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Ballistic mastery for extra 10% range. Even random (are they, actually? or templated?) AI officers should have good chance to roll it. Any competently leveled officer for a ballistic capital must have it.

iirc Hegemony officers always have it and ordnance expertise as their first 2 skills (not sure which gets picked first though)

If we start talking about skills, the elephant in the room is Field Modulation.

Ballistic mastery for extra 10% range. Even random (are they, actually? or templated?) AI officers should have good chance to roll it. Any competently leveled officer for a ballistic capital must have it.

Plus, there is always Gauss Cannon for unquestionable range superiority (except vs optics+TL/HIL on a Paragon).

But, even with both, attacker AI is likely to try closing the distance as it begins to win flux war. Which causes it to lose flux war against efficient close range weapons.

This isn't as bad in practice, since AI can't reliably exploit small range advantage margins.

(Small being 40 units, in this case. A Plasma with ATC is 1400 units, a large ballistic with ITU is 1440.)

Haha ahh my ship mods are only ship and weapons mod with big beans which are all balanced around vanilla. Is it possible to do it with vanilla ships?

Oh definitely!  I'm just not sure what the best strategy is.  I know I've seen videos on YouTube killing the doritos using swarms of D-Mod Drovers with fighter spam.

One thing I really dislike is that engaging is non-cancelable easily. If you accidentally fat-finger 2 instead of 3 on that screen, you will have to engage because you literally aren't given any other option either.

If you don't actually put any ships on the map and press retreat, the battle will cancel in a couple seconds and it doesn't even count as a fight for rep loss (counts like "harry their retreat" and other similar options). Assuming you are the one to start the fight, of course.

Now that I think about it, the only info I want about my weapon groups is how many charges are left for my missiles or anti-matter blasters... Do new players benefit from seeing what weapons they put in their weapon groups?

For me, it's ammo count, for both missiles and mag-fed weapons (like mining blaster and its ten year recharge), and cooldown bar for really slow weapons like gigacannons.

This doesn't even touch on what is Paragon's real weakness:
- It can either out-range everything with soft flux weapons. This is strong vs low/mid tech, but a Radiant or a hard flux Paragon will steamroll it due to superb shield.
- Or equip hard flux weapons and be out-ranged by every heavy ballistics-capable capital. This isn't as bad in practice, since AI can't reliably exploit small range advantage margins.
- Or mix both (like default sim Paragon), and go for middling performance at both ranges.

But this is fine. Ships having weaknesses is necessary part of balance.

Haha ahh my ship mods are only ship and weapons mod with big beans which are all balanced around vanilla. Is it possible to do it with vanilla ships?

The enemy has a max deployment of 240, you have a max deployment of 240, and any fleet setup has room for a couple cheap frigates to capture objectives. How are you getting outnumbered on an even playing field? As for the command points, invest in skills and hullmods that increase command point regeneration.

How are you getting outnumbered on an even playing field?

There is no even playing field. The fights are always asymmetrical due to strategic concerns.
1. The player can only hold up to 30 ships in their fleet and, unlike AI, they need to be concerned with fuel costs, supplies and other stuff, which demands also having a number of logistical ships.
2. Deploying frigates or even destroyers in late game is heavily discouraged because recovering these vessels and restoring them later will cost the player way more in supplies and money (if they are still concerned about that by then) than running a fleet of a few caps or cruisers. The AI doesn't care, so it inevitably ends up with much more deployed garbage than you do at any given moment because they can fully take advantage of the fleet limit size.
3. 240 and 240 is rare. The actual DP limit depends on officers you and the AI has. You may quite easily end up with only 160 DP. Yes, you can capture objectives, but so can AI and it does a decent job at that.
4. Endgame will have you often tackling multiple joining enemies at once, which translates to almost a thousand DP worth of scrap metal easily, leading to really long fights. You, on the other hand, are discouraged from having too much DP in your fleet available due to certain skills downscaling with combat DP.
5. AI is generally pretty horrible at piloting your own ships and especially so when outnumbered due to its propensity to run into a bad position like an idiot and die a painful death or, worse, avoiding engagement for far too long, trying to survive instead of kill as much stuff as it can before dying. In other words, you almost always need to join the larger fights yourself and be the super aggressive pilot to kill things faster than they kill the rest of your AI-controlled fleet.

Given all that, you're almost always going to be outnumbered unless you're playing strict wolfpack tactics.

Possible for an option for uncapped mastery/smod limit option for lunalib?