rs is IIRC the critical mass point for an alpha strike that can destroy a capital ship. Thats about 350 to 525 in supply. In a stand up fight vs LFs the LFs would win as bombers can't cause nearly as much damage as they can to capital ships and LFs rip open carriers. In a fluid situation where the carriers are moving and have a chance to jump out before sustaining too much damage and nail some critical cap ships in the process is the bigger issue. I wouldn't be surprised if corvettes do a better job of managing the bombers but I can still see them getting in a least one alpha strike before the carrie
I'm interpreting that as at least 50 carriers loaded with bombers. I'll try at some point to see what if any counters one finds for that... if a cap is 1-2 jumps away, which seems to be the main concern here.
A quick calculation shows that [w/o weapon upgrades] a TEC bomber squad has an alpha damage of 44.4*5 = 222 damage. That times 100 gives approx. 20K alpha, which even reduced to 13K after the 0.6 multiplier of bombers vs. cap armor surely looks like would kill a cap even at max mitigation of around 65% if it the cap had 4500 or less effective total health [including what it gets from armor]. It's still rather unclear to me if the game engine manages to apply mitigation growth to that 1st second pending damage it queues/accumulates, i.e. whether 13K initial damage from X tiny ships serially raises mitigation or is all applied to the initial 15% mitigation unchanged. So the alpha of bombers might be even more powerful in the latter case.
I'm also curious what would happen to the 100 bomber squads if they passed through a flock of 200 corvettes or so, which is a nearly equivalent fleet supply. That kind of fight is obviously unmanageable with manual orders so a lot depends on the built-in ship AI/behavior. Would all the corvettes focus fire and massively overkill only a few bombers? I'm hoping something less lame would happen, but the Sins engine is known for significant disappointments when it comes to ships picking their own targets...
Update: I was actually so curious I've done a half-scale test: 100 bomber squads vs 100 corvettes (to limit lag and carpal tunnel in spawning them). The bomber squads barely took any damage on multiple passes though the corvettes' formation. Wiped out every structure in the quickstart grav well and were still at 90%. The corvettes appear to focus fire on one-two bomber squads at a time, which they massively overkill, but the rest of the bombers are unharmed. So this another epic fail for the claimed "low micro management" of this game. Surely, the micromanagement was low, but so was the effectiveness of corvettes as defense here, unlike in the small scale test where it was feasible to give them individual targeting order (vs. bomber squads, didn't thankfully had to get down to individual bomber level there). If anybody wants this recording for the 100-bombers spam it's at: http://www6.zippyshare.com/v/13788886/file.html Twice as many corvettes would have made no difference in saving those structures, although they'd probably exact more revenge thereafter.
I suspect that fighters have a similar problem countering bomber spam: all fighter squads probably focus-fire on one bomber squad and massively overkill it, while the rest of the bombers get through.
Splash damage may or may not work to fix this... The splash area would have to be huge to counter the game engine's bad targeting orders vs. bomber spam. You could say that the designers of Sins took Stanley Baldwin's words to heart ("The bomber will always get through."), but in reality it was probably "focus fire against everything seems okay" that they were actually thinking...
The obvious answer is to just not field low level or fragile capital ships against a huge bomber swarm. Instead of investing in multiple capital ships you should be building fighters, corvettes and flaks in some combination, or just making bomber spam of your own. If you are building capitals then build anti-bomber capitals. "Alpha strikes" won't succeed against multiple TK pushes combined with a huge flak ball and a few guardians. The same fleet supply to sustain 80 bombers from 2-squad carriers can also field nearly 150 Flak, almost 2 flaks for every bomber squad. Good luck winning against that with your "critical mass" of bomber spam.
Have you actually tried this? Given the very bad focus fire behavior of ships vs. bomber spam in the large scale, I suspect you'll trade one bomber squad for every flak ship, and the carriers will still be alive at the end. That's assuming they want to stay and fight your battle ball, instead of wiping out every structure in the well and moving on.
