No mods, 0.91a-RC8
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* I'm playing on "easy" and I've been playing spacey games for decades (and am not too shabby at them as a general rule), but I still keep losing whatever ship I'm piloting with great ease, even if it's a cruiser and the rest of my ships are destroyers (against destroyers/frigates). I transfer into another ship in the fleet and shortly thereafter I'm dead again while the rest of my fleet goes on with no loses. I'm not that aggressive either. Now, for one thing this is a testament to the great AI, and obviously I'm doing lots of things wrong, but apart from this balance issue, I *have* to participate in the battles otherwise I'm just spending 10 minutes watching a (admittedly pretty) space combat happen. I can't micro my fleet (which I'd be more than happy to do) because I have a piddly amount of command points. So what am I /meant/ to do during the combat? I can't micro my shields/weapons like the AI does, I'm more of a strategist than a tactician but the game design decisions means that the space combat portion can be quite not-fun against anything except an inferior force.
Not all cruisers are great at combat. Some of them have more of an exploration focus (e.g. good cargo space, exploration related hullmods), e.g. Venture Class, Apogee Class cruisers. While they can generally beat a destroyer 1v1, they will not survive if they take on too many of them. If you are done with exploration, and want a more battle-focused play, then your aim should be (besides making money) to buy a strong cruiser like the Eagle or Aurora. You are much less likely to lose either of those ships, and pretty much impossible to lose them if the enemy has no Capital ships.
* Further to this, in big fleet battles there simply aren't enough command points in the first place, even without microing. Reinforcements eat them all up alone, if I were to bother retreating that'd eat a bunch more. Didn't get the command-point upgrades because spent my levels on non-combat stuff (not that +3 points would have done much).
Completely agree here. Although there is a skill you can learn for more Command Points, it's not enough for the largest battles, unless you go for the pure Paragon spam.
* I "resisted" an AI inspection and took a -50 hit to rep! Ok, I get that they *really* don't like that, but it should have told me that the consequences would be so bad then I would have simply bribed instead. That's a *huge* rep hit with no warning; no way I'm going to bother grinding that back. If I click on the event after the fact it actually says "relationship reduced by 59". :-/
Ah. If you decide to use any AI Cores (Gamma, Beta, Alpha) in your colonies, it will trigger AI inspections from the hegemony. If the Hegemony AI Inspection fleet gets defeated by either Your personal fleet, or any fleet belonging to your faction, then the Hegemony will declare war on you and your faction, and relations will go to -50 instantly (if not lower already). Essentially, the Hegemony will become your enemy in each and every game-play, unless you decide NOT to make any colonies yourself. Having low relations with Hegemony is completely normal, I end up with -100 on every play-through, unmodded and modded
* Forced manual combat against tiny fleets when I'm orders of magnitude more powerful.
Use fighters. Fighters can shred frigates and destroyers insanely quick.
* Chasing the last frigate or two down (and it's not decided I've "won" yet). Gah! Especially when they have that jumping ability.
If you think the ships with the phase skim ('jump') ability is bad, wait until you have to fight ships with the phase cloak ability
there is nothing you can do to catch then, other than waiting, or installing console commands and typing 'Nuke' (recommended solution).
* Given that (again) I can't micro my fleet, it would be nice if there was a "keep away from all other ships" option for my carriers. I've tried various things (assigning escorts, placing them "behind" where I think the combat will be, assigning them as escorts, etc) but they're glass cannons. I don't have enough command points to keep repositioning them away from the combat (which is always moving fluidly).
Carriers naturally keep away from combat, except for the Legion class, because it is not a pure Carrier (it's a kind of a hybrid combat and carrier ship). However, if the enemy can keep your fighters busy with their own, and has a bunch of fast destroyers, it's a bit of a coin toss as to who will win
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* One of my colonies in particular keeps getting raided (by various factions). Eventually they took down the starbase, and now all the raids succeed because there is no starbase and they raid while it's still "disrupted". This has happened at least 5 times in a row now! Starfortress, heavy batteries, patrol, size 7, 270% fleet, me administrating with all 3 colony perks.
* The pirates keep setting up next to one of my colonies in particular. Then I go there and destroy them, then a few months later they're at it again... :-/ Happened at least 4 times. Colony has patrol, surely they should, you know, patrol known pirate places. (Another colony has High Command).
One colony with one High Command and Star Fortress will repel many of the common attacks, but a fully fledged pirate raid can overwhelm that. If you want a base that is impenetrable for unmodded vanilla, get a system with 5 planets, colonize them all, build High Command and Star Fortress on all of them, put Alpha Core as Administrator for all, and put Alpha Core into all High Commands and Star Fortresses. It is usually best to keep all your colonies in one system if possible, there's not really a lot of advantage in colonizing between distant locations, because of the aforementioned pirate threats.