To Cykur, JohnJames

If you had responded in the thread, I would have noticed this sooner!

As you point out, it is because bombers get mauled by fighters.  Yes, it doesn't happen instantly, and you can do a little damage, but once your strikecraft are dead, you can't recover unless you pull your carriers out of the fight or dock the strikecraft.  If your enemy chooses to pursue you, you are in trouble, because the carriers need a minute or two of peace and quiet to rebuild.  I am pretty sure I did have some bombers in my line up toward the end, but they don't live long enough most of the time.  The one cool thing you can do with bombers is step in and kill a big ship or structure in one pass, then duck out again.

That is why the enemies were using fighters to support their starbases -- because the starbases are vulnerable to bombers.

If we had not already won the game, I would have switched to bombers if I couldn't beat the starbases with my convential forces after I had gotten rid of the enemy fighters.

Bombers also take longer to make and take up more antimatter

Well, thanks!  I learned something!

The next question I would ask is "If fighters trump bombers so much that bombers can't really be deployed in most situations, then you are left with a fleet of carriers + fighters which are weak against most units in the game.  In that case, why not just forgoe carriers altogether (since they would most likely have to field fighters) and instead move to something like enforcers/kodiacs/etc?"

In trying to think logically, the predicted answer is "Because if we moved to something like enforcers, then our opponent no longer has to field fighters on his carriers, because we don't have any fighters to oppose his fighters, so he will then field bombers and rape our enforcers/kodiacs/etc."  Is that correct?

Also, what would happen if you micro'd a TON of bombers to take out enemy carriers (transporters, etc)?  I've micro'd bombers to take out damn near anything in one pass, but I can't remember doing it to carriers.  Is this a viable tactic?  (I know it's a dumb question because you've already been there done that, and have the answer ready and waiting, but it's still a natural question to someone who doesn't know).

Just so you know, my skill level is WAAAY better than the poor guy to the south of JJ in that one game, and I'm guessing it's better than the TEC player to the upper left (unless the guy was doing a lot of stuff I didn't know about, like heavily feeding red to his right), but my skill is not quite up to red's at this juncture.  I'd wager that if he didn't turtle, he'd kick my ass.

Yes...it is pretty much like you say...if you don't make your own fighter carriers, the other guy WILL use bombers.  Bombers are pretty nasty if you don't counter them.  Also, fighter carriers prevent the other guy from using Long Range Frigs.

You can take out damn near anything in one pass with enough bombers, including carriers.  But if you have equal number of carriers, you will have to pull out fairly soon because your bombers will die quickly.  If he doesn't chase you, there is nothing to stop you from coming back every couple minutes and killing a few carriers this way.

He had a starbase fully upgraded. HP was almost 20K.  So we would lose lots of ships trying to take it out. Also he had repair bays.  Would likely lose most of our units just trying to take out the starbase while he would be free to attack us with his full fleet.

Also if he started using mines our entire fleet could have been destroyed with little effort.

Therefore carriers was the only solution and vas lack an anti starbase ship

As stated, you use fighters to kill other fighters, bombers are long range frigates. Once they are done with those, they can also kill other units/structures, just not as effectively as bombers due to the various armour type damage modifiers. But as JJ said, as long as you have enough to take the target down, even a little bit at a time, then you have a way of kililng something without your fleet taking damage. This is a big win as it means you are not buying new ships, and therefore are building your eco or doing research to increase ship effectiveness - e.g. upgrading phase missile tech, or shields/hull etc...

Good answers - thanks.