Before I get into any (constructive, hopefully) criticisms, I have to say that I absolutely love the entire atmosphere and feel of the mod. The lack of shields changes things radically, and makes for an overall more interesting experience, I think. It's incredibly balanced from what I've seen (minus C.Six's apparent dominance in all auto-resolved and fought battles, and other details such as PD or damage types) The art, the sound, all is great.
(Note: I've only really seen things from the perspective of Coalition ships, and I apologize if there is a lack of coherence or any rambling in this post
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Now that all the fluffery is out of the way, I do have some thoughts. One is an utter lack of effective PD weapons. I have better success with integrated point defense AI on weapons designed to tackle other ships than in using actual weapons designated for PD, though this may just be because of the sheer amount of fire as opposed to accuracy. Still, without shielding, this leads to a missile-based force having a significant advantage. The problem is non-beam PD is entirely unable to track missiles that aren't headed in a perpendicular angle. They just don't seem to lead the target, even with elite crew.
Coalition anti-strike craft weapons appear to use fragmentation damage and has proven to be utterly ineffective. The fast-attack frigate, for example, comes with a default 4 rapid fire weapons (and 1 useless PD) that do around 10 damage per burst to armor, if all shots hit. These frigates cost around 3200 I believe, default weapons included, yet they can't even kill *any* fighter craft 1v1, which cost about 1500 max. I suppose the complaint here is really the fragmentation damage - I'd wager a simple switch to energy damage would increase their usefulness by a ton.
I frequently lose frigates and fighters, and have come very close to losing a destroyer or even my cruiser once or twice, all in even terms. I think that is awesome as usually Starfarer has defaulted to laughably easy or not-so-laughably hard. As it stands, every battle requires my attention. There is a problem here though - the stations seem to be running out of ships. Eventually it looks as though I won't be able to replace my losses. I imagine that, when there are economic alternatives for progression (outposts), it'd be possible to construct your own ships and losing a few ships and dozens of crew isn't as horrible as it is now.
Speed. After frigates, almost all ships speed suddenly drops down to capital-sized movement. In fact, just about everything but fighters and frigates are in that neighborhood, rarely above 70 or 80. It feels wrong, for the size of the ships. Let's ignore the lack of friction as a limiting factor, for the sake of gameplay!
I'd like to see the minor factions fleshed out - more ships, more weapons, etc. Especially the C.Six as they are apparently the player faction but have what, four ships total? The coalition also seem to have zero flight decks across their entire fleet. Second to that I would like to see the player as not being forced to join C.Six at start, or have a pre-defined character. This is a sandbox game, don't take away from that. I understand there is a story and lore and that's a big part of the mod, and I appreciate that, but I suppose this is a matter of preference.