Well...  While fleets of carriers only deal massive damage, I took a fleet of 40 transporters and devastated a series of planets.  My opponent was apparently waiting for me to get to his homeworld...  When I got there, I met two hundred flaks and three kols with flak burst...

As for the part about the bombers... perhaps instead of launching a squad, you could launch one "super fighter" sort of like Vader's ship.  It is still a fighter but unlike the others can go to hyperspace (but there is only one).  The same could apply here.  Those ships could have phase drives...

i absolutely agree. another thing could be to give SC an ammo/fuel rating and once on or the other is depleted the SC has to return for refueling etc. Also, giving them a maximum range could prevent kiting etc. i mean, if a carrier jumped in at one side of a GW and deployed its SC to the other side of the GW for a prolonged battle, how would the SC return? they would all run out of fuel...

anyway, no offense to the OP but i cant say as i like those ideas. it makes sense, sure, but... besides, we dont know exactly what kind of weapons these ships carries. agreed, fighters should be useless vs frigates and larger, but bombers could be carrying anything from high explosive warheads, to nukes, to thermo-plasmic charges, to EMP's, to anti-matter bombs, or some sort of alien technology we cant imagine.

back to gameplay... good luck jumping in a fleet of slow carriers with escorts through a fortified system and then getting it to a 'trade nexus' if one even exists in that map, then destroying stuff willy nilly. all it takes is a moderately upgraded Starbase in every UCGW to at least give notice/keep you tied up until a fleet comes to mop you up.

im having this debate in another thread, TEC Sova Carrier Embargo ability is impossible to use at its full potential unless you can leave it in an enemy GW alsmot indefinitly, or unless you are in a battle.

really, the only thing i can think of to fend off SC swarms is to have Triple-A on everything imaginable, on flak frigs, on caps, on carriers, on destroyers (if i can manage to get the devs to implement it) on structures, assault cruisers and seige frigates, etc. another thing would be to let SC be destroyed by catching an unlucky laser or slug or maybe even crashing into a ship? it would be difficult to code but it would certainly discourage SC swarming

That's true I guess, but I'm going with what is seen in-game, not conjecture. In game, the explosions caused by bombers bombing/orb hitting/beaming is minute. Even combined, they're tiny little specks on the shields. Obviously not the raw atomic power of a nuke, or the cataclysmic and hard to miss anitmatter/matter reaction.

Did you catch the idea about phase space capable bombers? Those might be able to do it.

You're all forgetting that most of the weapons in-game would use antimatter as the source of their destructive force, thus all the weapons in game have the most energetic natural reaction known to give themt he power they need. Look at the basic TEC Javelin missiles: If they impact a shield the matter of the rocket itself provides the reaction, and if it strikes hull there is more than enough matter to keep a continued explosive reaction going. (Before anyone raises the argument, localised shielding should theoretically able to limit the damage to a specific area, so the damage would be capped). Then there are the antimatter powered laser beams and missiles that fly through another dimension to contend with...

The only things I can see not really making a difference would be autocannons, but I'm sure everyone knows that MORE DAKKA simply overwhelms reality to the point where they do awesome damage no matter what!

um... no? honestly, abilities use anti-matter primarily as a lore-friendly way of explaining why you cant fire your Gauss round, or use seige planet, or phase missile swarm whatever every 10 seconds, as well as creating a way to prevent ships using abilities or enabling them to use abilities for longer (i.e. AM stealing abilities, Magnetic Clouds and Suns/AM improving/increasing abilities respectively)

i mean, lets say you have a fleet in a magnetic cloud UNGW, each ship can still fire its standard weapons, but all abilities are disabled. this means that anti-matter is not used in any weapons in the game. it may be used to power the ship and engines, and, ultimately, may be the thing provides the power for the auto-cannons and lasers and missile loading systems etc, but that does not tranlate into increased firepower. its like a nuclear powered ship or submarine is no more powerful than one that is run on diesel fuel and electric batteries... (except the nuclear powered ship/sub can do a kamikaze run but...)

also, even if it was used, the only weapons that would be improved by utilising an anti-matter reaction would be missiles (i.e. just like a nuclear explosion, plus propagation effects). lasers MIGHT get a higher damage output, but i dont believe a matter/anti-matter reaction can generate a laser itself, so the power it does create still has to be channeled through a laser capacitor and so on and so forth. and im sure beam weapons, autocannons, plasma cannons, wave cannons, etc etc wont be affected by utilising an anti-matter reaction because it simply doesnt apply.

im not sure if you know how a nuclear reactor works, so if you dont, ill go through it briefly:
a nuclear reactor uses a controlled nuclear reaction to create heat (so, you fire a particle at an atom, that atom shatters and fires more particles at other atoms, creating a chain-reaction. this is controlled using a dense metal like lead so that the reaction stays within manageble levels). that heat is used to heat water until it becomes steam, which then runs through a pipe at high speeds (due to pressure) and turns a turbine (like a big windmill) which is what actually generates the electricity. the steam then runs through more pipes, eventually cooling back to water, cooling the entire system, before going back to the reactor to be heated up again and thats a nuclear reaction. it also happens to work exactly the same as a coal-burning, fuel-burning and gas-burning electricity generator, except the potential for power generation is much greater.

so, point is, a matter/anti-matter reaction is very similar, the matter comes into contact with the anti-matter, they cancel each other out and create massive amounts of energy, most commonly heat, light and radiation, follwed by some less common/useful types. so, the fact of the matter is that an anti-matter reaction has nothing to do with how much damage a laser does, aside from the amount of power there is available to channel into the weapon. just powering a laser with M/AM generated electircity does not give it the characteristics of the method in which it was generated...

the only thing i can think of is if you could create and channel anti-matter particles into a beam and fire them at a target, creating a M/AM reaction between the weapon and the target hull... however, assuming sheilds in Sins use super charged ions and protons or something similar to create the shield, i cant say how effective this weapon would be against shields... possibly entirely ineffective...

so, long story short... the only existing weapons that would be benefitted by using a M/AM reaction would be missiles, and possibly a new anti-matter beam weapon, though its effectiveness versus shields is suspect... everything else is simply inapplicable

Speaking for Entrenchment:

carriers are pretty meh. Try spamming then in mp agaisnt a skilled opponent and see what happens.