Lets talk about L and XL ships: Which and why you should buy them.

[DYRT]

Comparsion: http://prntscr.com/lt1j43
1-How useless are L weapons: Low projectile speed, lack of L size weapon variety...
2-How usefull/useless are docking bays. You can just give them follow/protect command.
3-Prefering a builder instead of ships that has no purpose other than just fighting. As you see in the list, builders has a decent shield value, lots of drone spaces, same ship storage capacity but less docking bays. less missile storage and no large turret or weapons.
What is your oppinion?

[Harrison]

I think you left out some important factors in your comparison: speeds (travel, boost, non-boost) and maneuverability.

From your list, the builders look fairly decent. What it doesn't show is that they slow and combersome. Which isn't to say the carriers are speed demons, just that when it comes down to it, the builders can't run away.

And when those shields run out, they're awfully squishy.

[MushuIV]

True but 100 drones is more distracting than 20. Carriers are kinda eh until if and when they add proper fleet control.

[Mish101]

I always have been a fan of Carriers in X games. I would probably get a carrier or possibly just a Freighter to serve as one. The reason being is, i tried having a wing of 2 escorts on me and they just lag behind. The purpose of a carrier for me is simply to deliver a massive swarm of fighters to my location.

In older games carriers had large cargo space and fighter storage capacity and jumpdrives. This means I used them to store munitions for my fighters and to refitt them with guns too.

I hope in X4 the carriers will eventually regain their ability to act as mobile base of operations.....

[salzlaender]

Certainly get the Selen L freighter. I don't say it is the best L because it is the fastest, I say it because of the freaking awesome cockpit ^^

I just bought it and hell, that is SF feeling all right!

And all those texts are probably real prgramm code just scrambled.

[Harrison]

Pretty sure all the Paranid capital ships have the same bridge/cockpit.

[DYRT]

Builders definetely have lack of speed (especially acceleration) but i don't think carriers can escape middle of the battle either. There is also interuption system if you get hit while charging your engines you lose your charge and travel mode turn off. Without being able to using travel mode all ships are in heavly danger no matter what they are.
All L/XL ships are pain if you use them manually. Their charging time long, turn values low. They're basicly a sitting dock in fights. Thats why i didn't add their movement values.

Carriers are nothing like a "moving base" in this game and only munitons are missiles and instead of feeding their fighters with them they can just spam all of it with their turrets. Since turrets have accuricy problem, tracking missiles good to go with L/XL ships. S/M ships are has opportinity for close combat.
Missiles, drones, fighters all means lost of currency. But drones atleast easy to renew.
Too bad you can't just spam M2's and M7's like old days and make yourself an army which loose nothing in wars.

[scaarab]

At the moment:
All L and XL class ships are hot garbage. Player owned capitals do not under any circumstances use their turret mounted weapons.
As the pilot you don't even get the ability to change turret behavior like on M class ships.
Unless you have the 2nd tier of being liked by a faction you wont even get access to the destroyers main cannons which is the sole thing destroyers can use to do damage also it has less dps than an M class AutoCannon.
The moment you slave ships to capitals they load those ships order queue with hundreds of "wait in place" orders thus you can't even manage the fleet properly.
The sole L class ship that I consider worth its price is an L class minimum freighter I use to manually transport station building materials from the station I produce Claytronics, Hull Parts, Energy cells to the same stations building storage cause I bought 300 cargo drones for ♥♥♥♥♥ and giggles.

Get a large swarm of M class ships preferably the corvettes from Paranid. Since turrets are still retardedly blind.

Now if we only look at theoretically everything working and balanced properly Id say Destroyers are the best, they have main cannons and fighters can go anywhere they want. If carriers get the ability to store large amounts of torpedoes that actually do proper damage making torp launcher ships viable then carriers. Right now not a single one of them worth the credits or the parts.

[Leester]

Egosoft really needs to fix this, in my opinion capital ships being gimped is second only to the economy stalling out in fixes needed.

For now there are shield, turret, and capital ship weapon mods on the nexus that make them better. Not perfect buy a long shot, but better. The shield mod at least makes them much tougher.

[John The Dad]

In X3 I only remember having a good experience using a carrier as my main ship when I was using specific mods for it that made it actually bearable.

Going by what little experience I had early on of trying to get a single fighter to land on my Cerberus I didn't have high hopes for using a carrier in the future after it took 3 minutes to dock, so I've not actually bothered buying a carrier even now I have the credits to do so.

[themaw365]

The capital turrets all have close combat ranges of 2 - 4 Km and do as much damage as a mk1 laser. I have a destroyer and a carrier, the carrier flies close to its target and uses about 20% of its firepower. Its turret placement looks as if its for defence only. The destroyer is even worst, the main guns have a range of like 7km and the turrets a range of 3 -4 km. So what happens when you order it to attack something is it sits at 6 - 7km and fires the main guns, the turrets never activate because they're out of range. You end up doing as much damage as a cheaply fit fighter but at 4500% of the price and about 10% of the travel speed.. Then there as the wing command orders. They don't work the way they should. If a ship is docked on a carrier and set to defend it you first have to force undock the ships and let them do their default behaviour before attacking anything. If you order them to attack while docked they will do 1 strafe run and then return to defend. You cannot split fighters into different wings to do different tasks. If you control the ship all the turrets are set to defence, if an npc controls it they are set to attack my target. Carriers without jump drives are in fack worthless since you can get all the fighters to the target faster on their own. So the core problems are, no turret control, turret range too low, turret damage too low, fleet orders almost non existent and where they do exist are garbage. Also fleets do less damage if you are out of sector, I don't know why. So basically, atm, don't even bother buying capital combat ships. They are useless.