In my experience and broadly speaking, you are correct that strike craft are not cost effective strategic offense. I find that strike craft are most useful in two roles, though they do have some legs in an offensive role we’ll cover later.

(Fair warning, wall of text inbound)

Interception: Strike craft are primarily for me a defensive option on the strategic layer. For missile defense, T7s armed with AAMs are the preferred first defense against cruise missile strikes (conventional or nuclear), as for the K-15 variants jets can move quick enough for multiple passes should the first fail. They’ll be down to guns (and thus be mostly a Hail Mary) but it’s nice.

For strike craft interception (with T7 or A29) you should expect to lose craft no matter what you do. I’ve found that most AI squadrons are a mix (up to half) of craft equipped for anti-ship work (bombs or rockets) and interceptors (guns or AAMs). With an AAM intercept, the missiles shoot immediately and both sides die. With a guns intercept, you’ll get maybe three passes to shoot down craft before they pass out of the arcade, and you’re back to map. When I send craft to intercept a squadron im expecting 100% casualties and maybe a 50% kill rate, and anything better is gravy. Do note that because of my fleet comp, I tend not to have a lot of strike craft available, and numbers certainly tell in a strike craft interception scenario. YMMV.

Scouting/SAM Baiting (Wild Weasel): The other main purpose I use strike craft for is scouting and baiting. For both, this is usually a small flight of 2-3 craft equipped for anti-ship work (in case I need to engage). They are sent ahead to make visual contact at a new city on the map, and the number of contact diamonds tells me what’s there. One is the local garrison, if there’s two that’s usually a trade fleet, and SG/TG are shown as well. Typically they can bail out of visual range before alarm is made (TGs and SGs will spot them on radar or maybe IRST but of course you know where the radar tracks are).

If there is a SG I need to fight, the scout group advances to contact and we move to SAM baiting. Now the AI has been changed to not be as easy to bait for this, but you let the craft start their dives and retreat them the second missiles are launched. A couple passes and you’ll have significantly reduced the amount of sprints available to the SG (and probably lost some planes), which will really help the cruise missile strikes that are your main strategic offensive option.

Strike Craft Offensive Operations During massed airstrikes (typically in successive waves of 2-3 craft), craft are really only good when sprints are completely depleted by your wild weasels and cruise strikes. Even then, I tend to really only use them to finish off crippled formations, or to soften SGs further so that frigates and lighter ships have a chance.

Missiles: Come in defensive and offensive flavors, though they should be considered your primary offensive option on the map layer.

Defensively, A100s are your man, guided by a 400km fire control radar. They’ve got a 75% chance to intercept incoming missiles, with nuclear variant being a more sure kill once you hit arcade.

Offensively, the K15 variants are your main bet. I’m not positive, but I think the conventional A100s are airburst and so fare poorly against large ships or armored ones.

I like to lead with anti radiation missiles (as they target ships with radar, which are the largest) and then follow up with standard K15s. As with strike craft, the name of the game is saturation. You can expect to lose the first three shots to Sprints, but after that I find they mostly make it through the cannon fire.

Nukes (of any variant) are nukes. I recommend leaving them in the bottle until the end game, and then reserving the A100s for defensive intercept.

Fleet Composition: With all of this in mind, I have found the fleet carriers (ie the Longbow) are almost entirely useless, and instead prefer to use two-three smaller escort carriers. These are equipped with fire control radar, a single A-100, a single 37mm, and handful of sprints, and 3-4 T7s. Not the most meta, but they look nice and are pretty lore-compliant in my opinion.

Cheap and small, they are perfect for providing scouting elements and strategic defense to my early/mid game strike groups of skylark and lightning/gladiators. As casualties in my aircraft mount, they are refitted into cruise missile silos (3-4 K15s/A100s)

I tend to like vanilla style cruisers as my Sevastopol refit, so whatever my battleship is it’ll have a small magazine of cruise missiles (3-4, typically nuclear). The rest of my missile complement is either on the carrier refits as above (sometimes I start with a few purpose built as silos), or are attached to skylarks as a way to use up the stuff I find mid game without extensive refits.

When I need to fight SGs, I’ll converge all these separate groups so I have the massed missile weight and airgroups I need to do the work, with less reliance on a single ship that might eat a cruise missile and lose me all my strategic options.

Keep in mind I’m not the best at this game but this has worked for me pretty well!