I like the idea, but wonder if fighters should maybe be a bit more expensive in that case. Someone else has already questioned the effect on balance and I concur. Realistically, for fighters to get anywhere they would have to be transported by a carrier, which wold cost as much as its air wing combined. In game, all we buy are the fighters without having to worry about how they’re getting anywhere. If dedicated carriers aren’t required for fighters to be present, I think that their cost should be abstracted out onto the fighters themselves.
I’m wondering how often fighters will actually get to use this… it seems quite rare to me for a fighter to be damaged, but not outright killed or slowed enough that it isn’t going to get far before being killed. I suppose a heavily armoured bomber might, but would it be quick enough to retreat to the cruiser before being killed?
My initial tests have shown it to be surprisingly useful, unless you have enemy fighters dedicated to going after your fighters. For the situation where you have a bunch of fighters set purely to engage enemy frigates or cruisers, and they are armoured enough to survive a shot with engines still vaguely usable, a good percentage of them can make it back to base.
bear in mind that currently … armour on fighters isn’t normally used. so they do tend to go foom in one shot.
but you might change that design if there were repair services…
Yes. This will make heavily armoured designs a more interesting option. They’ll still get torn up by fast fighters that were set to chase them down… But they would have a good chance of breaking away from a fighter screen that was unable to pursue far enough, due to escort orders. It’ll certainly be lots of fun experimenting with the new tactics this will enable.
Now I want to be able to give fighters orders to escort other fighters, even more than I did before. I want my fast, light, fighters to escort my heavy bombers back from their bombing run, as they return to repair.
This also makes me want a ‘break formation’ order, that cancels out escort/formation orders once a unit has engaged / been engaged. I want my fighter screen to escort up until the enemy attack… Then pursue those retreating bombers all the way to the carrier.
…
There I go reaching for the stars again 
Instead of repair, what about making fighter missiles and rockets into limited-supply modules? Then a carrier module could resupply them. By tweaking how much supply each weapon system consumes in use you could end up with, say, powerful rocket armed fighters which can do a couple of attack runs before resupply, medium-damage missile fighters which can make several runs without resupply, or laser fighters which can mix it up all day long.
That way a fleet can field laser-armed interceptor fighters to kill fighters and threaten frigates without providing carrier support, or anti-capital missile and rocket fighters as long as they have a carrier base to keep up the pressure throughout the battle.
This is something that is often talked about. The problem is making sure that everything remains balanced. Right now, not a single weapon is ammunition-limited, partly because it would be frustrating to see ammo wasted on the ‘wrong’ targets.
I would consider introducing finite ammo in future updates though. Maybe some weapons that are slightly better all round, but do need reloading…
In my dreams, the game would have vastly more stuff like that, with supply shuttle dispatched mid battle from the back of your fleet to replace ammo, crew and fuel on the front-line ships. That would be teh awesome 
But would it be more fun to code than to play? is the game complex enough already? These are all unanswered questions for now
Maybe now we can have fighters damaged when a ship pops.
Of course I would still love to see detailed orders for being able to tell a squad to pull off when a ship is x% damaged and move on. Or when the shields are down, or armour is gone etc etc.
I love the carrier idea.
Oh my, this might actually (surprisingly) turn the tide on fighter swarms. Think about it, a cruiser has a repair bay and a nicely armoured fighter screen. Large hordes of fighters would get destroyed without causing much damage. Either that or turn tail and flee to their momma, which would result in the kind of fighter/carrier battles I’ve always wanted to see in this game, where the fighters don’t just have a rapid bout of fighting at the start with a clear winner before the main ships engage, but instead a longer fight where the fighters are all pew pew pew at each other while still flying around the cruisers.
Indeed, that’s the aim. And its fun to watch. I did a lot of tests, and its cool to see a badly damaged fighter limping slowly towards its carrier, flames billowing from it, and a nearby enemy frigate zapping away at it right up until it safely docks. And it’s even more cool when they get zapped just before they make it back
Been playing around with it in the 0.20 alpha patch…
It’s pretty neat. I tried it out with the Rebels… One unarmed cruiser at the back of my deployment (hopefully this should mean nothing decides to shoot it 
equipped with eleven fighter bays. Cost a little over 3000, like most heavy cruisers.
On my first attempt, I paired this up with a swarm of Atlantis Bombers, each armed with two torps and some armour. Their low speed made their high hitpoints worthless, and only one ever made it back to the carrier.
Second go around, I went for strength and speed, at the cost of firepower. Just a single laser on the heavyweight Atlantis hull, but two pieces of armour, and cautious orders set to just 1% - if you get hit, run away. This went a lot better.
I was a bit surprised when none of them retreated on engaging the enemy fighter swarm… Turned out the two pieces of armour were enough to reflect fighter laser fire… Things got more interesting when they moved on to the enemy fleet though, after slaughtering 12 squadrons of faster fighters unscathed, with a steady stream of fighters disengaging from the assault on the cruisers. With the 11 bays, they didn’t bottleneck at the carrier, getting straight back into the fray (about 6 probably would’ve been enough, in this battle.) Still, by the end of the battle I’d lost over 50% of the fighters, thanks to the enemy tractor beams… If a ship got caught in a tractor beam, then usually it was killed immediately, despite the massive armour and HP. Anti-fighter missile frigates had a similar effect - if 5 or 6 missiles are going for one fighter, if it gets hit by the first, it’ll die.
A cute side effect of having the fighter bays, was that at the end of the battle, instead of retreating to the swarm at the edge of the map, all the surviving fighters docked with the carrier.
Seems reasonably balanced at the moment. I’ll still probably go with unarmoured fighters most of the time - they’re so much cheaper. Time to have a play and see how many of these make it back for repairs in a similar battle.
EDIT: hrm, it appears that the fighters don’t consider damage to their armour when deciding when to return for repairs - only to other components. This is quite a big flaw, IMO, as I’d usually want fighters to go back to repair armour straight away, rather than waiting for their engines to get damaged. After all, the armour is one of the things getting repaired.
EDIT3: Oooh. Destroyed armour modules don’t get repaired. Could’ve sworn I read earlier that destroyed fighter armour modules were going to get repairs. Hrm. this strikes me as yet another disincentive against using fighter armour. Why would I mount armour that will never get repaired, that slows me down, when other module types will get repaired. Now it seems a better way to increase survivability is to add additional engines, even though their inefficiency means you might actually move a tiny bit slower. Why? Mainly for the extra repairable HP, but also to decrease the chance of being brought down to a crawl by engine damage. I think you should let destroyed fighter armour modules be repaired in the carrier - after all, it’s pretty much just a question of bolting new ones on, far easier than replacing an engine, for example.
EDIT2: A nice squishy BUG! Aha! If you set ships to retreat at ‘0%’ damage, the leftmost point on the slider, they in fact never retreat - as if the order wasn’t set at all. Can I suggest either making them retreat as soon as they take damage, or just not letting the slider go past ‘1%’. It’s fiddly having to find 1% on the slider for ships that I want to immediately seek repairs for any damage, since the minimum doesn’t have the desired effect.
Aha interesting. I agree about the armor damage. However, I’m not sure I’d want to change that for all ships. I guess taking hits on the armor is just part of the job, and wouldn’t be considered real damage anyway. The plan with fighters is that a single hit probably toasts your armor, but at least prevented it doing enough internal damage to fry the pilot.
I’ll get that cautious order fixed thoguh
Yeah. I guess the difference is, replacing the armour on a fighter is just a case of pulling off a few panels and bolting on / welding on new ones. No problem. Not so easy to do to a frigate, without a huge great big dock to put it in, and massive supplies of metal. Plus there’s a compelling gameplay reason to let fighters repair armour 
You might want to differentiate the two docks a bit more. As it stands, I can’t really see any good reason not to use the reinforced one. Maybe make the weights significantly different (i.e. make the reinforced dock HEAVY. Like, mass 300 or something. So you’d have to use the smaller dock if you wanted to be mobile.)
I’d like to add my support to restricting fighters to fleets with a carrier module. It makes the game more realistic and adds a new consideration for ship balancing.
At first I thought this sounded nice. And it’s not hard - after all, my cruiser with 11 bays was only 3k points, and 11 bays should be enough for any map…
But then I thought ‘what about the fun map where you aren’t allowed cruisers, then it’d just be frigates’
After playing with the carrier module a little I have a few comments.
Multiple modules do not seem to do much at all. They do not speed up repairs of the craft.
Fighter Armour doesn’t appear to be repaired, as it is still red, after repairs.
If the carrier is destroyed all fighters then retreat to the edge of the screen to be eaten alive by anything as they don’t fight back.
So we need a new dedicated order for carriers and fighters.
No mater what I do with orders my carrier ships will attempt to go into battle. An order to make it be central to fighters would be nice (without ripping out engines)
I like that at the end of the battle the fighters dock with the carrier, that is pretty neat, although, they all pick the nearest one.
I would like to see more differences between the two carrier modules.
Those are my first thoughts on the new modules. Overall, I think they will be a great addition to the game.
TFM
It appears to me, that multiple modules let the ship repair several craft at the same time. It also means you have a larger overall stock of repair supplies. In a long battle with 17 fighter squadrons, my carrier with 11 bays managed to make some use of all 11, with the first 4 bays completely running out of stock (so I had at least 7 fighters repairing at the same time, and in total I guess I used the stocks of about 8 bays. 11 bays seems to be overkill, but only just, on a fighter heavy deployment.)
Think of it as several different places on the ship that a fighter can dock for repairs, rather than one huge one. You can only get one team working on any one fighter… But multiple teams can work at the same time - on multiple fighters.
Yep, currently destroyed armour modules cannot be repaired. From cliffski’s responses to mine above, I think he’s going to change this repair behavior, for fighter armour only.
Yeah, a cautious order that was dependent on a carrier actually existing, would be nice, so they don’t flee for repairs to a non-existent carrier.
You can fudge this (avoiding battle.) Set their ‘max range’ to 2000. This will stop them approaching within 2000 units of the enemy, and they’ll move away if the enemy close to 1000. Also make them cautious at 1%, so as soon as they take some damage, they will retreat back to the map edge. This actually makes having nice engines beneficial, as your ship will manage to turn around and move away before the enemy plasma / beams get in range (so you’ll only die if they have plenty of missiles, or if they manage to chase you all the way to the map edge.)
Cliffski, perhaps this slider could go to 2500? Then we could have ships that would truely try to stay out of range, since they’d turn about at 1250. Of course, it’d be even better if you let us decide the minimum range directly, instead of it being tied to 50% of maximum range
Simple, make it scenario specific. Any maps that don’t allow cruisers will allow cruiser-less fighters.
Or make it scenario specific so only specific maps require carriers. Say something like, oh, I dunno, fighters can’t enter a stable orbit around the multari gas giant unassisted due to their engines being too small.
Further to my last feedback,
I would like a counter on the Carriers picture during the battle, and I mean the status screen when you click on the ship that has a picture of a fighter and the number currently in the carrier waiting repairs.
Regarding the armour being fixed, how about double repair time for armour? So if you want to use armour you pay for it with waiting for the ship to be repaired.
And I would love to have the fighters “loaded” on the carrier at game start. That would be very neat. Since they would warp in and then unload.