But Bombers are a component of Carriers. You can't build a fleet of bombers, you have to build Carriers, and when it comes to carriers, (again cost aside) Advent owns.

Don't forget, weaker heavy cruisers. More time intesive support cruisers. No structure killer cruiser.

I'd rather have Vasari scouts with both

While you can argue their fighters are somewhat better, Advent carriers in general offer about the same value as everyone else.  I don't know why people insist that Advent carriers are better, for every advantage they have there is a clear disadvantage.  However, Vasari with phase missiles are absolutely amazing and totally outclass other strike craft when attacking targets that have shield mitigation.  Yes, that means their fighters are weak at taking down bombers (a point I'm going to discuss shortly...) because they don't get damage bonus from upgrades until very late in the game, but against everything else they positively rock.

Now, just as I say Vasari bombers are awesome, I also have to add that they suck at countering bomber spam.  I was up against a TEC player the other day and he was spamming nothing but carriers and flaks at me (mostly bomber).  License to make light frigates, right?  Oh sure, I didn't have quite so many out on the field yet, but the fact was that he could raid me, destroy a structure, and get out without losing a single carrier.  It got so bad that I needed to bring out a Kortul with jam weapons to protect my skirmishers while they tried to counter the carriers because the bombers were killing skirmishers faster than the skirmishers could kill carriers.  Yeah, they're that bad

Oh, and the reintegration autocast AI is still a joke.  Had to manually activate it because the automatic activation happened way too late (like a split second before they died).  Once I started microing reintegration manually they did alright, but I was fighting battles in up to 3 gravity wells simultaneously, so often times I had no choice but to let it go.  Waste of a research...

When they doubled the number of carrier squadrons, why weren't light frigates boosted to compensate?  If you have more squadrons per cap you would need more light frigates per cap?  Same with hangars, the effectiveness was halved.  Hangars had more squadrons, suddenly they were equal without any cost compensation.  Turrets were also affected, having twice as many strikecraft in the gravwell reduced their effectiveness and there was no cost reduction to compensate.

I've bumped the v1.1 changelog for comparison purposes.  The only change I found in between was when carriers were slowed to prevent kiting- which also marginalised light frigates. 

In spite of all this, in the online multiplayer game, there are a number of pro players who still play Vasari almost exclusively, so Vasari can't be all bad.

I'm obviously somewhat new at this, and it's not meant to be a whine thread, but let's look at it from a logical perspective:

Light Frigs counter - Flak Frigs, Siege Frigs, Carrier Cruiser, Support Cruisers, and Disable/Repair Cruisers.  You just countered 5 different ships by building the most basic ship in the game, which everyone has access too naturally.

Long-Range Frigs counter - Light Frigs.  1 thing.  Are you kidding me?  Even if Vasari's LRF's were superior early game, which we know that they're not, it still wouldn't make up for this huge deficit in role that they have compared to Light Frigs.  Granted, for Vasari they can be made a lot more effective than a typical LRF because of the phase upgrades, aoe upgrades, and synergy with Subverters, but early game this hardly matters, as most of this stuff is a mid-late game advantage.  Even if you mass LRFs early game (which is pretty much your only option with Vasari besides SB rush), an opponent, especially Advent, can simply counter you with mass scouts and shut you down.  Since their LFs are also so good, pretty much whatever you build can then be countered, especially since LF's naturally counter so many things.

This is just one example, but TEC can do it as well, maybe just not as effectively.

A lot of people have been bringing up:  "But many pro players use Vasari, so they must be good."  Just because pro players use a race, does not make it balanced, and using that as an example is a logical fallacy.  Pro players may use Vasari for several reasons.  One, they are a challenge, because they have a disadvantage over other races early on.  Two, they are the most fun to play (in my opinion), and have great early resource bonuses that only TEC can try to match (in their research tree and with their Scouts).  Thirdly, late game in the hands of a skilled player they can easily become the best, if for no other reason than upgraded LRF with Subverter spam, or even just bomber spam and of course Phase Stabilizers.

As absurd as this all may sound, I bring it up because of another RTS game I used to play when I was younger called Total Annihilation.  There were 2 races, and one race, Arm, was superior in every way early game (and for the most part late game) over the other race, Core.  However, pro players would always use Core because it made them feel better when they won.

Back on topic, the point is:  Light Frigates are, in my opinion, the best, cheapest, and most versatile unit in the game, which can be built from square one.  Giving one race a huge disadvantage in this aspect is only asking for trouble as far as balanced is concerned, and therefore it should not surprise you that I've switched races from Vasari to Advent, because their Light Frigates are so much better.

Neutrals, it's all about neutrals.

I'm well aware of Vasari being the "fight dirty" faction, but this doesn't change the fact that skirmishers still need to fulfill their role, and they don't do that job well enough as is.

First of all, siege frigates aren't countered by light frigates (though in practice they're so fragile that anything that has a gun can easily kill them).  Secondly, disable/repair cruisers are typically just placed in the same category as support cruisers for this purpose.

Also capital ships.  Does it need to be said that this is a huge deal?

The reason I said Light Frigs counter Siege Frigs is because the in-game description says they do, sorry for that mistake.  As far as their power against the 3 cruiser types, this information (on the link) says that they deal 150% to all 3 types.  That may have changed, sorry if my information is incorrect.

I don't know why this hasn't been corrected.  The actual "counter" is scouts and fighters, but in practice siege frigates are very fragile and anything in reasonable numbers will clean them up very quickly.

Another pitfall to watch out for is paying too much attention to modifiers and not enough to base stats.  While LF do have better overall modifiers, their base stats are inferior to LRF.  Here's a breakdown of how Skirmishers, Assailants, and LRM (another faction for comparison) break down on a per-command basis:

• DPS:  skirmisher=1.5 ; Assailant=2.1 ; LRM=2.75
• Hull:  skirmisher=105 ; Assailant=100 ; LRM=120
• Shield: skirmisher=66 ; Assailant=60 ; LRM=70

As we can see, the assailant offers superbly better damage for the price you pay then the skirmisher does.  In fact, even with a 150% damage multiplier the skirmisher is still only dealing 2.25 dps per command, marginally better than the assailant with a base of 2.1!  That's a pretty weak counter, when even with a significant damage bonus another unit type is close to matching your performance.  Then if we look at the LRM, it simply blows both of the other two out of the water, which is what the "Vasari are fighting an uphill battle" folks are talking about.

So yes, in terms of their damage multipliers LF seem great on paper.  However, their base stats are so flimsy that they perform relatively poorly.

On that topic, do you have any advice on killing capital ships early?  It seems like early game you just don't have the DPS, even with LRFs, to get them low enough before they escape, usually just wasting a bunch of time attacking them that you could have been focusing the smaller ships.

What makes light frigates outclassed is the cap though, not necessarily the unit.  Most light frigates though lower tec take up more cap than LRF.  If they took up slightly less cap than currently the figures would be more balanced.  A slight boost to the skirmishers dps would not balance the unit, except against other light frigates. 

When the carriers were boosted in v1.1 they got more strikecraft per cap.  Light frigates, though they had no need to be nerfed as they were hardly outstanding, were not compensated- so with Darvin's skirmisher versus carrier example the skirmishers became worse off after v1.1.  If the supply were decreased a point for each light frigate that might work as belated compensation, though as Darvin pointed out earlier the reintegration autocast needs fixing as well.

A one point decrease in supply for light frigates will not create a new OP unit.  Nor will a slight increase in skirmisher weapon DPS.  A substantial decrease in turret costs could offset any early rush problems, turrets and hangars are even more of a scam than any ship.  If you can take a planet before the owner can scrap its useless turret defences perhaps you should get the scrap value...?

Has anyone got the figures for the v1.1 boost to carrier strikecraft by cap?