Personally I like SC.

Is it very spammable?  Yes

But logically this is a very difficult thing to avoid. This is true even in real life. If something works better than something else in battle, spam the hell out of it to win. Admittedly the other side will strive to counter this move, but we need to learn to do this in game as well. There never will be a perfectly balance game (at least I have not found one yet). And when you consider what SC is used for it makes sense anyway.

It's a very legitimate tactic. Air power is one of the main focuses of the military because its strength outweighs the potential for loss. And yes, we 'spam' our enemies. Not that it is foolproof. Israel sought to use superior air power over its enemies in the Yom Kippur War, only to discover they had deployed SAM batteries bought from Russia.

I personally like a strengthened air power. I don't care for the approach of the Mad Scientist mod which makes it dominant, but I enjoyed it in Death from Above and the current Distant Stars mod. I counter it offensively with fleet fighters and defensively with hangar bay flak/fighters.

From what I have seen, the "cruiser carriers" are like the "Jeep carriers" of WWII.  Smaller and carry two (Or three in advent?) squadrons.

The cap carriers are more like the early WWII carriers, just converted battlewagons with a couple squadrons added in.  Although here they retained more of their battlewagon firepower.

If you add too many squadrons, they will drastically unbalence play.  To make them a "traditional" carrier, you could increase the squadrons to say start at 4 and upgrade to 6 tops, then change the weaponry to defensive flack and light frigate sized weapons.

In terms of American WWII carriers it would basically reduce the weaponary to the quad 40mm's and the 5" deck guns.

Yeah, I think that carrier caps should have pretty weak weapons, patricularly compared to ther cap ships.  They should be like modern Aircraft carriers; serving no real purpose but to launch and maintain SC.  Any weapon damage should be incidental. 

I agree that carrier caps should carry more squads, possibly 10-15 rather than the two that they do now.  It seems pointless to spend the money on a capitol ship that carries the same number of squads as a light carrier.  The abilities are nice in the early game, but aren't really worth it in the late game, at least for the TEC carrier cap.

ROFL     An excelent point.

Yes, there also needs to be a balance between what the cap carrier carries and what an SB carries.

If we stay with the naval example from above, a full CV carried 70-90 aircraft, while a "Jeep carrier" carried 24.

In keeping with that we could use 6-9 squads for a CAP carrier.  SB's would still be able to provide more SC than a CAP carrier.  Increasing the number of SC carried would also need to be offset by reducing the offensive firepower turning and putting into a more traditional role of a carrier as a supporting ship rather than a "Line" ship. (Yes I know carriers are the "Flagship" but they are not 'Line ships' firing their main weapons at enemy cruisers.)

Well, I wish someone would upgrade Death from Above for Entrenchment. That increased the SC of carriers and bays by two fold. Mad Scientist does this too, but with some upgrades necessary and more options as far as fighter types. As for the vanilla game, they looked to the mods for inspiration with graphic updates, why not play with the mods and take ideas from there?

I believe that to ballance capship carrier with more squadrons, they need to be slower and weaker than every other capship so using them as their front line vessels would be suicidal. I also think capship base stats should reflect their purpose more (armor, hull, speed, shield strenght, shield charge and hull repair). They currently have some difference but they are very slight, it's mainly their abilities that differenciate them the most.

A tactic that I have been useing (with tec) with fairly high success: In my fleets I usealy build my strike craft with a 2 fighter to 1 bomber ratio.  More fighers to combat enemy fighers and the fact that they are harder to kill than bombers.  This ensures that I will have some full squadrons thoughtout the battle.  I will then group my bombers together and have them attack the same target at the same time for effectivness (usaly eneamy long range ships), let the fighers do their thing according to the AI (they target bombers first then light ships).  All the wile grouping my long range ships as a group, (with some anti-fighter ships too) then the rest of my fleet as the main group with the rest of the support ships to increse thier abbilitys and surviveablity.  I keep my long range ships out of the engagment range of the enemy's main battle formation and attacking the hard targets (caps, starbases and other orbital defences). My main group is  slugging it out with the enemy main battle formation (taking out any starbases first with my longrange ships, using the main fleet as a shield aginst other ships).   Mid to late game I would have around 30 figher squads and 15 bomber squads, and 15 squads of bomers together will take out any longrange ship in mere seconds.  My carrier caps produce all bomers because of the (tec) abbility of heavy strike craft, increseing the thier surrviviblilty behind the enemy formations.

In my system defence, I go with a 1 to 1 ratio because with the flak wepons on hangers (entrenchment only) and the gauss weapons produce a good ratio of offencive and defencive power (depending on your setup). 

Works for me anyways.

I think that cap carriers should start with 4 squads, then max out at 9 at level 10 (+1 squad every 2 levels) I also think that carriers should have very little offinsive firepower aginst most other ships, but be very effective aginst strike craft with much longer flak range than any other ship (better than it allready is).  With Tec, take the flak abililty from the kol, give it to the carrier, and give the kol a diffrent battleshipy abililty. I'm thinking a consintrated firepower ability ("Consentrate forword fire power on that target.. CONSENTRATE FORWAR......")

hey, these are great debates, in which players get to though in all there 2 cents (and hopfully geting a few bucks worth out of it) were the devs get to see what the players are saying and hopfully come up with a good compermise to add to new updates and expanstions.  keep it up bro.

Thanks guys.  I'm new to the whole forum thing, but I think it's great that the community has a voice in the game.  Especially a great game like Sins.