So this is my feedback thread for every aspect of the game as it currently is. It may sound negative but I assure you I love the game and already got my money's worth. The entire point here is to discuss what I feel could/should be improved.
Keep in mind that some of these things would obviously be OPTIONS so, for example, even though you may thoroughly enjoy the fact that your admiral smashes his radio against the wall once he has given X number of orders (equal to your command points), having the option to disable such things would be PURELY beneficial as no one would be forced to do it. :)
1) While the AI for fast frigates is pretty good, it seems like all fighter pilots are complete ***. They're way too careless and they don't seem to take into consideration that their carrier teammates can magically respawn their wingmen if they make it back alive. With the current (strange) mechanics, the best fighter AI is a cowardly one since you would then rarely lose an entire wing. Hopefully there will be a setting in the future to let us decide when a fighter wing goes back to refit & repair. I would obviously set it to "whenever you lose a single craft".
2) Slightly related to the above, I find it very immersion-breaking that the last craft of an entire fighter wing is magically super important for no reason as he is necessary for the reconstruction of his wingmen. It seems like the carriers should either be able to build fighters or not, regardless of having one of them docked there. Even if you were to find some excuse such as "they use the remaining fighter as a blueprint to know how to rebuild his wingmen" then I would like to be able to order one fighter of every wing to remain docked at all times, making the wing effectively invincible. The current implementation feels gimmicky and obscure.
3) At a cost of 1 CP each time it is issued, the "Refit & Repair" order for fightercrafts becomes rather useless.
4) Nav buoys and sensor relays are way too powerful and game-breaking. While nerfing them into the ground would help, changing their bonus to something more reasonable would be better. For example, nav buoys could decrease the chance for your retreating ships to get lost and captured (increase the chance of having them regroup with their fleet after the battle), perhaps based on how long you've held nav buoys during the fight or how many were held when the ship retreated. Sensor arrays could give more line of sight to your ships or simply give a large radius of sight around the relay itself. I don't really have a problem with comm relays as they are right now.
5) I find myself having the most fun in small engagements with no capture points. Can we have an option to change what size is considered a small engagement? I would like to remove capture points in my game.
6) The enormous handicap where the player takes 50% of normal damage should definitely NOT be activated by default. Finding out that it has been on and then turning it off (which I assume most will do when they finally find out about it) is the equivalent of having your characters' levels reset to 1 in an MMORPG, except that what you lose in this case is all the knowledge you thought you had about ships and how to fit them. Ship setups that were valid or even very powerful can become useless without this massive game-changing handicap.
7) This is probably already in the plans but there needs to be an option to more precisely manage how you distribute your crews of different experience levels.
8) If you don't have 4 weapon groups, you can select a non-existent one (for example pressing 4 when you only have 3 groups) which allows all your weapons to be on autofire. There's no reason for this not to be possible with 4 weapon groups and it would even the playing field between us and AI controlled ships as we would be able to shoot all our weapons AND control an omni shield aswell. This can be particularly frustrating when, for example, you have an incoming Salamander missile and you have to STOP SHOOTING the enemy in front of you so that you can turn your shield to cover your engines.
9) It would be nice if we could set our shield to automatic just like weapons. At least for the direction of an omni shield.
10) In the mission Forlorn Hope, the player's greatest enemy is his own terrible weapon groupings. Being forced to disable your tactical lasers, autopulse lasers and point defense just so that your heavy blasters stop overloading your ship with flux is pretty ridiculous.
11) While I like the concept of nebulas adding an extra tactical layer to battles, they seem to be way too common and some of them are so small they are barely larger than a battleship, making them somewhat insignificant on a tactical level but just as annoying when you're trying to get to the battle.
12) Please add an unlimited control points mode which obviously would be off by default. While I have only rarely been annoyed by command points, I've never felt like they added any enjoyment to the game (so I lost little but gained nothing). In the few cases where they annoyed me, they did so by preventing me from compensating for the occasional shortcomings of the AI. For example, if I'm using a lot of fighter wings then I will most likely either run out of command points for Repair&Refit or the AI will get a bunch of them killed. In either case I end up frustrated instead of having fun. Those who enjoy command points would simply not turn them off.
13) It seems absurd for any fleet to travel any more than 10% slower than the travel speed of their slowest ship, regardless of fleet size. I doubt there's a lot of obstacles to dodge in space and I assume most captains are at least semi-competent, enough to not randomly steer or slow down their ship.
14) Since the slowest ship(s) of a fleet are obviously not going to mistakenly wait for other ships that are significantly faster than them, any ship significantly faster than the slowest ship of a fleet should not slow down the fleet at all. "Oh my, our Tempest is very slightly behind everyone else, slow down the Paragons so he can catch up!"
15) If fighter crafts are kept in hangars then it would make sense that they would not slow the fleet down at all. They would rarely do so anyway if suggestion 14 is implemented.
16) This one is very obvious and already known but the current algorithm that determines when an enemy fleet retreats is the most cowardly thing I've ever seen. I've captured a Paragon using a frigate because he decided to run away after I killed a few fighters. For the record, he could easily have travelled to his destination with his 360 degree shields up, ignoring my insignificant damage indefinitely.
17) It is annoying to (for example) have an extremely slow Venture be able to retreat from my Lasher just because he reached the imaginary end of an imaginary box in space. Unless a ship actually got away from all its enemies, it should not be allowed to retreat, only surrender. Otherwise, a slow missile boat can enter a battle, deal any amount of armor or hull damage to a ship that would usually defeat him, then retreat and re-engage (or be re-engaged). Someone suggested that the map boundaries themselves should move to follow the center of mass of all ships currently fighting and while I don't know how hard that would be to implement, it's the kind of solution that would restore the feeling of actually fighting in space, not in a tiny box. If a ship actually has enough speed to be able to surrender then it would be able to disengage from its enemies in battle and gain some distance, then be allowed to retreat without surrendering. If it cannot do that, why would the battle boundaries allow it to?
18) Retreating ships sometimes stop using their shields for no reason, making them many times weaker than they actually should be.
19) It would be useful if we could decide if we want our PD lasers to prioritize ships, fighters or missiles. It's annoying to have your burst PD lasers waste their shots on practically harmless swarmer missiles when the enemy fighter launching them is in range of said PD laser and will continue launching them for at least 2 full minutes anyway. In that case I wish the PD would shoot the fighters first. This is situational so a setting would be best, even if it can only be changed from the refitting window.
20) AI ships being shot by a tachyon lance will often raise their shields then turn them off before the lance is done dealing damage, resulting in hull damage that obviously shouldn't have happened.
