It's lonely here! (First post!)

[Suicide Junkie]

A better equivalent would be choppers, I think.

Quick, manoeuverable, and fairly easy to replace when lost in combat.
Particularily compared to capital ships, which are slow, long ranged, tough, and very expensive.

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By the way, don't let the name fool you.
Carrier Battles mod is about BALANCE, not fighters.
The fact that fighters and missiles are useful is a side-effect of the balance.

You may want to keep an eye on the PBW game "Carrier-Free Battles mod #1", and sign up as a replacement, should anyone have RL troubles.

I think I'll open a second CFB game too...


PS:
In CB#3 game, I use fleets composed of about 10% carriers, 30% Missile ships, 30% point defense, and 30% Assault ships (short range/high power, direct fire guns)

Eorg went a little nuts, building only carriers. That worked for a while, because he was a Disposable Society (double build rate), and he put his foot down with overwhelming force. However, the rest of us quickly learned to build a lot of antifighter designs... AF missiles, 40mm torpedoes, cluster missiles.
When Eorg failed to modify his own designs (IE use a mix of gunboats and missile ships, instead of all-fighters) to counter our new fighter-killers, he was defeated.
His carriers often got away, since we had little anti-ship firepower, but he was losing thousands of fighters in every battle, culminating in a big 300-ship vs 5000-fighter clash, which finally broke his navy.

The point to all this, is fighters are quite useful, but certainly not sufficient, and not completely nessesary.
The same can be said of ships, missiles, direct fire weapons, just about anything in CB.
The best fleet will have a healthy mix of everything, with strategies set so that the different types of ships and fighters support each other; covering each others' weaknesses, and clearing the way for their strengths.

With such a fleet, I recently defeated a 400 ship fleet which was over-fightered, over missiled, under-PD'd, and very lacking in direct-fire assault ships.