they do seem a little OP.

When the AI has carriers, I counter with beam ships and range extenders.  It cost resources, though.  But I destroy the interceptors before they can touch me and by the time the other ship comes in range, my fleet can fire again.

Yup, that is one side of the story. The other is that you drive through galaxy with self-replenishing fleet which is in fact upgrading itself automatically without any costs - what jumps out from carrier depends on your current technology, not tech you had when the carrier was build - and without any resource costs.

That way when I research smth like nightmare torpedoes I do not build even single ship armed with them - there is never enough antimatter to build meaningful force manually. While those tiny bugs that jump from my carriers have like 64 missile attack - each. Funny.

Plus, I have impression that carriers are just too good in both protecting your fleet (sheer number of moving targets) and attacking (the same large number of strong weapons) at the same time, while having rather modest costs to build and maintain.

I don't have problem with carriers being very powerful, let them be - but in my opinion power should come with price tag, they should get quite a number of tweaks to be balanced a little bit better:

- they should definitely cost more in terms of production, I mean carrier modules should be among most expensive ones;

- they should cost more in terms of maintenance;

- drones should be equipped only with those weapon variants which do not require special resources;

- carrier logistics cost should be bigger than hull size itself - at least +1 for every carrier module; 

- [optional, idk] maybe drones should not be treated exactly like regular Tiny ships you can manually build, but should fall in category of it's own, "drone", weaker than Tiny hull - less space for modules, less hp, only slightly better evasion chance, etc.?

It might be general problem with game's economic balance, I encountered a few things which elude me how they were really calculated on design stage in terms of value/costs ratio. I mean - when you have X choices in game, when only one is optimal and all the others are clearly worse, it makes whole beautiful diversity only an illusion. Right now I see like 0 reasons why anything but carriers (+ maybe, some single other, dedicated support ship per fleet) should ever be built once you finally can build them. There is no meaningful choice or trade-off here, only reason I build anything else is for fun.

You might be right, late-game would not feel these changes enough, but I would add it anyway, as carriers are just too cheap comparing to other ships right now. But yeah, something more should be done to keep them in check in late game.

Increasing their logistics cost, like by the number of carried drones would help a bit imho. And/or nerfing the drones itself, like creating special type of weapon only for them, instead of autobuilding them with weapon systems used by "normal" ships. 

weapon placement does not do anything, only offense vs defense stats, accuracy vs evasion and range, i.e. if you can you hit the ennemy before he can strike, you get a free shot with no reply.

When the battle comes, each ship targets one ship, regardless of how many weapons it has.  Ideally, you could send a missile volley to one ship, use your beams for another one and have the kinetics fire at everything that comes close to you.  But I don't think it's the general direction they want Galciv to evolve toward.

Here. Just try it again with Assault drones. And don't bother with cruisers, just throw on more Assault carriers. 😉

How many carrier modules did you stack? It does not matter which one you use--Guardian, Assault, or Interceptor--, what matters is how many you stack per ship. Two is useless and 3 is not very effective. Wait until you can stack at least 4 carrier modules per ship. Your goal is to have about 60 drones per fleet. Then you will see how ridiculous it is.

Nevertheless, if you are only playing the AI, any optimized ship is overkill, whether it be a carrier or even fully loaded large hull. You can rule the galaxy with one balanced huge hull.

Could be. Carriers happen to be quite cheap and fast to build though, you construct them faster than any really optimized large hull. Plus, you don't bother with upgrading weapons, as drones use just best current reasearch, ignoring resource costs, aaaand any losses are replenished over time automatically and for free.

IIRC logistics, you get 4 large hulls vs. 36 assault drone swarm from 6 medium carriers, my bet goes to drones in current  battle system and I think you can get carriers faster and cheaper.

Quoting Horemvore,

reply 16

Intresting. Tweaked this for my mod after reading this.   (No it does not use standard blueprints or AI Tech specialization choices)

Which way of tweaking you followed, just out of curiosity?

My huge hulls with 900+ Capacity laughs at your feeble attempt of a mass mod.   

Although, when you say 2 guns per fighter, what kind of offensive stats would we be looking at?

Oh sure. I am just saying there is no point to bother, though. lol

Never put all your eggs in one basket, as they say. The ideal number of modules to me is 4 or 5 per ship, so there is plenty of space leftover. The reduced firepower would make a difference, though, but I suspect not as much as intended since that still does not mitigate the issue with targeting. Even at half power, multiple that by 60 and you still have more than enough.