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Not sophisticated but it works. Designed a missile frigate with 8-10 torpedoes. Each torpedo has long range and moves quickly, for a torpedo. Put 10 of that design in an attacking fleet. Warped my fleet into firing range of the base but far enough away that beams and most torpedoes are out of range. My missile frigates had destroyed the base while my regular ships were engaging the enemy ships. Then the missile frigates wiped out the enemy ships. The fleet is also useful for warping in destroying a heavily defended base and then warping out. Then another fleet on route meant to engage the enemy ships shows up soon after. Missile frigates against fighters and bombers is never a good idea.

a classic Master of Orion tactic [8D]

why call them "missle frigates"??

apparently you put torpedoes on them! so call them Torp Frigates!!

Missles have farther range and would be better to destroy large bases if you are looking at "distance" as the factor.... but they would take a lot longer to destroy them YES I know... but they'd be out of harms way !

Fighters/Bombers

Yeah, just abuse strike craft. Standard templates barely have anything in the way of point-defence and even basic bombers have like 75% evasion.

With the "fighters" on the carriers carrierbays, do you use the missile fighters or torpedo bombers?

Torpedos.

Missile bombers do have about half the base dmg as the equivalent torp bomber, but retains the same -50% vs armour penalty as regular missiles do, use the same energy per shot and their 60-80% extra range is negligible against all those shortcomings.
Plus, I almost always tech down the beams+torps trees for weapons first, so the torp bomber tree is unlocked a lot earlier for me anyway.

First, get a ship armed with lots of missiles, set tactics to Stand-Off, as already described.

Second, design a ship with heavy shields and rail guns, set tactics to Point Blank and retreat to "Never."

The 2nd ship will tank & draw all aggro to itself while the missile ships do their thing. You may lose a couple of the "banzai" ships but you will get the base, every time.

Point of using rail guns is that they are shield piercing, and will start damaging the spaceport from the opening shot. Many times, in slow motion, you can watch that starport lose half it's guns and fighters before the shields even go down. That makes a considerable difference. Also, on AI ships set to retreat when taking armor damage, rail guns can trick them into fleeing from the first hit - especially in the early game when they don't even have armor to begin with.

Yes, fighters and bombers make the best long range method in the early game, but that's because point defense weapons haven't been developed by your enemies. In the late game you'll find carrier becoming less and less effective against foes that can easily fit enough PD guns to massacre whole fleets of fighters in seconds.