(Lack of Proper) Carrier Warfare In 4x Games and Sci-Fi In General

[jayman]

I've been watching some documentaries lately about carrier warfare in WW2, and it reminded me that of the 4x space games I've played (MOO 2 & 3, DW, GC 2&3) - and in most sci-fi in fact - they just don't get carrier warfare right at all. In WW2 some fleets didn't even meet and the whole battle was carried out by aircraft, and capital ships like the Bismark or the Yamato were sitting ducks for aircraft.

When we get to sci-fi, like Battlestar Galactica and the two Stargate series SG-1 and Atlantis, they do have fighter battles in them but they're just attrition units mainly as the story is mainly geared for fleets of capital ships blasting away at each other. Star Wars at least tries to have some use for fighters, like the Deathstar-killing stuff (both of them) and the A-wing taking down a Star Destroyer in Return of the Jedi, but they were special events for the drama and heroics. Mainly fighters just get swatted. What fighters and bombers in sci-fi are seemingly used for is to attack planets before the troops go in, and even then it's inconsistent and most show the big ships blasting away from orbit or using huge weapons to take out cities, like in Independence Day.

Exciting, yes, but realistic? Space is a big place and I doubt huge fleets of capital ships would even get within human sight range of each other, although telescopes and radar would let them see each other of course! They certainly wouldn't get close enough to risk damage from the enemy exploding as I've seen in some Atlantis episodes. Then there's the logistics of even building a craft to get to the moon that we have in the real world, let alone three or more large starships in less than eight years from a standing start like in SG1! Of course they did have alien help! Many smaller ships, 'fighters' if you like, are easier to build and less of a hit economically if they get destroyed, which is why battleship-warfare on Earth stopped being a 'thing' in the first place. Gone are the days of the Battle of Trafalgar, or even Jutland in WW1, where battleships blasted away at each other from relatively close range.

When it comes to 4x games we never even seem to see the fighter strikes on planets, just the big guns. Of course it's probably the limitations of the engines (and hardware) that can't deal with massive fleets of small ships all over the place, as well as software engineers (and sci-fi writers) never actually having any experience of how carriers are used in the real world.

On a personal level I've never used carriers in 4x games, even if they are available. because with the limitations forced on you by game-designers it's much better to have a battleship or five take out the enemy fleet anyway.

Does anyone have a use for fighters in DW? Are they any good for defending planets or something like that for example? I'm considering using fighters based on spaceports in my next playthrough just to test it out.