How come normal Lightning Warheads seem to be more effective vs AI Carriers than Armored Warheads? I thought it would be the other way around since Armored Warheads can do full damage vs single target. Like OMDs they're extremely powerful vs Carriers. This made me wonder how x Warhead vs Carrier mechanic works exactly.
No time to investigate right now, but iirc it sorts the list-of-stuff-inside by largest first or smallest first depending on warhead type, and then starts chewing away. Also, if there's a carrier in range and also "loose" ships in range, the lightning warhead will tend to hit the loose ones first, and if the armored warhead will tend to hit the carrier first (unless some of those loose ships are big).
EDIT: Ok my further studies suggest that if I use the Armored Warheads first the Carriers will unload more ships like Neinzul Youngling Commandos. And if I use the normal Warheads first then the Carriers will unload more ships like Stealth Battleships and Tractor Platforms. Keith has said numerous times that the ships inside the Carriers don't exist. But if that's the case then how come this is the case? Does each Carrier have it's own "budget" for each ship type available which it uses when it unloads ships or takes damage?
They don't exist in the sense of having a full ForegroundObject allocated for each ship, which means it can't track any state about the individual ships (including current-health; but the carrier as a whole does remember any "leftover" damage from the last hit that didn't actually kill something inside).
But the carrier does know exactly how many of each
type of ship is inside. So it knows it has 200 MkII Commandos, 300 MkIII Commandos, 20 MkIII SSB's, and 10 MkIV SSB's, or whatever it is. It remembers that from the time the carrier was created, and doesn't make that stuff up on the fly (in the past, when carriers could die before their contents, it could "combine" the contents into a smaller number of more powerful ships for performance reasons).
So when I use an Armored Warhead the budget for low ship cap ships (aka high health ships which are prioritized by Armored Warheads) is decreased?
Essentially, yes. It sorts the contents and sees that the MkIV SSB's (or whatever) have the highest strength cost for an individual unit, and chews on those first if it's an Armored warhead. With a Lightning warhead it does the opposite.
That's why a lightning warhead can cause the "number" on a carrier to drop much more than an armored warhead: it's a lot easier to kill those commandos than those SSBs. That _may_ make the carrier overall less dangerous, or it might not. Depends on the specific ships in question and what defenses you have. Personally I care more about killing SSBs than commandos in a major attack situation.
EDIT: I also wonder why using all Warheads at once is more effective than using one at a time. The difference is so big it can make the difference between survival and death.
Using all at once --> 2 Carriers left
Using one at a time --> 10 Carriers left
That I don't have a ready explanation for. The detonations are processed sequentially, so it seems like the commutative property of addition would be on our side here
Though, depending on how many ships each carrier is left with, sometimes 2 full carriers are worse than 10 lightly-loaded ones.
