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Carriers seem SOOO much better than standard ships, even when you haven't gone deep into the fighter tree. Most weapons have a pretty short range, while the carriers can sit out of harms way and ALL their firepower in terms of the fighters concentrate on the target. The AI never seems to have anywhere near enough fighters. Maybe this is just because up till now I've only played on normal. Early game, before I have carriers I'll even make "Pocket" carriers out of a frigate with 1 missile since its required and one fighter bay.

So is this a general trend for the AI or just a difficulty setting issue? The only enemy carriers I've run into are scripted "dread" pirates, and story line.

I find the AI is pretty terrible at researching things so my guess would be any race that doesn't have fighters as tech focus just isn't going to go down that particular tree far enough for carriers.

There are a fair few things that simply are a bit OP against the AI. Carriers are one of them, but the thing about fighters is that they blow up if you destroy their fighter bay. What this means is that if enemy fighters are bothering you then you can ignore point defense entirely and just blow up whatever ship or station the fighters are coming form. It's an option for the player but the AI seems to have a hard time realising that the easy way to end the threat from X is by moving forward a bit and killing Y.