@Goumindong
RE: discussion of armor and the flux war
I will comment that a key assumption of the flux battle analysis was that ships fight to the death always. That guarantees that spending armor will result in a flux advantage and eventually a kill. The concern when that assumption breaks is that the AI will spend armor to gain an advantage in the flux war, but then the enemy will escape/vent and the armor will be wasted. A perfect AI actually needs to identify situations where it can
successfully spend armor to win the flux war
and deal damage/kill. I think I understand Alex's reasoning: this is actually a very difficult judgement, and making the AI use armor as a defensive resource when flux is high ensures that the armor will get some value in allowing for a retreat/escape or extended engagement. Maybe a better solution still exists, but you definitely don't want the AI wasting all it's armor when it can't get much benefit either. I think you do definitely want the AI to use shields at lower flux to avoid slowly getting armor chipped down while never achieving anything.
I actually think the current AI behavior can be good at exploiting itself too. If you put an aggressive AI in a dominator, it will lets its flux get very high, then drop shields. The enemy AI will think that it has a big flux advantage because your flux is high and try to push in for a kill, but it's actually just dumping damage into armor while the dominator is getting its hits in as well. Maybe it would work if the flux level required to drop shields was lower when armor was higher. Like if the armor is nearly full, then drop shields at 60% flux instead of 95% flux.
Personally, I think Onslaughts are OK. It's armor mechanics and heavy armor that I have problems with. Onslaught is a useful illustrative example, though, because it has extremely high armor and bad shields. And even for Onslaught, a single tier-1 skill will totally eclipse its stripped armor performance, making it worse than the stripped armor mitigation of a Kite with a level-1 Captain.
This isn't really accurate though. Stripped armor performance is a multiplier on hull HP and the onslaught has waaaay more hull, so the stripped armor on the un-officered onslaught will still provide waaaaay more effective HP than the officered kites stripped armor. The onslaught gets an additional ~10000 HP vs a 100 dmg weapon from its 87.5 residual armor while the kite gets an additional 276 HP from its 165 residual armor with IM1. There's no comparison, the kite takes an extra 3 pulse laser shots to kill while the onslaught takes an extra 100+ pulse laser shots to kill beyond the number of shots to kill the bare hull on each ship. Residual armor works fine.
Uhhh I am using onslaught as an example because it is the only vanilla ship designed as an armor tank?
The dominator exists. I think it is an excellent example of a ship that is fairly balanced against other ships of its size while relying on high armor for a significant portion of its defense. The mora is also a decent example, and maybe the legion if it didn't play like a terrified carrier all the time.