Might I ask what load out you give those armored shepherds? Perhaps I was doing it wrong.
I guess I forgot to iterate that I'm planning to make this mod have ships that do great when time and effort is put into them (and maybe officers). I've been testing the hulls against vanilla and modded factions. Different layouts most appearing pretty wonky and nonstandard seem to work best. I know King Alfonz said that the ships were designed to meaningfully capable but not the best but it doesn't hurt to try and make them stand up to actual combat vessels. Rn the Junker fleet excels in one on one fighting with seriously cost efficient fighter support. I can see the scarecrow being used as a artillery esque ship and the Brilliant as a fleet anchor, however these are a lot harder to test because the cockroach and king roach hulls kill things in seconds.
Just imagine a space colony from the edges of space that everyone presuemd died off comes back with an armada of scav hulls for the sake of 'exploration'. The Hmi tends to prefer building the junker hulls and rarely add the scav hulls, so I feel like my own force in the galaxy
Impressions of over 5 straight days of campaign and simulator work with HMI.
1. A lot of the junker ships are well balanced for a direct assault role and conditional heavy firepower support. I particularly love it when my SO cockroach can just decimate frigates (or anything) that gets too close. Same for the king roach.
2. The scav hulls I've tested a lot less but the Berserker, Rampart are really good carrier hulls that cost nothing to maintain. The Brilliant and Scarecrow still going through a lot of testing. Armored Shepherd good in mass numbers as a sort of frigate based pd, lack the range and DPS to really kill frigates.
3. the illegal goods I haven't tested much but most modded factions correctly label them as illegal after a while.
4. It's possible to make a competent low maintenance armada that can practically fight anything from any mod with the cockroach, king roach, junk and berserker/rampart fleet. Playstyle is either fight or die trying (incredibly sustained damage output with my current comp though, win by attrition all the time). Distinct weakness against Dvarion, Blackrock and Dssault modded factions as they ships are just too fast and kite able to handle (which is why I'm testing the other hulls so much to cover that flaw)
5. The new weapons in the mod are excellent for mining, the more combat oriented ones seem to work better with magazine expansion which is a nice touch. Still testing that last bit tho. Also devastator cannon and seth drone fabricators are stupidly fun to play with.
6. Testing the scintilla battle carrier hull, nice 2 fighter capacity and 12 DP only. I'm guessing the fighter recall ability is what really strikes it out vs the Rampart/ Berserker hulls. Probably not intended for the AI to use well though.
7. Yeeting through the sector useing 200 fuel to move my army of picket and sentries isn't fun. Zerging the enemy at 10:1 is though.
8. Spent 5 hours on the scarecrow. Much like the eagle, it's very reliant on it's shield because the second it gets hit on the hull, it loves to turn right around and stop firing, unlike the eagle though it can't really kite and thus it's as good as dead once the shield is down. Speccing it more heavily on flux capacity now. Armored Shepherd still faring quite poorly, I'd say make it slower, and give more range and large cones of fire for the heavy borer drone instead. It like to run away and get hammered into oblivion, an escort drone carrier shouldn't be trying to fly like the wolf, added range on the drones would allow it to cover it's escort much better and decreased speed would make it make in on par with the hmi fleets (escorting the junk and zeu for example)