I played the campaign, unfortunately i couldn't get very far as the biggest ship they were selling was the Charger destroyer. Every other ships were only frigates and fighters and even then only some of them.
First of all, i felt like pirates in Patria had pretty big fleets early game. Of course they had the usual lone smugglers flying around but other fleets were at least group of 5/6 frigates and sometimes destroyers, making an early game in this system pretty hard. Possibly a bug that come with the duplicated economy error?
A lot of Patrian ships have rear facing missile hardpoints. Unless you place a Pilum or some swarmers there, it's nearly useless for every other missiles.
The Magnanimous class lack any weapons, which cause issues with the AI as it will try to hug its target. A single energy or ballistic hardpoint could fix this problem (but not missile i think) without making it too strong, perhaps increasing its deployment cost a bit as well.
The Bastion 3 small ballistics turrets use medium mounts sprites.
Phase ships don't have a cloak glow effect.
Some ships have really few OPs to use while some other (like the charger) are comfortable enough to get weapons, hullmods and additional flux capacity, not sure if intended.
Each fighters have two variants, which make them quite confusing to use. They already have a lot of fighters for different roles, no need to add variants to them.
There's a lot more things to say, like some weapons that are so close to vanilla that they don't really deserve to actually exist, plus they use barely modified vanilla sprites which is even more confusing. But before balancing everything, the most important would be to make the mod playable because it currently feel like an early alpha. Few ships available, weird economy, no bounties... A lot of details that make the campaign experience very uncomfortable.
So yeah, it need quite a few fixes.
I forgot to add a disclaimer that campaign integration wasn't quite ready yet. It's very hacky and poorly done imo. Did you try 2.2? It might've fixed the campaign bugs.
That said, all missile turrets are intended to be used as PD, so both the Sling and the Swarmer SRM work for that. Rear facing missile hardpoints were implemented to discourage the use of anything but LRMs and MRMs; I didn't want, say, the Groundhog to be able to put out a huge amount of Annihilators.
I've never actually run into the Magnanimous issue, but I've seen it before with other ships; it's very annoying and I suppose I'll have to put in a rear-facing LMG or so.
The Bastion used to have 3 medium turrets, but this was changed later. The sprite simply hasn't been updated yet. This is also the case on the Yamato. Low priority, imo.
Phase ships were intended not to have a glow effect. If I add one it'll be subtle; I want them to at least
look hidden.
Most ships are intended to be very inflexible. The Charger I may take a look at as it's not designed to be any more versatile than its role requires.
Fighters having variants was another deliberate design decision. It might be confusing, and I've considered this before; I might add different emblems, sprites, or even hull colors to fighter-bombers. I initially considered making only one variant and designating, say, the ASF-4 for fighter-bomber while the F-104 was only used as an interceptor, but imo that really messed with the fluff. I know it's not exactly SS or gameplay friendly, but beyond small visual cues I don't see myself removing the variant part. After all, fighter-bombers still aren't that dangerous as bombers (their weapons are all relatively low damage, making them mediocre against armor despite being strike weapons).
It feels like an early alpha because it is. I just didn't communicate that well; apologies for that! I mentioned weapon sprites being on the way in the OP. And as for some weapons being too close to vanilla; I've tried to avoid this, which is why I've removed the fighter-specific weapons.
The Coilguns still haven't received a scrutiny pass as I've been focusing on other things. They were intended to be low-accuracy, lower-range, beefed up Railguns that did such high damage they could be used to destroy armor as well as pop shields, in exchange for mediocre (but not bad) DPS and horrible flux costs. I thought they were interesting to use, but this is obviously going to be subjective.
I'm also of the opinion that adding new weapons isn't necessarily a bad thing and that they don't
have to be
radically different from vanilla weapons. I still try to reduce redundancy though, which is why there are no Large TPCs (plasma cannons more or less fill that role/fluff), nor is there a Large Coilgun.
Flak artillery and carronades were the result of experimentation. I'm not sure if I want to keep them. I like the idea of a Fragmentation cannon, and I think I've finally balanced them well enough (it was a nightmare to do so). Once they get their own sprite I think they'll fit in nicely as low-tech choices besides coilguns.
I'm considering switching the coilgun to Ballistic and removing the Light coilgun, as most ships just use the Railgun now anyway. I could very well just rely on the Hvel driver, but it doesn't look... coily enough to me.
