Minor pet peeve #1: An unlimited number of Mercenary Officers is overpowered. For (endgame) AI fleets it makes these fleets too strong compared to a normal/casual player fleet, because Officer Skills provide a massive boost to a ship's strength. It is also abusable by the player in an unfun way: grind XP to stockpile ~100 story points, then hire ~20 Mercenaries and go on a rampage. That strategy shouldn't be required to beat the endgame. >>> Solution: limit number of Mercenary Officers to 1/2 the number of normal Officers, for both Player and AI. >>> Is this achieved for AI by setting "officerAIMaxMercsMult" to 0.5?
Minor pet peeve #2: Random Officers potentially being better than the best Officers you can train normally (with Officer Training skill) is BAD and should be removed. Because becoming as strong as you can be should primarily depend on invested effort, not on luck. Luck should affect whether you reach max power faster or slower, but it should always be possible to compensate for bad luck by trying harder. That is exactly how it works for Blueprints, where you can raid factions for ones you can't find in salvage.
>>> This can be changed with "maxSleeperPodsOfficerLevel" setting?
Minor pet peeve #3: Why Missile Specialization and Energy Weapon Specialization but not Ballistics Specialization? Naïvely I would say that means either Ballistics miss out, or missile/energy weapons are underpowered without their appropriate skill. I think the latter is certainly the case for missiles (primarily because limited ammo is too limited sometimes), and probably also for energy weapons (although the high flux stats of high-tech ships compensate for that already).
Minor pet peeve #4: Flet makes a good argument
here about how ECM mechanics are all-or-nothing, which can lead to 'wasted' investment of Hullmods and skills if you don't get your rating up high enough. Having said that: the new maximum penalty of -10% range is low enough to accept if you don't want to invest in ECM so it's not all bad. And the difference between -10% and +10% is still enough to warrant fully investing in ECM.
Minor pet peeve #5: Hiruma Kai makes a good analysis
here and
here to argue that 0.9.5 has nerfed armor tanking in favor of shield tanking, and in general nerfed defense in favor of offense. This worries me because (1) I like tanking and (2) 0.9.1 already favored shields. In 0.9.1, the best defensive hullmod for an Onslaught was Hardened Shields, not Heavy Armor, which feels wrong for a low-tech ship. In 0.9.1 Heavy Armor was defensive hullmod priority #6 for me on Onslaught, after Hardened Shields, Solar Shielding, Resistant Flux Conduits, Reinforced Bulkheads and Armored Weapon Mounts. In 0.9.5 I might favor it over Reinforced Bulkheads, but only because the higher OP cost is negated by making it permanently built-in.
Minor pet peeve #6: I agree with the point raised in
this post about how the game is too easy. At least it was in 0.9.1 and I haven't seen anything that would significantly change that. More specifically, jumping from the early to the late game is way the hell too fast, to the point where it doesn't feel like there is a substantial mid-game. Previously in 0.9.1 I did a playthrough with 5x cost for ships and weapons and that was still quite manageable if you know what you're doing. The only drawback was that replacing lost ships or paying for D-mod removal got expensive quickly.
There are mods and settings that up the challenge in some ways and that's good, and you can use self-imposed challenges (my fav is not allowed to use black market, ever) but it feels like there's a more fundamental pacing issue in that the early-and especially mid-game is too short. Not sure if there's an easy fix for that though - and not all players may want that fix, so maybe an optional gamemode? - because a lot of simple tweaks like slower XP gain or higher prices could just make the game feel more grindy instead of more fun. This might be a me-thing though since I love slower/longer playthroughs.
Good player-adjustable bounty levels *should* help, if it works properly, because bounty difficulty escalated way too quickly in 0.9.1.
Another part of the problem is it's too easy to explore and salvage the galaxy with a small fleet. There just aren't enough systems that are too dangerous to explore with a fleet of say 3 mules and 3 combat destroyers (particularly if you use stealth), but not so dangerous that you need an endgame fleet. My personal preference would be that a basic fleet of Apogee + 3-4 frigate/destroyer escorts (about 50 DP worth of combat ships) and some civilian ships shouldn't be able to safely survey more than 40-50% of planets.
TL;DR there need to be more challenges appropriate for a 50-100 DP fleet!
Minor pet peeve #7: not a priority, but one can dream :p I'd like better/more options for controlling ship AI behavior, most notably Aggressive officers who don't count PD weapons for determining engagement range. Ideally I'd want independent ways to toggle preferred engagement range, flux level at which AI retreats, aggression towards high-flux/overloaded opponents, and ratio of Fighter Escort/Attack. Probably too much to ask though.
And a way to tell ships to not launch anti-armor missiles like Hurricanes, Annihilators or Reapers towards targets with low flux, because that is a major contributor to AI prematurely running out of ammo. Or to not launch Swarmers against Destroyers and up. Or to not launch Squall against Frigates. Et cetera :p
>>> This is moddable to an extent? E.g. removing the hint CONSERVE_5 from Hurricanes in weapon_data.csv makes the AI use them similar to Harpoons? Or giving it CONSERVE_FOR_ANTI_ARMOR? Or setting PD_ONLY for Swarmers? Guess I'll have to play around with that...
