Carriers!

Carrier only fleet? No, a massive fleet of flak will stop it though you would get some ships destroyed out of it.

Best? Well Advent carry the most per supply (6.7 per strike group vs 7 per with TEC and Vasari) but after that nothing noticable. Vasari have the best overall fighters/bombers (high hitpoints and armor with powerful late game weapon phase missiles).

Research? Weapons first. The initial strike upon a high profile target (high level cap or starbase) can change a battle quickly. After that strike craft can be killed quickly with or with out the armor/hitpoint research.

What Ryat said, seriously, a carrier group with any faction, if used and supported properly, is excellent.

Carriers have numerous advantages and disadvantages.  The biggest problem they face is that they're just too easy to run down and kill with frigates.  Light frigates in particular are fast enough to close the gap before you can blink, and early-game this is going to put a quick end to your carrier-based strategies.  In the late-game, huge swarms of strike craft get countered by the right capital ship abilities.  The Vasari in particular can completely shut you down with jam weapons and phasic traps.  Advent and TEC will punish you with TK push and flak burst respectively.  Going pure carrier is just asking to get countered.  If you can substantially outnumber the enemy this is somewhat irrelevant, and carriers (equipped with bombers) are definitely the game's best coup-de-grace unit.  However, for a straight fleet battle I'd be inclined to mix unit types thoroughly and wouldn't want to lean too heavily on strike craft.

As for the best carrier, they're all roughly equal.  The Advent carrier has better range due to its larger antimatter reserves (this scales nicely with the larger unit size) but otherwise they all cost and perform about the same.  Now, as for strike craft, the biggest difference is Vasari, which uses the phase missile type weapons for both its fighters and bombers.  This makes them incredibly effective against anything that has shields, and absolute monsters against capital ships.  When fully upgraded, Vasari fighters are better against capital ships than the other faction's bombers. 

If you really push it late game and can max out mass transcendance, the Advent Halcyon becomes an extremely nice carrier.  It can swat away enemy strike craft with its TK push, and offers six squads thanks to its adept drone anima.  Level it up once, and now it's fielding eight, outpacing an equal value of carrier cruisers, and level it up twice and anima tempest will really make your day.  Of course, I've almost never seen it done in multiplayer.

im a big fan of the advent carriers  i use alot of them when i make my fleet   mix in some gaurdians, a few capital ships that boost the strikecraft,  a few ilums and some crusaders and im good

Matt that is a nice fleet but a costly fleet.

Also 1 level 3 concentration aura is better than 3 level 2 concentration aura you’re better off getting a Halcyon and/or a progenitor then more than one capital ships that boost strike craft.

yeah thats one of my late game fleets master, what ive been doing recently is using the domination abiltly to boots up my fleet and work on my shields weaponry, AM, and hit points instead of boosting up my fleet.

The problem with domination is that you need to be in combat to use it, meaning you'll be taking casualties anyways as the fight goes on.  If you're actually increasing in fleet size from using domination, that means you're not taking casualties in combat, and you've pretty much already won in this case.

Domination is highly overrated.  It's worth it to grab hoshikos and overseers, since Advent lacks any decent form of hull repair, and in the mirror match it's good against guardians since you can then let off a repulse right in the middle of the enemy's fleet, but that's about it.  Most of the time, you're better off conserving antimatter for vertigo which is a downright awesome ability once maxed out. 

I'd be more inclined to have only 1 or 2 Raptures tops, and spend most of my capital ships on Progenitors and Halcyons.  A couple Radiances and Revelations aren't bad, but use them sparingly since they're only good for knocking out enemy capital ships, which is something a sufficient amount of frigate-based firepower will do just as well.

hmm i can see what you mean i wish the advent would get a better healer or at least make it so they dont have to face who thier healing its veary time comsuming and by the time  they cast it the ships nearly dead. or i end up falling back to heal when i use domination i use it to grab (like you said) hoshikos and overseers and a few heavy crusiers just cuz i can . and for vertigo that only works on frigets right it wont stop a  cap ship?

There was a developer comment recently that the Domina is going to be getting an overhaul in some manner. Vertigo works on both frigates and capital ships. There is no target cap, so you can potentially affect dozens of frigates simultaneously, drastically cutting enemy firepower. The ability implies it only affects a single target, but it actually affects every target in a large radius around the one you specify.

sweet ill have to try that out as well. at first it seemed like vertigo seemed kinda useless in the later game cuz i thought it only targed one ship hm thanks for letting the advice.

No problem; Vertigo is one of the game's best-kept secrets. It's far more powerful than most people give it credit for. It works out to a 50% damage reduction to affected units when you max it out, which is positively insane when you're already soaking up most of that with a shield regeneration/projection combo.