Semi-OT: Carriers? When are they good?

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Basically, in RL, fighters are good for getting there the firstest, which automatically means you have the mostest. (Mangling what some general or other said)

[Alneyan]

Light Carriers are great in the early game: they are cheap to research (Construction is mandatory to research after all), have 420 "free" hitpoints, the Heavy Mount for a small increase in damage or the Large Mount and some leaky armour. They also cover all your needs for cargo transport, and give you more points than Light Cruiser, boosting your morale by giving you the first position. Their main drawback is the lack of the 10% defence bonus of the Light Cruisers, and their added cost can be a problem in relation with build times.

Fighters are quite nice early on too: seven fighters can be built in one turn, they can be deployed the turn after, and they are blockading the wormhole the next turn. They are thus faster to deploy than minelayers, while having the firepower to destroy lowly-armed vessels warping through that wormhole (even a Colony Ship with a PDC component will suffer, missile escorts will be swiftly taken down, and unarmed Colony Ships will suffer a lot). Mines are much better as soon as you can deploy a minelayer on the frontlines however.

Other than that, the Fighter technology can be good if you have a long peace ahead of you: 20,000 fighters protecting the sole entry point in your systems would make for a powerful defence, though your own casualties would be equally impressive. The problem is, you are not so likely to have a long peace, and creating one hundred wormholes or so is going to take a while too. Carriers often than the Light Carrier are fairly useless however: they cost a lot to research, while being only marginally better than Light Carriers, and standard hulls are much better for less research.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

But if you're doing singleplayer, sure, go for it. It's not like having a few around won't work, it just won't work as well.