30 squads of fighters can rip apart a LRM line, and 30 bombers can chew through a Cap or starbase without too much trouble. When you're facing over 30 carriers, you'll see why they are so controversal (play on hard and you might see it with the AI as well). And really the carriers are hard to kill and they will always run around or hug support ships, so destroying them is actually a time consuming task even when all the strike craft are destroyed.

One thing to remember from a singleplayer perspective is that the AI will build hordes and hordes of light frigates ("LF").  This is a ludicrously bad strategy in most situations, but it just so happens to be a counter to carriers.  Because of this, carriers come across as mediocre in singleplayer, but this is more to do with the fact that the AI masses the counter to carriers for the first hour or so of the game than the strength of the unit.

Typical early game strategy for Vasari and TEC is to unlock the long range frigate ("LRF") as soon as possible.  These units decimate light frigates and serve as your best defense against an enemy rush and support for your capital ships.  However, carriers turn LRF into space junk with relatively little effort.  If a large number of carriers are built, their strike craft can converge upon your army and literally rip it apart before you even get to fire a shot.

The hardest part about killing carriers is that they have massive amounts of hit points and can just run laps around a planet while your forces chase after them.  Unless you have a faster unit to chase them down (it's called the light frigate ) it can be nearly impossible to kill them, leaving you to fight off endlessly respawning waves of fighters.  In addition, these fighters can chase down any other unit and swarm them in a way that frigates can't, making capital ships and other important vessels highly vulnerable.  These are quick and deadly maneuvers that no other unit can pull off.

The argument over strike craft balance is less about balance than game design.  In their current status, strike craft and carriers are the workhorses of your fleet.  Carriers are tough, have lots of hit points, and provide reliable and mobile damage dealers that simply cannot be compared to frigates.  It's not hard to see why people take exception to this one unit ruling the show.  However, that's more of a game design criticism.  The other side is that carriers can be beaten.  As the AI (which gets a bad rap for being incompetent) can demonstrate, massed light frigates will take them down.  Flak frigates in significant force work too.  They're not easy to beat, and they're going to be a core part of any fleet, but they aren't unstoppable.

Some people do.  You can't get away with it against an opponent who knows better, but some people just can't bring themselves to sacrifice their fleet's overall damage output to include enough flak or light frigate.

If you reach a certain critical mass of carriers, virtually anything starts to die.  So long as you don't run head-first into a Kol, Kortul, Dunov, or Halcyon which have special abilities to deal with huge numbers of strike craft, this "critical mass" fleet is virtually unstoppable.  A good player will have lots of those special abilities if he sees you doing this, but the AI selects its capital ships randomly.  I think you need at least 100 squads of strike craft to reach that critical mass, so that's about 50 carriers (33 for Advent).

Carriers are a mager part of your fleet. If you charged me with all the capital ships that you could get and all I had were 25 carriers and like 10-15 light cobalts or something like that I'd be able to knock all of your guys out. Trust me I know. I'm one of those people who love building something that can shoot far off. Here I'll give you a story: Tragic, Adventure, and Betrayal. During the summer in D.C. I built a map that had lots of planets on it I was also the one that built the pirate map but, thats another story. We split into teams. I had a newbie and this other guy I did not know had my good old friend. As the game progressed I built up my defenses on this one planet because that was the only one they could get to so that they could get to my capital and it had in artifact. But my main defense was carriers. I built aproximately 20-30 carriers and I think 4 capital ships 30 cobalts and like 10 of those missle things I just started building the heavy cruisers. But as I was doing this my good old friend decided to check out the planet wit a preatty good force. As soo as he got there the map turned blue completely of my guys (all aircraft). He left right away losing a capital ship and alot of lighter craft and a little carriers. 10 mins later him and his partner come back for seconds. That battle never stopped. And the only way I kept them at bay was keeping my carriers alive by moving them away from the battle and they new it so they followed them without luck. After about half an hour to an hour of fighting we called a truce but, they didn't know I was giving my true ally supplies and eventually I pressed enter on the wrong time and they found out so I had to send my carriers to kill my partner which sucked by the way. But heres the whole point of the story even though the carriers have no special ability or wut not they still pack a punch and yes everyone thats played multiplayer has experienced that. So try playing multiplayer and you'll see to but, you won't be seeing me for a while. OUT!!!!!

I haven't played much in 1.15, and don't yet own Entrenchment, but so far I haven't seen much difference in the AI unit choice behavior.  Still spams LF and can be easily countered by directly teching to LRF.  Maybe it's switching over to other types sooner, but I'm still able to fit in a LRF rush and slaughter it right away.  Point being that you can't jump straight to carriers because the AI will be assured to have a considerable LF presence at the start of the game.

I'm not talking just overwhelming, I'm talking critical mass where once they jump into the gravity well it's already too late to save your fleet.  The kind of critical mass where your capital ship dies in two or three strafes.  This is a critical mass level where you could be massing flak frigates and still not be able to save a capital ship from going down.

As far as capital ships go, do not ignore them.  They're a critical part of your fleet, offering versatility and special abilities well worth your time.  For TEC, the only definitively wrong starting capital ship is the Dunov; it's a support ship for later on.  Kol offers best survivability and is very useful against strike craft later on.  The Sova is a risky capital ship, and the only way to make it worthwhile as your first pick is to use embargo then immediately rush to the enemy's homeworld to steal its income, otherwise it's just too weak and flimsy.  The Akkan is the weakest colony capital ship by far, but still not a bad choice just by virtue of being a colony cap.  The Marza is your strongest combat capital ship, offering you strong military presence early game when you need it most.

Later on, you'll want to use a pair of Dunovs (so they can shield restore each other), Kols for flak barrage (kills strike craft like no other), and then some Marza, Sova, and Akkan as necessary.  Remember, capital ships are about their special abilities.  If you don't want/need the special abilities, get cruisers and frigates instead.

Only thing I would want is either cheaper or faster firing flak frigates.

I played a test game with a friend today to see how carriers do in mid-sized battles. We both played TEC, both maxed out technology, and both made a fleet to throw at each other. He ended up with around 700ish logistic/fleet points. I managed to squeeze out 850ish in the same time. Going off what I can recall:

 Him

45 Light Carriers, all Bombers

10 Hoshiko Robotics Cruisers

20 Javelis LRM Frigates

Akkan Battlecruiser (lvl 10)

Dunov Battlecruiser (lvl 10)

Me

15 Light Carriers, all Fighters

30 Flak Frigates

20 Hoshiko Robitics Cruisers

8 Cielo Command Cruisers

18 Kodiak Heavy Cruisers

35 Javelis LRM Frigates

15 Light Frigates

1 Dunov Battlecruiser (lvl 10)

2 Kol Battleship (lvl 10, 8)

 We started on opposite sides of a star (which, in hindsight, was a huge advantage for him). My plan was to keep everything tight so that my flak and repair ships would minimize damage while I closed in. Before I got half-way to him both Kol’s were down. The Dunov also went down before I got to him. I had yet to cause any harm to him and all three of my capitals were toast.

 It then boiled down to a game of attrition. He got free replacements. Mine went down permanently. My fighters and flak could not kill his bombers faster than he could replace them.

 I managed to kill both his capitals, eight of his repair ships, most of his LRM (not sure what ate them), and about six carriers. He took out everything I had. Sure, if I ignored his capitals I could have dropped a few more carriers, but there’s really no difference between 30 or 40.

I'll look over the "anti-carrier" tactic again. However, I don't see why anyone would think a game mechanic is balanced when the offense is incredibly simple to do but its counter is dramatically more difficult to pull off. Build carriers vs. build a specific ratio of ships and micro manage them. Down with StarCraft carrier "balance" imo.

Huh!?  With its adaptive shield to protect itself, and flak barrage to kill off the bombers, you should have killed all the bombers before they even got through one Kol's shield.  The fighters should have also severely damaged several squads before they even got in range of your fleet.  Something sounds wrong here; fighters should murder bombers, even in a 3:1 ratio, and although flak isn't as effective against bombers as fighters are, it should have still contributed.  The big factor here is that you had two flak barrages (presumably both level 3) which when timed right would instantly kill all strike craft in their overlapping range.  If a huge swarm of bombers did a pass over your kols, you could kill them all instantly with this if you timed it right.

Although 45 carriers will replace units quickly, between flak barrage and 15 carriers full of fighters you should be able to suppress that down to a level where your fighters are killing each bomber the moment it spawns, giving you functional strike craft supremacy.

That's what Flak Barrage (the Kol's special ability) does to carriers in Sins, which is why I'm puzzled by the above case.  Much like in Starcraft, however, it doesn't make them useless, it just means you have to be careful when and how you use them, and what suport you bring in with them.

You may want to note that flak frigates tend to be more effective against fighters. Secondly a proper ratio of flaks to carriers would be at least 2+ flaks for every 1 carrier (it may seem like a lot, but the cost is still less than one carrier). I have no doubt that around 90 bombers went through your caps pretty quick, but you make it seem like you did little to stop them. I agree with Darvin in that even if you caps did go down, your opponent should have had a LOT less bombers afterwards. My guess though is that they downed one of your caps on the first pass. With all those bombers you should have built your fleet around the counters for them. Spending less on kodiaks which are weakest against bombers AND LRMs would have been a better idea. You could have beaten that fleet with about half the number of fighters as he had bombers.

So, had I been in your position, i would have built maybe 10 kodiaks and spent the money saved on a couple more carriers with fighter wings. Jump in your carriers and flaks first in a tight formation to draw fire from the bombers and thin them out a little, then jump in your caps in right on top of them. Your opponent would have set the bombers to attack the carriers first and you'll probably loose a few in the outset, but after their first attack pass those bombers would have scattered (which makes it harder to focus fire on say, your caps) making them a perfect target for a couple of flak busts coupled with the Dunov Flux Field. It would only take a couple of rapid lvl 3 flak bursts to bring down ALL or most of the bombers. At least it would knock them down to a more manageable level. After that have your fighters focus on the lrms that are approaching (40 or so fighters will shred 20 lrms), jump in your kodiaks, LFs and hoshikos to hunt down the carriers with the assistance of your flaks and you've won. The nice thing about adding those flaks is theyll attack multiple carriers doubling their production time, and make sure your LFs have sabotage reactor activated so they can sap the carriers AM. Sure it takes more micro then your opponent has to do, but just that little extra micro and strategy means your opponent is SCREWED, not just disadvantaged, SCREWED, so I think its worth it. With no bombers your opponent has no offense. No offense means you win.

a simple but important regarding destroying squadrons:

there are two ways it can happen. you can chip away at them and kill the strike craft off one at a time until the squadron is dead or you can blast the whole squadron at once with an anti-squadron AoE. 

Flak frigates shoot at one strike craft at a time. they kill fighters very quickly but fighter squadrons have alot of ships in them (4 for Vasari, 6 for TEC, 9 for Advent). what you'll notice with Flaks vs. Fighters is that the squadrons will gradually shrink and be doing less and less damage all the while. the damage rate against Fighter Squadrons is noticeably higher than the rebuild rate from the carriers so you'll be able to remove all the fighters even before the carriers are out of anti-matter. 

THIS IS NOT THE CASE WITH BOMBERS. Flaks do less damage to bombers (alot less actually, half as much) so i'm not even positive you can out-damage the rebuild rate. Flaks are a generally crappy counter to bomber squadrons. What you really need are fighter squadrons. 

Fighter Squadrons generally have the same effect on enemy squadrons as an AoE attack would. because the fighter squadron is firing multiple weapons into an enemy squadron at once it usually deals damage to every ship in the squadron. fighters tend not to chip away at the number of strike craft in a squad (which is what Flaks do), rather they tend to damage it on each pass and on the last pass they'll frag the whole squad. usually takes 3 or 4 passes to finish off a squadron. or rather, it takes 3 fighter squadrons 1 pass to insta-gib an enemy squadron. 

this is why Fighters are the best counter against enemy squadrons. they function like infinite range anti-squadron AoE attacks. Flaks are really for protecting your own frigates from fighter strafing runs. they just kinda cut back on the amount of damage you'll recieve from being strafed but they won't finish off the attackers. Fighters are what you need to establish squadron dominance in a grav well.