I've had a long running terran playthrough, since CoH came out. I've built asgard and Tokyo centred fleets. The asgards can one hit kill a K and even take out an I with a few shots. The asgard also had the same volume of ship slots for interceptors as the Tokyo. The asgard has L turrets.
The Tokyo can launch more ships at once and looks pretty cool, but really that's it.
Am I missing something?
Launch rate is actually very useful for overwhelming enemies and minimising fighter losses in my experience.
Also the Tokyo can repair and resupply ships while the Asgard cannot (as far as I know).
Asgards are an OP endgame ship anyway.
The Tokyo is available earlier, provides a different set of strengths that works well with Osakas and most importantly to me, effectively denies enemy S and M ships from an area.
I usually stick a honshu with my asgard to act as support. Could I skip the honshu on my carrier fleets then? If you can't have a trader assigned to the carrier it's hard to resupply though.
I do find I lose my tako interceptors quickly and usually leave them docked on my asgards unless I'm chasing down faster ships.
I have hundreds of hours in these games and still have no idea what I'm doing.
Well, I don't play Terran but I'll chip in as regardless of faction, the differences between a carrier and a non-carrier will still be clear enough even taking into account the fact that one of them is an Asgard.
So, principally, one is a carrier and one isn't. Seems like it's just a word, but it matters. Whilst they both can house 40 S class ships, the Tokyo has 18 actual docks for them, vs the Asgards 3. Meaning that when the shit needs shoveling, the Tokyo can launch the whole lot in 2.2 waves, vs the 13.33 waves needed for those same ships to launch from the Asgard.
Lets say that it takes 30 seconds to launch a wave (guessing, but it's probably fairly close), the Tokyo has everything out and ready in just over a minute, probably less considering that the first wave will be on the pads and ready to go anyway, vs the almost four minutes needed for the Asgard to ready its fighter complement.
If you're running with flight wings of torpedo bombers, that's enough of a time difference to destroy 3-5 Xenon K's should they have tried to ambush your capital ship. Of course, the Asgard has its Bullshit-CannonTM to help it in this respect, but even that isn't taking out 5 K's in under four minutes due to the recharge time. Of course, sending in either class of vessle without an escort fleet would represent an almost criminal negligence of acceptable fleet doctrine anyway (normally, there are edge cases though). In real terms, there is an issue of only having a wing of 40 torpedo bombers, meaning that they may run out of ammunition before all 5 K's are dead, I can't say that I've ever been ambushed by 5 at once so I'm not sure exactly how many one wing of 40 can take out. I know that 30 Chimera's setup that way can take out at least 3 without running dry though, so I'm confident enough about the numbers. I'm not sure what the Terran equivalent ship to the Chimera would be, pick a heavy fighter and you're probably good to go.
There's also the question of wether or not your capital ship can even survive for those four minutes under that kind of fire... Much would depend on how good the pilot is at tactical maneuvering, etc. I've not ever actually used an Asgard, but I'm sure they have some survivability here, they're almost legendarily tanky so far as I know.
Yes, carriers are massively OP if you have all of the fleet logistics and support industry setup correctly, even moreso than the Asgard.
Of course, getting amubshed by fleets of K's isn't exactly the standard use for a carrier/battleship, so what about the difference between the two in more normal situations?
The main thing here is that because the Tokyo is an actual carrier, it has access to all of the carrier AI that comes with one, such as Position Defence, allowing you to deny specific areas from enemy access, setup rapid response forces from a central location that will strengthen other areas on an as-needed basis, etc. This is all remarkably useful and cannot be done from a non-carrier platform regardless of how much ship storage space there is. It all adds into the actual worth of running a carrier group, which is force projection over an extended area, whereas an Asgard is about being an unstoppable removal tool against specific targets.
Also, as a carrier the Tokyo can automatically repair docked ships, ships which will automatically re-dock when combat is finished when using normal attack commands, or re-dock on an as-needed basis when using Position Defence points, etc. An ability which will greatly increase the resilience of your fleet when on a protracted deployment. None of that is going to happen with an Asgard as it isn't a carrier and has no capacity to do any such things.
Of course, unless you have specific reasons such as doing a Terran Only run, you should just use a Raptor instead of a Tokyo, but you're literally doing a Terran Only run, so...
The carrier specific things going on in the Tokyo (and all XL carriers) make it effectively a mobile airbase, with all of the maintenance facilities and command and control capacity which comes with that. When considered for the same purpose, the Asgard is merely a large box that can carry a bunch of ships. That's your main difference there.
That makes sense. My asgards bleed fighters. I built a second carrier group to try it out a little more for defense. The auto repair is great. I'll probably load it with 20 interceptors and 20 torpedo ships.
I'm still a bit confused on the logistics. I can't assign a trader to the carrier. Does it need materials for repairs? Can I skip auxiliary ships in carrier groups?
Ok, so fleet logistics is a little more involved once you're using fighter wings, and more so again once you're using torpedo wings.
The carrier will repair docked fighters, but that's pretty much it. Even that much is game-changing though when it comes to fleet resilience.
To do fleet logistics right, especially once you start using fighters with torpedos (which you absolutely should, as it's the most powerful doctrine in the game), you need a multi-tier logistics approach.
Firstly, there's your carrier, this would be the fleet command vehicle. You'd have your fighter groups attached to this via their intercept/bombard orders, let's call them alpha and beta groups.
Then get yourself an auxiliary ship (the big XL ones that cost about 60 million credits to buy), attach this to your carrier as one of the later groups down the list, kappa or epsilon iirc, so that it doesn't get in the way of your other flight groups, like destroyer groups or extra fighter wings and such that you may want to also attach to the carrier. (having it at the bottom of the list here isn't necessary at all, but it's a nice quality-of-life thing when it comes to organization). When attaching the auxiliary ship to the carrier, it should be attached under as "Supply for Commander", rather than the usual attack/defend orders you use for your fighters/destroyers. This will tell it that its job is to see to resupplying/repairing the fleet under that carrier.
Now, attach to the auxiliary ship a number of M class trade ships, and group them as whatever group, let's do epsilon again here as they're non-combat, and add them under the order "Trade for commander". This will make them go out and buy the necessary resources to fill up the storage of the auxiliary ship with whatever's necessary. You can see the space that it has assigned to various resources in its info tab.
What this all does is that when your fighters need to repair, they can just go to the carrier and do it. When they need to resupply missiles, they'll go to the auxiliary ship which will build them missiles out of the stored resources that's in its cargo bay. When the auxiliary ship runs low on resources, the M-class traders attached to it will head out and find the resources to buy, then bring them back to the auxiliary ship and deposit them there, ready to make more missiles, etc.
The whole thing will work passively if you have the money to pay for everything. Once you start with torpedo wings, attacking things starts costing money so you need the financial foundation to back up a carrier group like that, presumably, that isn't a problem if you're on a long-standing playthrough. The auxiliary ship will also make its own open buy orders so that NPC traders will just come along and sell resources to it like with a station. It's a good help to your own logistic traders.
On top of the above, the auxiliary ship can also happily repair your other capital ships should it have the required resources for it, they'll head over and link up with the auxiliary ship as needed for repairs/rearming.
EDIT: A couple of additional points here would be that, along with repairing/resupplying everything in the fleet, the auxiliary ship will have good docking storage for ships, so you generally put spares in there for when your flight wings eventually take actual losses. The Honshu (Terran auxiliary) can store 40 S-class and 10 M-class ships inside. So, you can bring a mixture of spare fighters for your various flight wings so that you can replace losses instantly when in theatre. The 10 M-class slots can be used to store extra M-class transporters which can be kept permanently in there to expand the cargo space of the Honshu itself. You can transfer cargo from the M-class ships to the Honshu itself while they're in storage by using the wares transfer menu, they don't need to undock or anything. This is important as it greatly increases the amount of missile resupply that you can handle without having to get restocked from external sources using your fleet of M-class traders. Large wings of heavy torpedo bombers take enormous amounts of resources to resupply, so supplies tend to get stretched thin at some point.
Wars, after all, are won by logistics. This isn't so true in X4 when using energy weapons, but once you move up to Heavy Torp wings it becomes an absolutely inviolable Law to live by.