It's lonely here! (First post!)

[Suicide Junkie]

There are no mines in CBmod. Heavy torpedo satellites on the blind side of a warppoint are the closest you'll get to that.

Removing fighters would certainly degrade the AI's performance, but if you also remove the carrier hulls, at least they won't waste their time building carriers.
I'm sure you'll find that fighters are not that bad, however.
They are just one of the many facets of a CB navy.


You could just leave the carriers and fighters in, but not use them yourself...
After all, anything a fighter can do, a ship can do too (except for the being placed in cargo thing)
You will, of course, have to build more ships than your enemies, but you will have more build queue time to dedicate...
You may also have to build a higher percentage of anti-fighter ships than normal, since dogfighting is the most common role for fighters, and your ships will have to take up the slack.

PS:
I would certainly be interested to know how a carrier-less empire fares in the mod. It should not be significantly more difficult than playing normally; you'll have more trouble with balancing fleet compositions (since you'll need to build whole new ships to change it), but less trouble with logistics (since you won't have to restock your carriers after battle).

PPS:
Be sure to always have some troops present on all your colonies. You don't want to be an easy mark, and the AI will invade frequently.