it was faster to reload game than to grind up new replacements
That remains the case. Lost an important ship? Instant reload, don't even finish the battle. I laugh every time I see the Iron Mode checkbox in the new game screen and its tooltip that that's how the game is eventually intended to be played. Even if you can easily produce replacements, you might have to wait up to a month for them, and going back to your home system for them is a PITA if you're out in the boonies farming [redacted] or exploring. That's part of the reason why I like to play with a small deployment - the more ships you have with you, the more chance there is of having to reload because one of them decided to suicide into a clump of enemies. Iron Mode should be renamed Frustrating Mode and the tooltip should read "you might randomly lose because allied AI decided to do something stupid and there was not a damn thing you could do about it, no do-overs".
As far as I'm concerned, Recovery Operations, the industry skill that gives salvage bonuses, needs to also include "allied ships are always recoverable" in the first rank and "recovered allied ships suffer no d-mods" in the second rank. None of this "almost always" BS, none of this "ships with officers" BS.
I do like colony skills (I want to own an empire), but taking those on my character hurts combat power. Alpha cores and Pather bug fix that problem, letting player to get more combat (or carrier or zombie) skills and power.
That's why I like the SkilledUp mod that lets you keep leveling until you get everything. A level cap that takes a very long time to get to, yet severely restricts what skills you can get, and no respec? No thanks, that's just anti-fun.
Would that be such a bad thing??
Of course this can totally be a subjective thing, but how is it good to remove any sort of challenge from a game? It sounds to me that you want to play a totally different game, with a different playstyle (which is fine) but there are mods for that. It would be very silly if you could remove the biggest weaknesses for every ship. The very thing you mentioned, plasma jets Paragon speaks for itself, it has no place in vanilla since it removes any sort of choice.
It's like having a greatsword in an rpg where the balance lies in its slow attack speed. Then you want it to swing as fast as a dagger while still doing insane damage. Makes no sense.
I agree, it would be very silly to be able to remove the weakness of
every ship. That's why I specifically said it should be very hard to do and very expensive precisely so that you can't remove weaknesses from
every ship.
The point of putting Plasma Jets on a Paragon isn't to make it more powerful, it's to make it more fun to play. Giving up the Fortress Shield would make it significantly weaker in direct confrontations, in fact. In your analogy, it would be making the greatsword faster at the cost of reduced durability.
Of course this can totally be a subjective thing, but how is it good to remove and sort of challenge from a game?
By making the player feel like an overpowered demon that gets to step on the enemy and turn them into a red stain on the ground.
The challenge in the game may not necessarily be combat itself (because player wants a completely one-sided fight), but to arrange circumstances where such a one-sided smackdown is possible. Not unlike luring patrols away or waiting for pirates to raid a system and kill patrols, then either raid planet for blueprints or sat bomb it off the map.
Exactly. Starsector is a game with a progression system, the whole point of which is to make you more powerful over time. In a game with no progression system, where you win by playing better than your enemy, you earn your victory by your actions in the fight itself. In a game with a progression system, where you win because you have better stats than your enemy, you earn your victory by your actions before the fight itself.
The problem with making battles in Starsector challenging is that the challenge is mostly to the player's patience. The game is
heavily stats-based, there's not a lot that you can actually
do during combat to affect its outcome, especially in the late game. The quality of your ships, weapons, and officers is what determines the outcome for the most part. Which you do have control over, but the game needs to be set up in such a way that even late-game content can be made easy by diligent preparation. Otherwise you're just producing frustration and tedium as the player loses an even battle they have barely any control over through no fault of their own because their AI decided to do something stupid.