Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Save/Load UI, Autosave, Intel Map Markers, and More (04/10/24)
Differences are cool, but what is brawling exactly? Ballistics have close-up high damage weapons like the Flak, Chaingun, Machineguns etc, as well as long-range artillery, long-range disablers, shield crackers.. pretty much everything under the sun. So the Ballistics = brawling weapons analogy does not hold up.Yeah, ballistics have many roles, and they are the basic and powerful weapon choice. It fits their lore - they are tried and true. Energy weapons should be a little quirkier. They were more recently developed, so they are less polished. There are major downsides to every energy weapon, even though there are major upsides that a ballistic usually don't have. High burst, high flux cost. Balanced damage, low range. Has emp, but low damage. Is a beam, is a beam. If you want to make a powerful energy weapon loadout, you have to put a little more thought into it than 'slam the best kinetic and high explosives on it,' but you also have more varied options available.
Even so, all Ballistic weapons right now have a distinct feel and a distinct role. That does not get lost just because a certain weapon type has many options to choose from. I don't fear that something like that would happen even if the Energy lineup was extended or its stats modified.
There have been fun space games with shoddy AI. The Escape Velocity AI could be kited easily , but it was fun since it had great atmosphere, exploration, etc.
Even HAL9000 got cheesed. In short: Don't hang success on the AI at the expense of other factors like variety and world richness.
You're adding all this fun, great stuff to campaign. This is good. By contrast though, combat might start to seem a bit underdeveloped. It's the same kill or be killed cage-match every time, in more or less the same arena no matter where you are (± nebula).
If the terrain is precarious for the AI in combat, maybe think of other ways to make combat more varied. Perhaps different objectives: protect/escort a ship, disable and capture specific ships, find a specific thing, etc.
Previously, SS was a bit like oregon trail- all the kids were just sitting through the educational stuff waiting to go hunting. Now I wonder if it will be the reverse- a rich, complex campaign layer, but combat being not much more than hunting in Oregon Trail, albiet with better graphics and more bullets.
) so I am feeling optimistic about the next few updates. 
that would be great - one of my favorite games was a 2d space mmo called starport galactic empires, but it is a ghost town nowadays. I bet someone here knows what I'm talking about.
The weird thing here is why my fleet is spending its (hypothetical) time scrounging up crap like scrap metal and ammo replicators instead of, say, readying their own ship for another combat.It's a post-apocalypse, remember? That's what people do!
