i will agree, fighter / bomber fighting does seem a bit unbalanced still...

I am positive this was fixed as of beta 4. As for the rest of it, we are still tuning bomber and flak frigate damage. One possibility is to give flak frigates an area of effect attack.

The fighter vs bomber issue was fixed to a point, but from what i have seen if a fighter is attacking something else. Like a ship, or structure when no bombers are present (at least until they respawn). They don't switch targeting back to the bombers until after what they targeted is destroyed. If bombers are present when fighters launch they do generally go after them 1st.

A group of 5, or 6 flak frigs in close formation (if you can call it a formation) will wipe even large numbers of bomber wings off the map. However the bombers do get that alpha strike off before they are vaporized. Ironically the bombers were targeting my flak frigates. After a few respawns i had no flaks left, and had to rely on my Kol's flak bursts, and Dunov's magnetize.

I actually played a game just recently - I decided that I would go 100% bombers and that's it. I focused on nothing bot Sova carriers and the research to get me more of them (cap ship upgrades, missile strength upgrades) and I threw in bomber hangars for defense and the occasional Carrier Corvette if I had a few spare bucks.

I was thoroughly tromping over all the enemy fleets for quite a while. Maybe 45 minutes of gameplay. I owned about 10 planets which was more than my fair share, but the AI started catching on.

Soon every fleet that warped into my worlds had a heavy compliment of fighter squadrons.

The battle that did me in? Two AI fleets attacked at the same time, with about 9 fighter squadrons and a few flak frigates. My 25 bomber squadrons all seemed destroyed within a few minutes and my sova carriers were left with their onboard guns to take out the onslaught of enemy ships.

They failed miserably.

Suddenly, within the space of about 5 minutes, I went from steamrolling the map to having not a single ship to my name. playing the bomber game seems cheap and easy but it is SO easy to take them out I was actually going to consider asking for an increase in bomber HP or something.

Tried using the empire tree instead?

Kryo the empire tree is nice, but it shouldnt be the only way to go about it, IMO fighters should be automatically dissabled from band-box selection (not bombers) as if you want to select all of your fighters, you just have to altclick them.