Hi creature,
I'm loving your mod. The super ship missile destroyer is one of the fastest-paced, bullet-helliest ships I've seen anyone make in Starsector to date. Good job! It's a great contribution to Starsector and the modiverse as a whole.
I'd like to mention a few points of feedback on ship stats that felt weird or out of place;
1: All of your destroyers are base burn 8.
-In vanilla starsector, destroyers are base burn speed 9, unless they also have the Civilian Hull built-in hullmod, in which case they're 8. (That hullmod allows the player to install Militarized Subsystems to remove the debuffs, improving burn speed to 9).
Seeing all your destroyers at 8 felt strange, because they're the same burn speed as your cruisers- it blurs the lines between the ship classes. You may wish to up the burn rate of your military destroyers (the 611 and 656's?) to 9, and on the others (which seem to be freighter conversions or other odd slapdash ships) add Civilian Hull instead.
2: Most of your ships have
extremely high Peak Performance Time. I'm getting that it seems to be a faction particular perk of your mod, but it's so out of whack with vanilla content that it seems really strange, and it's not really explained to the player why it's so high.
Generally in Vanilla, frigates are 180-240, destroyers are 360-420, cruisers are 480-540, and capital ships are 600-720.
You've got destroyers at 600, a cruiser at 800ish, a capital ship at 1300ish, etc.
It's cool to have higher PPT be a feature of your faction, but I'd suggest implementing it in a way that makes it very clear to the player, such as:
-Set each base ships PPT to a value within the norm for vanilla
-Add +60 PPT to the faction built-in hullmod that you have on every ship, and put that in the description. That way PPT will show in green as buffed on your ships, and players will know it's a faction perk.
3: Your battlecruiser has the CARRIER tag in hulls.csv. So does your missile destroyer (the 656). That tag affects AI behavior, and so is usually saved for ships that the player would want to stay well away from combat. That might make sense on the missile destroyer, but on the battlecruiser it may in many cases make the AI want to avoid enemies, which would feel weird.
Related: It might also improve the player experience to add the tag "NO_AUTO_ESCORT" to many of your ships with fighter bays or built in wings. That tag tells the AI not to send their wings to escort the player-flown ship, which carriers without it will often do instead of sending them on their own attack missions or using them against their own targets.
4: I see you wrote that you have a custom ship you'd like to someday have as a special bounty or mission reward! That's awesome.
Have you considered integrating it with 'Vayra's Sector' as a High-Value Bounty?
Vayra has made an example mini-mod to show how to set up High Value Bounties- it's pretty simple! Just set up the data right and players running your mod together with Vayra's Sector will see your bounty pop up when the conditions you set (minimum game date, player fleet size, etc.) are met.
Here's a link to Vayra's mini-mod with an example High Value Bounty.
http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=16347.msg259773#msg259773I hope some of this feedback is useful to you! Take what sounds good to you, and drop the rest- you're the mod author, and this is your creative work. Thank you for sharing it!
-solar