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[jokez80]

I noticed that when I had 2 Apogees in my fleet, whenever I equipped them with any fighters they were waaay too timid and never used any of their guns offensively, only using their fighters to attack which really squanders their amazing flux potential to be more aggressive. Only when I got rid of all fighters they had during refit, then they behaved normally.

I dug into the ship_data.csv in the hulls folder in your mod and noticed that under the hints column, the Apogee was labeled as 'CARRIER, COMBAT'. I'm assuming that this is telling it to act as a combat carrier? In any case, it never moved within range to use its energy weapons.

once I got rid of that tag, my Apogees behaved much better and closed in to attack with all of its weapons. Could this be the reason why Apogees feel a lot weaker in this mod?

Been having a lot of fun with your mod though, having a blast on my second playthrough of the game!

[Morrokain]

What kind of big buff? I thought it's already the strongest in the game. Not cruel enough, are you? I think remnant unique weapons drop would be nice addition.

10,000 more max flux and higher armor (iirc) but doubled the cooldown between teleports.  I am a cruel lord indeed. Regarding unique weapon drops: I like this idea! I'll keep this in mind for future updates. This one is already getting massive and with the recent feedback continues to grow.

Faction ships review time!!

Nice, thanks! 

Remnant: Holy crap fleet. Good thing they can't burn. Actually lost against everyone in auto resolve. Radient has sucide tendency to teleport into battle immediately and of course die. When will I be able to capture one, hurry up dev.

The wait is worth it for the quality that comes with updates, trust me. The suicide tendency might be partially helped by the above buff. A teleport into a bad situation is less likely as the ship is now monstrous in battle. But retreating teleports are less likely too- so a trade off there which mostly benefits player convenience at the expense of additional difficulty when encountering that ship.

I'll take a look at autoresolve, though, that shouldn't be happening so I probably forgot to change the FP values.

Archean Order: Revenant ship is pretty bad, lacking a lot of weapon mounts, also a very serious matter to all energy base ship is that the weapons flux/damage ratio are the most inefficient. It's usually self suicide all the time by firing till no enough flux for shield. Mine got killed by a Legion(XIV) with no crafts, so bad I don't want to recover it. I think Archean needs one more frontline capital ship or repurpose that Revenant. Megalith is pretty bad in AI fleet as it's so slow, the front line are all gone before it arrive. OP Phase bomber.

Everything mentioned here except the energy weapons flux/damage ratio has had some changes. Notably, the Megalith is no longer a combat carrier to the AI and the speed limiting and replacement increase hullmod has been removed. This will make it get to the battle far more quickly.

Additionally, I'm (right now actually) coding a hullmod to hopefully reduce the cooldown of it's ship system to replace the carrier hullmod. So the Megalith is a special ship that still replaces fighters quickly due to its system- but without the carrier limitations. It will be a true dreadnought indeed and very difficult to take down. It's deployment cost is substantially more as well.

Adamantine: Overall OPnessly balance. Hivemind Orb is OP, projectile speed wise, can't be countered with PD. Widow is your best Anti-craft support but usually, shoot ship instead. Great fighters loadout. Has the strongest star fortress of all with so many Reapers. AD>High Tech>AO.

Hivemind is meant to be relatively uncounterable and force an engagement by the player. The downside? AI can't determine this and so in the player's hands it's practically an "I win" button in large amounts. It's meant to be really rare as a result. To be fair, most legendary weapons feel that way, though.

Psi-Corp: Why are you even here? Has the weakest fleet of all. Could make do as a minor faction. Apogee is weaker than vanilla. Odyssey is Odyssily weak.

They are supposed to be a little weak (they are the underdog you root for) but I'll take a look if they are too much so. Other feedback has also been given related to those, so lot's to go on/look at there.

Tri-Tac: Paragon speed is just superb than vanilla, the second best ship after Tyrant. Astral missing one small mount texture. Harbinger is pretty cheap this time. Auto resolve may never be in their favor.

I'll take a look at the Astral texture thanks for that find! Why is autoresolve not good for them, I wonder? Their FP are just as high as Hegemony ships. I wonder if it is their fleet size... hmm.

Hegemony: Strongest fleet below Remnant. Devastator + Boltter is great. Onslaught(XIV), apart from the ability and terminator beams, is very strong for 30+5 points (not sure but look like it’s bug at 30 instead of 35). Terminator is actually a very crappy beam. Can't it be thicker to look more imposing? Normal Onslaught might actually be stronger with more ballistic? Legion(XIV) ability is so good, a very strong fire support ship as well. Dominator with Reaper is scary and can fire guns indefinitely with so little flux cost for some ballistic weapons. Eagle and Falcon (all models except AD) are not so great, easy to kill, can't kill anything maybe due to gun arc.

Onslaught(XIV) is 30+9 now (iirc) (nope checked and still 30+5) and it's Terminator Beams are longer ranged now and represent a cost efficient alternative and higher OP opportunities. This really improved the AI's use of them, specifically.

As far as looks and Terminator balance, should do doable. I never thought of the Terminator as bad though. It strikes with such speed it is really easy to sneak shots in while the shields are down. If it's used on shields its bad, though, definitely.

Persean: A little love for midline ship? Executor and Conquest Feel great but a bit squishy. Has good balance weapons. I do feel that there are too many high tech ships and would like to have more midline for Persean, Diktat, and Independence.

Noted. I have another faction in mind, too, that will mostly use midline ships so that will expand the roster as well.

Prate/Ludd: Practice targets. Very threatening early game. Pillager is too squishy. I think the smallest fleet is still too large for starters. Can there be an additional smaller size fleet like a picket roaming out of the system like Luddic mini fleet for pirate? It could also be paired with a mini trader fleet for the would be pirate starter.

Pillager is probably squishy on the pirate side since I think it has D-mods. In general, though, it's speed and firepower are it's main attributes so it needs to be a tiny bit squishy. Fleet sizes are being adjusted in the next official update.

Overall Frigates: Too slow to survive. Have no meaning endgame. I think frigate should be half as fast as the average bomber/gunship, at least 120-150 in speed without boost. It should be balanced so that even with navrelay it will still be lower than fighter speed. Frigate should be an annoying ship that is hard to kill. I do imagine frigates as the Millenium Falcon fast but cannot shake away TIE fighters but also won't get swarm by it either. Also, peak performance time is not enough.

Made some notes here. It will likely also help the collision issue to do this, so I will definitely do something here. Maybe this update, maybe the next. It's a pretty substantial change to make that could break a lot of things easily so I will need to test a lot.
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After more testing,  the consortium start is very doable even with the 1 frigate agent start.   Just worked my way up from that start to getting a doom AD in iron man.  The night reaver start isn't too hard once you buy a freighter,  which only takes a couple months of commission salary.  I haven't tested the doom yet,  but if the harbinger and the stats are any guide I will probably be soloing small fleets with it.   The flux dissipation is higher than a battleship, so phasing between massive damage bursts to reload and dissipate flux is likely an extremely powerful tactic with the mod changes.

If you want to make the consortium fleets extra scary,  I suggest making the default loadouts include insulated engines.   The players wouldn't see them until they are quite close.

Edit: the Doom AD is less OP than I expected from using the harbinger.   The triple plasma cannon harbinger is somewhat uniquely OP.

Thanks for the tests. I'll take a look at the harbinger. Sounds like some reduced dissipation is in order.
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I noticed that when I had 2 Apogees in my fleet, whenever I equipped them with any fighters they were waaay too timid and never used any of their guns offensively, only using their fighters to attack which really squanders their amazing flux potential to be more aggressive. Only when I got rid of all fighters they had during refit, then they behaved normally.

I dug into the ship_data.csv in the hulls folder in your mod and noticed that under the hints column, the Apogee was labeled as 'CARRIER, COMBAT'. I'm assuming that this is telling it to act as a combat carrier? In any case, it never moved within range to use its energy weapons.

once I got rid of that tag, my Apogees behaved much better and closed in to attack with all of its weapons. Could this be the reason why Apogees feel a lot weaker in this mod?

Fixed for the next update, good catch! Forgot I did this because of the large number of bays before I made the carrier changes. Even not considering the AI issues, it isn't really an apt description now.

Been having a lot of fun with your mod though, having a blast on my second playthrough of the game!

  Glad to hear it!

*EDIT*

I'll take a look at autoresolve, though, that shouldn't be happening so I probably forgot to change the FP values.

Well, no they should be good. Not sure why this would happen to be honest. It appears like they should autoresolve at a higher win rate according to FP stats.

Additionally, I'm (right now actually) coding a hullmod to hopefully reduce the cooldown of it's ship system to replace the carrier hullmod. So the Megalith is a special ship that still replaces fighters quickly due to its system- but without the carrier limitations. It will be a true dreadnought indeed and very difficult to take down. It's deployment cost is substantially more as well.

Actually I did this in a new ship system for the Megalith that does the same thing. The new built-in hullmod is just to make it raise it's shields faster for AI purposes (I removed the built-in accelerated shields in favor of this- they will stack).

[DatonKallandor]

In my experience early pirates/luddics are pretty hard fights because a lot of the crappy early frigates they like to use come with built-in strikecraft, and it doesn't matter how crappy the strikecraft are if they outnumber you 3:1. It really drives home how important PD and fighter cover is. Don't know if it being that harsh is a good or a bad thing though.

[Impedocles]

I noticed on my last start that the Consortium starting blueprint sells for $800k to the pirates.   Not sure if that's intended,  but it certainly makes starting as them a lot easier.  I've yet to see whether that makes the pirates start building consortium ships.

[Morrokain]

In my experience early pirates/luddics are pretty hard fights because a lot of the crappy early frigates they like to use come with built-in strikecraft, and it doesn't matter how crappy the strikecraft are if they outnumber you 3:1. It really drives home how important PD and fighter cover is. Don't know if it being that harsh is a good or a bad thing though.

Hmm. Well, ideally I want to start teaching those kinds of things early on. One thing that will likely help is the extra weapons on civilian ships. I think part of the difficulty in the early game is that retreating from a fight you can't win is extra difficult because strike craft swarms can take out your freighters and tankers very quickly- or pin them down for larger ships to catch them. So the added weapons will help with that a bit, though retreating is still difficult depending upon your fleet composition. That's one of the reasons (besides flavor) I spent a lot of time on the cease fire/bribery mechanic- to give players a possible way to avoid having to retreat every time they are caught by an enemy they can't fight.

Luddic Path tactically uses a lot less strike craft than pirates (I'm pretty sure) but teaches the player about fast and deadly strike-type builds since most of their ships have safety overrides installed or built in. That's the design goal, anyway.

I am also considering (alongside the general frigate speed boost) increasing the zero flux boost limitation on carriers slightly (30 or 40 instead of the current 20- vs the 80 non-carriers get) so that while they still can't kite they have a better chance of retreating. They will definitely still need escorts/sacrifices to distract the pursuing ships even then, though. One of the reasons I'm hesitant is I don't want light carriers like the Osprey to be able to kite indefinitely- but!- my thought process is that these ships are so lightly armed most of the time that other fighter/interceptor swarms can pin them down to allow destroyers to catch up. Assault frigates can likely catch them anyway but now destroyers probably can't unless they have speed mods or a speed boosting ship system.

Btw, I made the change to Combat Capacitors you suggested and wow does it make ships that have it scary! I like it, though it makes it necessary to buff midline ships practically across the board haha. That could in part be due to the changes to Photon Cannon and Excalibur though. Persean League ships perform better against high tech vessels and a lot worse against Hegemony/Luddic Church heavy armor. I buffed the hitpoints of the Atropos to give them a slightly more reliable anti-armor weapon. (Reapers seem better in every situation anyway) I also buffed the damage/armor penetration of the Graviton Beam and Graviton Lance but reduced those weapons range to compensate.

Not done testing all of this so we will see how it turns out.
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I noticed on my last start that the Consortium starting blueprint sells for $800k to the pirates.   Not sure if that's intended,  but it certainly makes starting as them a lot easier.  I've yet to see whether that makes the pirates start building consortium ships.

They probably will, I'd guess. It's not really intended, but not the worst thing considering getting that blueprint will be very hard otherwise. So if you don't care about your faction using Adamantine Consortium ships and would rather jump start the early game, I'd consider that fair.

It would be cool if I could make that give you a rep hit with the Consortium, though, because lore-wise that would probably be considered an insult to let "lowly pirate scum" use premium dreadships that were granted to you for your service to the barons. Might be too technically complicated to be worth it, but it was an initial thought.
----------------------------------------------------------------

All in all thanks for the feedback everyone. This update is shaping up to be pretty darn good, I think! It's also probably big enough to be out of "patch" territory and into "minor" update at this point.

Notes at this time: (Still testing so more things -including the above stuff I mentioned- will likely be added)

Spoiler

Campaign Content Additions and Balance Changes
-------------

 - Overall Campaign Changes:
-------------
    - Revamped most new factions colonies to better follow industry count rules per colony size and size standards within vanilla factions.
    - Reworked mod economy to be more even in market share and resource spread between factions (in general) while hopefully still nurturing trade opportunities for the player through the simulation environment.
   -NEX Changes
      - Adjusted vanilla factions' starting relationships, diplomacy chance, and max relationships for all new factions.
      - Adjusted some extremes within new factions' starting relations and diplomacy chances. (Trying to stick to lore intentions here, but still learning Nex to a large degree. A first pass.)
      - Added base raiding behavior and increased invasion power of Adamantine Consortium. (should have no allies and needs this to remain a threat to the player/sector is the idea, but feedback welcome)
                - Removed pirate behavior features for Nex with Adamantine Consortium and reduced colonization chance overall. (Still happens occasionally)

 --- Colony Changes:
-------------
    - Reduced Archean Order colony size for several colonies.
    - Removed Orbital Station from Xolydunne so it can be more easily raided.
    - Reduced the resource deposit quality for Ilyss and Arkmaros in some areas.
    - Reduced industry counts on many Adamantine Consortium colonies.
    - Added remote Luddic Church colony with refining, heavy industry and an additional military base with a large hazard rating.
    - Added two additional Sci-Corps colonies to better separate out industries and resources.
    - Removed Orbital Station from Yama and reduced the station at Nachiketa to an Orbital Station (down from a Battlestation).
    - Added Fuel Production and High Command to Gilead (based in the star fortress instead of the surface from a lore perspective)
    - Added Orbital Works to Tartesseus (again not on the surface- see above).
    - Increased size of Traveler's Triumph Station to 5 and added Heavy Industry.
    - Upgraded Traveler's Triumph Station to a Battlestation (up from an Orbital Station).
    - Removed Orbital Station from Salamanca to allow more raiding opportunities there.
    - Changed Kazeron's Military Base to a High Command.
    - Added a standard independent orbital station to Derinkuyu Mining Station to add to its defenses.
    - Removed patrol hq from Yesod and Ilm.
    - Changed ground defenses to heavy batteries on Yesod. Reduced heavy batteries to ground defenses on Mazalot.

 --- Fleet Composition Changes:
-------------
    - Reduced number of dedicated carriers in Hegemony fleets. (partly for vanilla lore adherence and also to create more faction variety in battle tactics between factions)

-----

Combat Balance Changes
-------------
 - Reduced sustained DPS of Micro Repeater and Dual Micro Repeater.
 - Revamped ballistic weapon FX under these principles:
   - Yellow-Orange-Red color indication of assault-heavy assault-strike weaponry.
   - Bullet size now scales by tier to facilitate an intuitive learning of combat threats to armor and better teach a player when to raise shields.
 - Doubled cooldown of Phase Teleporter.
 - Added weapon slots and increased OP (if necessary) to most civillian ships to help prevent them from being overly vulnerable against fighters and missiles during retreat battles.
 - Added additional weapon slots and increased OP of some pirate and luddic conversion vessels (they are too weak).
 - Added a rear-facing small weapon to the Valkyrie and Valkyrie MkII to help give minor protection to its engines against interdiction-class missiles and upgraded the Valkyrie's central missile weapon size to medium to better combat fighters.
 - Added a built-in beam range increase to the Onslaught XIV hull to support it's built in foward weapons. (The AI uses them as a cost effective alternative more often now - even when equipping Devastators)
 - Added 3 additional small weapons (rear-facing) to Buffalo MkII and reworked variants for better synergy in attack builds.
 - Reduced per shot damage of Excaliber Cannon and Apocalypse Cannon line of weapons. Increased recharge/fire rate for those as well.
 - Made some ballistic weapons Energy damage instead of High Explosive damage.
 - Increased Revenant, Paragon and Megalith armor, max flux, and deployment cost.
 - Increased Megalith, and Revenant flux dissipation.
 - Slightly increased Megalith's base speed, removed all carrier limitations and benefits hullmods and replaced the built-in Accelerated Shields with a larger built-in increase to shield speed)
 - Increased armor and hullpoints for:
    - Pirate Atlas and Prometheus conversions
 - Rebalanced high tier vessel deployment costs. (FP cost slightly adjusted in a couple cases but mostly the same from before)
 - Increased speed of missile projectiles from bombers.
 - Increased attack range for missile projectile bombers.
 - Reduced hitpoints of missile projectiles changed above.
 - Reduced speed of phase orbs from Phantom bombers. Reduced their hit points. Doubled their turn rate.
 - Increased flight time of Hivemind orbs.
 - Combat Capacitors now allows the 0-flux speed boost up until 90% flux while active.
 - Buffed bomber defense across the board. Most heavy strike bombers release their payloads from further away.
 - Increased bomber damage.
 - Increased Claw bomber weapon armor penetration and reduced burst duration for more salvo accuracy.
 - Terminator Drones and Goliath Heavy Gunships will no longer target missiles or strike craft with their weapons and will instead focus upon their intended ship targets.
 - Obliterator and Heavy Obliterator no longer target fighters. (AI won't put them on autofire either)
 - Reduced damage and flux cost but increased recharge time for Gatling Laser and Heavy Gatling Laser.
 - Increased Artillery Blaster range by 200.
 - Increased flux cost of Guillotine Cannon to better match the Heavy Fissure Cannon.
 - Reduced flux cost of Avalanche Cannon.
 - Reduced damage and flux cost per strike and reduced cooldown of the Tachyon Lance.
 - Removed built-in Safety Overrides on Atlas MkII. Increased OP. Added a new MIRV variant to pirate fleets.
 - Slightly increased Sabot missile line flight speed and hitpoints.
 - Reduced flux cost of Icer Gun and Iridium Cannon. Added flux per salvo info to Icer Gun.
 - Increased Odyssey max flux and dissipation.
 - Removed Apogee from being considered a combat carrier to the AI. It should act more aggressively with it's primary weapons now.
 - Increased burst damage/dps but reduced range for the Graviton Beam and Graviton Lance.
 - Increased flux per burst/second for the Graviton Lance.
 - Increased hitpoints of the Atropos line of torpedoes.
 - Greatly increased burst damage of Terminator Beam and reduced it's flux cost. Dps remains roughly the same. Considering increasing its ordinance cost.
 - Mining Blaster no longer generates flux (not sure what I was thinking there this weapon was terrible compared to other energy weapons)
 - Increased Hammerhead, Falcon, Eagle, Conquest and Executor max flux, armor, and dissipation.
-----


Bug Fixes
-------------
 - Updated Salvage Rig and Ox sprites and hullmods. (That slipped through the cracks apparently between my update from .8 and .9)
 - Fixed another rare yet likely possible occurance of the Hegemony Legion not being found while starting a new campaign and causing a crash. (I never encountered a crash, but I caught an outlier in the faction file that used the old id)
 - Fixed the cost of a couple buffalo variants.
 - Fixed some of the buffalo variants' weapon mounts. (they were supposed to be ballistic)
 - Corrected tech name and font color of the XIV Battlegroup vessels.
 - Added tech type to drones.
 - Removed Light Ion Cannon as a base blueprint in favor of it as a Sci-Corps weapon.
 - Removed duplicate industries and diplomacy traits for vanilla factions when running the TC with Nex.
 - Doubled turn rate of Hivemind Orb and Phase Orb to help prevent timeout from maneuverable targets which may cause friendly fire.
 - Decreased flux dissipation of Harbinger and Harbinger (Ad).
 - Increased armor, hull and deployment cost of Harbinger (Ad).
 - Increased price of Harbinger and greatly increased price of Harbinger (Ad).
-----


Misc
-------------
 - Reduced sound of Micro Repeater and Dual Micro Repeater.
 - Reduced bullet size of Micro Repeater and Dual Micro Repeater.
 - Removed override behavior of the mod on fighter wings, ships, ship systems, and weapons.
 - Reworked the pirate falcon sprite.
 - Removed all non-essential sprites from the graphics folder. (May improve load performance as lots of duplicates from vanilla were kept there as a refence when spriting)
 - Cleaned up a few more descriptions and encounter flavor dialogue. (I try to do this as often as I can but I always find more typos and awkard wording. I'll keep trying to clean this up as I go and as I notice things)
 - Updated descriptions based upon market changes in the campaign.
 - Fixed minor graphical discepancy with the Astral.
 - Increased Terminator Beam fx width.
-----

[close]

[Impedocles]

Fun fact: the toughest ship that a properly fit Harbinger AD can kill in a single burst is a Dominator heavy cruiser.  Phase through the ship to shoot it in the butt, uncloak and press F on it, then land 4 antimatter blaster shot and a reaper torpedo and it is scrap while you are exposed to fire for about 3 seconds.  I'm having a blast terrorizing the shipping lanes with my tiny fleet of frigates and destroyers, though.  So not really complaining.

[Morrokain]

Fun fact: the toughest ship that a properly fit Harbinger AD can kill in a single burst is a Dominator heavy cruiser.  Phase through the ship to shoot it in the butt, uncloak and press F on it, then land 4 antimatter blaster shot and a reaper torpedo and it is scrap while you are exposed to fire for about 3 seconds.  I'm having a blast terrorizing the shipping lanes with my tiny fleet of frigates and destroyers, though.  So not really complaining.

I'm not sure if it's in the notes to be honest since I've been changing things lightning fast (cascading balance changes) but I reduced its dissipation (and the main Harbinger as well) and increased its cost, but the AD version has slightly better armor and flux stats now (as well as higher deployment cost and overall cost).

Not that its a huge nerf by any means, though.

[Frod]

Hello again!

I've been trying new update for a while, playing with NEX additionally. It seems prety balanced, in economics and politics right now. Or may be it is just a lucky start, as I am trying not to influence the global situation and see how it would develop according to the faction domination.

But some complains. And again to the carriers. I have noticed that too many ships have too much fighter slots that makes them to be better than any carrier according they also can fit better weapons. for example eagle heavy cruiser. It has 4 slots for fighters. I ran simulation with elite version of it against the astral and it beat him 1 time from 5, under control of AI, not to say that under player control it would be 5/5, but let's be fair why it is even supposed to have a chance? Also I need to notice that if you order him to keep a distance from Astral the battle will long forever I guess, as it eliminates the aviation of the astral to the point of 30% rate replacement too quickly. But it is the comparison of a cruiser to the capital ship.

On the same hull level it is again better to fit not a carrier hulls because they sometime have even more slots for fighters, but have better wepons and miss a speed nerf.

Edited: also one note the Pilager class under controll of AI performs little strange to my mind even with simmetrical placement of his guns he is trying to face the enemy under angle and switching sides as if he is an Atlas or Conquest which have broadside weapons.
Edited2: made a closer look on his weaponary, and he has a lot broadside guns wich can't shoot forward, but still it makes no sence as I fit them with PD only.

[Frod]

And one more. While I was waiting for your last update I decided to play vanila a little. I haven't played it for may be 2 or 3 years, and when I returned to the game I installed your mod first.

So to the point: in vanila I can play some simple battles almost without issuing an orders, so for example we have a battlecruiser with 2 cruiser cover, and our enemies are 1 pirate cruiser with several freighters. So I usually just make an escort from my cuisers for battlecruiser and watch enemies dying. So what sometimes happens here: my main ship having superiority in range, power and in flux can decide that he needs to retreat. And I don't know how exactly but he is doing that faster than his escort having a lower speed by the way. Thereby I can loose a cruiser in the situation where all the battle can be made by only 1 our ship. Of course it is fixing by simple issuing an attack order, but I really think it should be not necessary to do this. I don't know why it is happening beecause all the officers I have are agressive and reckless, and I don't have flux problems, I can only assume that it reatreats to regroup it's fighters lost on enemy PD, but it is rather stupid. Also I have encountered another problem with AI I haven't met in vanila yet. So you have a frontline, with heavy ship in center and flanks covered, so our battleship fights enemy battleship and everything goes fine, untill the moment some phase frigate appears on our flank. "Oh, it is not a problem I have some cruisers to deal with him" you think. "But wait battleship what are you doing, why are you facing that frigate?? You have enemies in front!!" So even having allies between the flanking enemy and my main ship, sometimes I have a situation when it starts facing it and trying to attack and pursue it, thereby making a mess to formation and bumping allies. How the ship considers what threat is bigger? And why it don't take his allies into this consideration? So roughly saying in vanila formations are much more stable. To the good point, enemies are much more agressive and trying to flank more often compared to vanila.

So it is only my experience, and may be I am doing something wrong, but still wanted to share with you.

[Albreo]

Well, no they should be good. Not sure why this would happen to be honest. It appears like they should autoresolve at a higher win rate according to FP stats.

I don't have much chance to observe it but one time I saw 4 Paragons vs 3 moderate size pickets + battle station(not sure which size) and it lost trying to reclaim its rightful planet, that's where I got my first Paragon from. I have revived Tri-tac for a second time and they went all out with Archean Order, orbital bombardment, and whatnot. I thought I would be able to remediate with agents but, nope, it lockout at -100 as in lore. Oh boy. So they went extinct this time for sure with Eochu Bres decivilized.

Onslaught(XIV) is 30+9 now (iirc) (nope checked and still 30+5) and it's Terminator Beams are longer ranged now and represent a cost efficient alternative and higher OP opportunities. This really improved the AI's use of them, specifically.

Have you rechecked the deployment cost yet? cause in my deployment screen I'm able to deploy Onslaught XIV for only 30 deployment points where it should be 35. But in XIV tooltip actually state that it increases deployment cost by 10%. Wouldn't it be 33 instead?

Another weird thing is that when I raided Adamantine planet, the Hegemony gets angry at me for no reason (already -100 with my faction) and sent an invasion fleet immediately on top of the Adamantine vengeance fleet (they were -100 hostile with each other). I also put AD at -100 with pirate so they duke it out in their system, very fun.

I actually want a character skill that increases the com sniffer counts that can't be detected.

[Morrokain]

I don't have time to reply in detail to the last few posts yet, but I wanted to briefly say I have read them and and will be reviewing the details there. Thanks and keep the reviews/experiences coming! 

@Frod
On the escort issues you are having, do you mind specifically letting me know your build on all 3 ships? I want to reproduce this behavior and see if there is anything I can do to improve it. Generally I can't do much with the AI, but if vanilla is acting better then there might be things I can do. At the very least, I can explain why its happening and give advice on how to avoid it. My initial guess is the escorts are slower (which makes escorts generally not act the way you want them to) and in vanilla those same ships might be faster than the battlecruiser.

[DatonKallandor]

I ran simulation with elite version of it against the astral and it beat him 1 time from 5, under control of AI, not to say that under player control it would be 5/5, but let's be fair why it is even supposed to have a chance?

I'd hope a Cruiser (and the Eagle is one of the best cruisers) beats a lone unprotected carrier. Carriers are support ships.

[Frod]

I'd hope a Cruiser (and the Eagle is one of the best cruisers) beats a lone unprotected carrier. Carriers are support ships.

Sorry for late reply.

True, what you say. But the balance negates the role of CV even if it is support. What is the point to have it, if eagle has 4 slots for fighters.
Roughly saying first I was very happy to see every ship has more slots for aviation. But in fact you don't need special ships that carry it, as the difference in slots for carrier is too little to compensate it's insufficiency in other aspects.
Obviously I like carriers and fighters, and my opinion can be little prejudiced. But what I see now, carriers lost their special role, as any other ship can carry lot of fighters. Also PD impact is much higher cause of additional small slots. And this impacts my gameplay where I want to see ships of the line holding the front and CV's dealing the main damage using aviation. The second one can't influence the battle the way they should. So in general it doesn't really matter how many carriers you have but it only matters how many ships you have to achive air supperiority. In fact it does that you can't choose your play style. Like choosing between artillery firepower and strong PD, or strong air force to inflict massive  damage from greater distance. Because we can have it all in one. That is just my point of view. I like this mod.

[Frod]

On the escort issues you are having, do you mind specifically letting me know your build on all 3 ships? I want to reproduce this behavior and see if there is anything I can do to improve it. Generally I can't do much with the AI, but if vanilla is acting better then there might be things I can do. At the very least, I can explain why its happening and give advice on how to avoid it. My initial guess is the escorts are slower (which makes escorts generally not act the way you want them to) and in vanilla those same ships might be faster than the battlecruiser.

The BC is pillager fited with velocity cannons almost like standart fit and cruisers are eagles with beam weaponary. I will check it more precise when I am back to the game, as I don't remeber now. But the fact is that the speed of escort is higher.

[Morrokain]

Took a break for a ~week to avoid burnout. 

I've been reading this thread though and appreciate the feedback here. Some things like escort issues seem like they might be difficult to tackle, but they are on the list!

@Frod on carriers:

The trade off for their low speed and lack of weapons (compared to hybrid/combat ships) is not just more bays, but far more efficient bays (the replacement rate of fighters on carriers is increased by 60% iirc) so in this case the problem probably stems from two things:

1) Even with the hullmod giving a description of this behavior, it must not be communicated very well in combat or it is not effective enough to give carriers a true role. I'd imagine this mostly manifests itself in the early game the most, when fighter options are more limited and light carriers can't really shine as support vessels compared to their combat equivalents.

2) Carriers (as a category) generally have slightly higher deployment costs over combat equivalents. This is because carriers can concentrate firepower better than any other vessel, but it is also there for performance reasons since strike craft take up a lot of system resources.

So, a possible change would be to increase the effect of the hullmod for carriers and further reduce general deployment rates, but there is another thing to consider in the example of the Eagle vs Astral:

The Eagle's ship system actually makes it sort of like a battlecarrier (intended) because it can replace strike craft far more quickly than other cruisers like the Dominator. The Dominator has a couple bays, sure, but it can't replace interceptors all that fast and bombers take so long to replace that the OP that bombers require would likely be better spent on weapons/flux stats that take advantage of the Dominator's ship system. (Burst firepower and speed at the cost of shields.)

Bombers will be better in the next update so that will probably inherently help the CV class as a whole.

The BC is pillager fited with velocity cannons almost like standart fit and cruisers are eagles with beam weaponary. I will check it more precise when I am back to the game, as I don't remeber now. But the fact is that the speed of escort is higher.

Thanks this is helpful to know. Especially that the speed of the escorts is higher. I'll test some things out in the simulator.
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Update: I may release a build today for testing. I am going to put a note in the post that its less tested on balance than usual- though I don't *think* I've introduced any more bugs or anything. I am going camping this weekend (finally getting some fresh air  ) and wanted to give everyone something to play for the weekend!

After this update, I will likely release a small update rather quickly after that which will address any balance feedback from the release today and also get to some other things on the list/recent feedback.