponry.
Fighter loadout included some bombers, heavy attack and armored interceptors. With Maxrange/CAP/Point Defense strategies.

1) The fighter-launched missiles only die one at a time, max. Odd, since they still hit as a stack for one big damage punch.
The interceptors were crucial to the defensive effort, since they fired multiple shots from the various stacks, and whittled down the incoming missile stack one missile at a time.
2) AI targetting of the Anti-missile missiles is good.
It fired about enough missiles for a 4x overkill on each target, then moved to the next with its remaining missiles. When it ran out of targets, it would save some shots for the next round of combat.
3) Since the combat was pretty balanced, it was down to the two carriers in the end. Without direct fire guns to worry about, and the other carrier's missiles to attract them, the two carriers ended up side by side with a thin haze of fighters dogfighting around them.
Both carriers were launching volley after volley of anti-missile missiles, shooting down the enemy anti-fighter missiles as fast as they could be launched .
4) Supplies were way out of whack.
Engine usage has been cut by 10x and ship's supply storage has been increased by 10x.
The 600kt carriers took about 2000 supplies to cross about 3 systems, and cooked off 7000 supplies worth of missile fire during the battle.
Considering that this happened with no extra supply storage components, I'll probably reduce the supply storage by half.
Fighting a battle like this will then require one or two supply bays or a supply tanker ship to restock from after battle. You'll definitely also need cargo ships with a fresh batch of fighters.
5) The final score was all but 5 fighters lost (half a wing of bombers successfully ran after firing), and a handful of components damaged on both carriers. Mostly armor, with 1-2 spare engines knocked out.
6) Maintaining the carriers from the homeworld was hard... some economic tweaking will probably be next.

I've updated the zip.
http://imagemodserver.mine.nu/other/...tles_alpha.zip