Unfortunately, the attack priority is given to those with the highest weapon to defense ratio [Off / (Def+HP)], so with your carrier group, they will always blow your fighters to smitherines first (because they have no defense and low HP). Then, if your carrier had no weapons, it's just a sitting duck waiting for death (even if it has insane defense lucky hits will still kill it).

Fleets of tiny hulls are best used around a military base.
Fleets of small hulls are best used around a military base.
Medium hulls are best used alone as defenders if you have a military base.

Fleets of large hulls are good battleship on their own.
Huge hulls are just bigger large hulls... nice, but not comepletely necessary.


As for a fleet's offense and defense, assuming you are not using military bases (and have the tech required), make multiple types of ships which focus on different weapons (IE: a fleet of 3 large ships should have one focusing on missile, one on beams, and one on guns). All three ships should focus into 1 defense type (the primary weapon that your enemy is using), and exactly 1 point of defense in the other two fields (so if your enemy is using lasers, make your ships have 5 shields, 1 PD, and 1 armor).

With the above fleet design, your enemy will never have a chance. They will literally never be able to adapt their defense to your weapon strategy, and even if they adapt their own weapons to your defense, and somehow managed to catch you off guard, they are still at a significant disadvantage.

But if you REALLY want an ultimate strategy, wait until you fight a few battle with this strategy. When you get one of your ships more damaged than the others, upgrade it to a design with a TON of defense, just make sure that its [off / (def + current HP)] is more than the next guy (which should be easy because in a few battles those ships will have leveled up some), and he will tank the enemy for the entire game. If you do this right, the game is just plain easy.

I tend to build fleets of a a handful of powerful cruisers(for invasions), a large number of well-rounded fighters(for interception), and a number of small scouts with good sensor capability(for recon and patrols). I've also had some good luck (and great fun) with very fast, long-ranged but lightly armed raiders, which I use to hunt down freighters and isolated starbases in the enemies rear areas.

you can defeat a fleet like that by never allowing it to be built.  i find that getting involved in some fights around lasersV/impluseIII goes a long way towards nerfing your enemies so you dont need massives fleets. also the fighters i build then usually have huge experience late game and are matches late game with an upgrade of at least a destroyer if in groups of 3-4. in larger groups they are just evil.

and speed is never worthless, its like a stategic force multiplyer

1. The speed of the fleet is the speed of the slowest ship; design your ships to go in fleets with a common speed as much as practical given changing technology.
2. Defenses on ships that do not get fired upon are not used; ships with high offense, low defense, and low hitpoints will get shot before ships with low offense, high defense, and high hitpoints. Defense is in no way shared among a fleet. Design your ships to go in fleets with similar offense/defense ratios.
3. One defense makes such a difference that in my opinion there's no reason to ever make a non-cargo hull ship without at least one point.
4. Because of the constraint imposed on fleet size by logistics, weapons are more relatively more effective on small ships and defense is relatively more effective on larger ships.
5. (2) and (4) taken together indicate that the most effective fleets are likely those built from ships with identical hull types, although I haven't thought this all the way out.

I just played a game recently (beta 3), trying out the strategy I outlined in my opening post. It worked alright (ie, no better than just making a bunch of independent ships), but I suffered from too much attrition damage, and when my fighters all died my carrier had nothing to fight back with and would slowly get wittled to death.

However, when I decided to switch it around, and load up my (1) huge ship with huge amounts of weaponry and have the rest of the fleet be mainly defensive fighters, it worked wonders.

I basically built 1 battle cruiser (large or huge ship, 1-2 engines, 1 support, 1-2 defensive items, the rest weaponry), and then every other ship in the fleet was a fighter (tiny ship, 1-2 engines, 1 support, 1 weapon, the rest a balance of defensive items).

The enemy would only target the battle cruiser (it had like 80 missile attack), which was protected by all the fighters (which each had about 8 defense). Each battle the battlecruiser only really took 3-10 hp worth of damage, and the little fighters all steadily got stronger.

This organization also let me maximize usage of my Starbases, since with 28 logistics, I had 1 battle cruiser and about 11 fighters.