Honestly Civ has always handled it well enough so I'd say use their system as much as possible:

First you'd no longer build individual fighters but squadrons. So simplify it a bit you could build fighter squadrons(small, fast, good for recon, and fighting other fighter/bomber squadrons) or bomber squadrons (sacrifice speed, range, and sensors for better damage vs. larger ship types).

Add a "Hanger" component that allows you to carry a certain number of squadrons per hanger. After that they would act like any other unit in regards to movement and attack or you can set them to CAP which then adds their attack power to the carrier they are attached to which further adds it to whatever fleet they are apart of.

Agreed

I originally posted this in the Tactical thread.

To be fair though fighters would have some small advantages. They could be dirt cheap and have high thrust to mass ratio because they don't need FTL, damage control, gravity, or extended life support. They could be little more then engines with several weapons welded on, especially if they were drones. At the same time they could have more complex sensors, jammers, and AI then missiles because you might recover them after launch. Also they wouldn't need to get as close as missiles because they have their own ranged weapons. You could have hive ships that actually just chew up space rock from a safe distance and throw wave after wave of disposable fighters at the enemy.

Although this doesn't really answer what they would be useful for in game.

Pretty much what they're good for in real life. Cheap power projection. I'd see fighters in space kind of having a reverse history to fighters on earth where they'd make up the bulk of your early navy, but would take more of a secondary scouting/support role as larger and more advanced ships become available.

Mass Effect 2:

"Gunnery Chief: This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kilotomb bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth.That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-***** in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's First Law?

Recruit: Sir! A object in motion stays in motion, sir!

Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot!

Recruit: Sir! Unless acted on by an outside force, sir!

Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire a husk of metal, it keeps going until it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you're ruining someone's day somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your **** targets! That is why you wait for the computer to give you a **** firing solution! That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it!" This is a weapon of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip.

Recruit: Sir, yes sir!"

Hard to scout without FTL. Even with FTL small ships like frigates or corvettes would be much better for this because they would have all the things fighters don't like extended life support, multiple crew, and stronger sensors. You would also still need to build the carriers for them so they wouldn't be all that early game. Really game wise it would be hard to differentiate them from missiles, their counters and purposes would be the same even if they act very differently.

Like I said in my earlier post basically I'd rather just see how the tiny hulls are used changed more than making some broad sweeping change. The fact is fighters are in GalCivII I just feel they work in a strange manner is all.

Actually, no. Tiny and Small hulls in particular have some fairly hefty tradeoffs between speed, range, durability, and firepower, and as such if you want a fast fleet are impractical to use. The purpose of a carrier would be allowing the use of such hulls without needing, for example, to drop your standard 4 engine and 6 life support components on them, and in exchange for the firepower that that gives you, you end up with a relatively vulnerable large ship (or ships) as the carrier, and perhaps it takes a round or two to deploy the 'fighters' thus carried with the fleet.

At the very least you would need some form of artificial gravity if you want accelerations much over a few gravities (if the craft is piloted by a living being; here I use 'gravities' to refer to acceleration normalized to the standard gravitational pull of the homeworld of the species piloting the craft rather than the Earth standard gravity). It doesn't matter if you have a thrust-to-weight ratio in the millions if actually using it turns the pilot into jelly or the ship into shrapnel, and artificial gravity of some sort is one of the few 'reasonable' ways to prevent occupants from turning into jelly; preventing the ship from becoming shrapnel is more of a design and hull integrity concern.

This might be reasonable for, say, planetary surveys or the like, but as DsRaider said, there isn't much purpose to a scout craft that is slower than its parent craft, especially since superior sensors tend to be larger sensors in real life (meaning that you can't have the justification of a scout craft that carries a better sensor suite than its faster parent craft except in the case of a technological divide between the parent and child craft - e.g. a relatively obsolete warship which is able to carry a small craft with the latest and greatest in sensor technology. There is then a question of why you'd do such a thing - both from the why you put a hanger on the ship in the first place perspective (unless we're looking at a carrier), and from the why you didn't just upgrade the sensors on the big ship perspective. A decent sensor suite will always take less space than that sensor suite plus room to store an associated platform to carry it will.

Carriers as a way to make small and tiny craft into reasonable components of my fast fleets are something I'm fine with, if it comes with an associated disadvantage that makes it more or less balanced against my normal fleet of fast battleships. Carriers with a special 'fighter' weapon type are also something that wouldn't particularly bother me - it wouldn't really add anything, but it wouldn't hurt either. As for the camp that says 'nothing should be added to the game if it doesn't really add anything', I direct you to the Terror Star - a weapon of mass destruction that I used exactly once in the years that I've had GCII, and for which I also always voted for the ban in the United Planets. That is something that added nothing to the game, at least not for me, and yet I'm sure if we put up a thread that says "Terror Stars should not be in GCIII" we'd find people defending the stupid things.

All this being said, I am neither for nor against the addition of carriers to the game. If small and tiny hulls remain nothing more than short-range gunboats, that's fine. If they become short-range gunboats that can be carried with heavy ships to serve as fighter analogues in big fleet battles, that's fine too.

I look at it like this, and to be fair I'm basing this off the assumption combat and ships will be be similar to GC2. Rather than creating some over complicated system just add a few alterations to the current one. We already have fighters in the form of tiny hulls. I'm simply proposing changing their mechanics.

Basically they would function almost exactly like they currently do, FTL engines and all. Instead I would reduce their maximum range some, to abstract the concept that they are short range and have limited supplies, and institute a rule where "fighters" (in this case anything built on a tiny hull) can must return can only end one turn outside of hanger after which is much return to one or be lost. You could have the number of turns a fighter can be away from a hanger modifiable by life support systems, there by allowing them to operate further from base for longer.

I'm not really looking to change anything, so much as make the use of fighters make more sense in it's implementation. That's all. I'm basically just taking the system Civ uses and applying some of the gameplay features of GalCiv.

Terror Stars were great in GalCiv 1. You could even go so far to say, that they were overpowered. For GalCiv 2, however, Stardock nerfed them. Big time. They are pretty much worthless now. I changed them in my mod, so that they have at least some defenses of their own, but their main weakness, the one move per turn limitation, is hardcoded. Even an increase to two moves per turn would make them worthwhile on most maps.

As for the question of whether they are in GalCiv 3, I already asked. I originally understood Frogboy's answer as "it's unlikely that they will be in the base game, but probably in an expansion." After thinking more about, however, I'm not so sure. He was talking about the campaign, while I was asking about the game in general.

Personally I'd leave fighters/carriers to an expansion, and devote some time to figure out how to do them well.

I like them, conceptually. My key thing is that they need to do something that other weapons don't. We don't need them to act as another gun, only this one is called a fighter.

There was once a whole TV program about all the simulated noise in space operas (movies and TV). There was agreement that space does not conduct sound, so noone would actually hear the sounds of ships passing, lasers or torpedoes flying by, etc., but that the reason the entertainment industries put all of those effects in to make their audiences more comfortable.

Personally, I like the sound affects, even though I know how silly it is.

Those who like the idea of designing carriers and seeing carriers in action in fleet battles I think will be happy.

Those who imagine fleet battles that play like MOO2 (i.e. where you're micro managing individual units) will be less happy.

THAT'S what I'm talking about!    

+1 

If it's like GalCiv II but with the addition of carriers/fighters (and their logistics/techs mumbo jumbos), I'd happy with that. Wouldn't mind a visual treatment of ground battles similar to the fleets'. Altough you have said that ground battles won't work like in GalCivII, so not sure what to really expect from that.

It isn't unreasonable that you would design a system to provide pilots and gunners with feedback on where targets and threats are, as well as where your weapons fire is directed. Thus, you might have a system in place which plays sounds which give an indication of the direction from which something is approaching, its speed, and the type of thing which is approaching, and additionally provide some form of tracer marking the path of weapons fire, whether as an image superimposed on the cockpit enclosure or as an actual tracer that moves with (or nearly with) the weapon fire. It also makes sense that you'd be able to hear or see something as the result of your own weapons fire, as a very common reaction among humans to pressing a button to no apparent effect is to assume that the button is broken (this is a primary reason why computers tend to turn on or flash lights and make noises while turning on).

It also makes a degree of sense that a battle monitor screen in a command center would give some kind of indication of which ships are engaged, what they are engaged with, and what is being thrown around. A relatively easy way to do this would be to provide a display with nice shiny colored lines being drawn between various ships, possibly with sound effects added in (although in a command center, sound effects make less sense than as an extra layer of feedback for a pilot or gunner).

Continually moving towards the obtainment of my money.

There it is, we have a ruling. Carriers are in and MOO2 tactcal battles are out. Is everybody happy now?

The plot thickens...

Nice to see carriers but I have to wonder about what they will do...

Perfect!  I can't friggin wait!

great, enough said

I think fighters/bombers make sense from a long range combat stance.  Send in fighters/bombers to take out high payload warships before you engage in combat with your more expensive capital ships.  The counter would be high manuverability, low damage turret cannons.  I feel it adds another layer of strategy, making it a game that requires you to not only capitalize on opportunity economically, but to also build the right tools to defeat your enemies (requiring intel/scouting).

If not for anything else, I would think fighters would be very handy for ground support actions when invading a planet.  A lot less mass destruction than orbital bombardment by large capital ships, which means less collateral damage and fewer friendly fire incidents.

Sounds good if you include the need for fighters to be designed for both space and atmospheric use. For an example, look at the Star Wars series. The books made very compelling arguments for the awareness needed about the aerodynamic differences that needed to be considered in the design of an X-wing verses the design of a Tie Fighter.