Slitherine

The USS Lexington and her sister ship Saratoga were originally planned as Battlecruisers.

"The Bureau of Construction and Repair was not then convinced that aircraft could be an effective and sufficient armament for a warship. Thus the design as carriers included a substantial gun battery of eight 8"/55 caliber guns in four twin gun turrets, two pairs of superfiring turrets fore and aft of the island." (Wikipedia)

This shows as the Lexington has a range of 6 and quite some firepower, but less anti-air and anti-torpedo capability as its later upgrade or the Yorktown class.

Yet I didn't upgrade. The upgrade removes 3 range and a lot of firepower but increases defenses. The ship sunk transports and supply ships and even two destroyers already and I plan to use it as artillery platform in some future invasion scenarios.
How about you? Did you upgrade, and if you did so, did you feel somewhat sorry when doing so?

Yeah me too. Bought her for being cheaper than the Yorktown which would have been more historical correct. Used her offensively in Coral Sea, Midway and Guadalcanal.
She got 6 kills (4 destroyers, 2 crusiers) and delivered 39 damage in 27 engagements. Pretty crazy for a carrier. I rather save the money. for other unit upgrading, paying reparing damage from the massive torpedo spam of Japanese ships are able to deliver.

I always wonder how they do it. A 1HP destroyer traveling 4 hexes, firing a torpedo over 4 hexes range and still deliver 1 hp damage to warship with a cruising speed of over 20 knots?
Japanese torpedoes WWII are on par with Exocet anti-ship missiles it seems.

Here's a comparison between Japanese/US torpedoes.

I've got the original. Unless the new one has more command points, then there's no real difference as far as I'm concerned. In a hot/heavy game I've pretty much never had the opportunity to get the carrier into a useful shooting position. But I'll comment more as I get further into the campaign. I'm just doing midway now, but I've only ever shot a few times for maybe one point of damage each time.

The biggest issue is that you cannot launch and shoot in the same turn, which is a pretty severe limitation on utility. If you have enough other flattops to recover and relaunch aircraft, then this effectively gives you another almost-light cruiser, but a few points of damage will cost you a bucket load of repair bills by comparison to a normal CL or CA.

Both Lex and Sara were intended to be part of the fleet scouting force and thus had to be prepared to exchange fire with enemy scouting force units, the heaviest of which were anticipated to be heavy cruisers. So both carriers were initially armed with four 8" twin turrets. They also had the belt armor of battlecruisers so in a pinch they might be able to survive a surface slugfest, but at the expense of damage to their flight deck and air wing. This is all part of the legacy of the battleship admirals who ran the navy until the 1940's, when aviation-oriented leaders took charge. The game correctly allows you to choose the upgrade to better AA defenses or not and either way you go, you lose and gain something.