Shielded Hounds and Cerberus are nice. As much as I dislike the speed reduction on Makeshift Shield Generator, it makes shielded Hounds and Cerberus easier to fight. Fighting shielded Hound at full speed would probably be like fighting a Remnant frigate.
Did another early playthrough, this time skipping tutorial. Storms seem infrequent enough that they can be dodged without much difficulty (still prefer 0.8 storms where they can be mostly ignored). Bounties scale too fast. I had to put my fleet in storage because the bounties are too big to handle, and took exploration missions with Wolf and Dram to raise enough money to buy more ships and weapons. Character level below a certain threshold, say... 20, probably should not affect bounty level.
I think I have seen enough. Will probably cheat up an endgame fleet because I do not want to spend days or weeks grinding up another game.
Warthogs are too strong when compared to other fighters, but it would be nice if they simply cost more if they otherwise stay the same. Warthogs already flux cap with mortars quickly, so lowering guns may not be enough. Probably need to lower wing size to two, and maybe tone down the flares to a single. Their biggest weakness is speed. Even with Wing Commander 1, many frigates can outrun them, which means Astral cannot rely on them to kill a bunch of frigates in the simulator when trying to kill the simulator. If Warthogs get weakened, I would like to see them go faster to compensate. It is annoying that they are so slow, but the power they wield makes them worth using.
Piranhas need their LMG (or Swarmers, if going old school) back. If not, their OP cost needs to go down - way down, like 5 OP.
After playing fighters more, Xyphos is not very useful. The main reason to use fighters today is for fighters to run down and kill ships, but Xyphos cannot do that. Small carriers need interceptors and the like to hunt enemies. Most, if not all, effective carriers built for brawling and can theoretically use Xyphos as auxiliary ion beams, outrange them. Legion with 900 range ballistics plus ITU or Odyssey with Tachyon Lances plus ITU and Advanced Optics want to snipe from maximum range, and Xyphos does not have as much range. Xyphos is more useful for a brawling Odyssey with Autopulse or Plasma Cannons, but new 1.0 shields made those classic configurations less attractive. Destroyers or Aurora with Converted Hangar can probably make good use of Xyphos, but it costs so much OP and with slower rate recovery (from Converted Hangar and no Expended Deck Crew), rate will probably fall in big fights and Xyphos will probably get killed off soon.
P.S. When I installed 0.8.1 for the first time, I failed to set combat speed to 2f and... UGH! 1f is so agonizingly slow! I quickly set it to 2f and the game felt much better. Still wish game could handle faster speeds while maintaining fidelity. 2.5f would be ideal. Wish there was a way to set game speed without digging into settings.json.