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I appreciate the feedback! As you mentioned, this isnt an ideal fleet setup & isnt my permanent setup (the destroyer is only slinging triple burst lasers bc I havent found anything else to put on it yet (everyone is mad at me! :c ). I am on the hunt for a HVD cruiser to pilot as the lynch-pin to my weird fleet & until then every fight is gonna be a chore, so I don't expect the AI to win battles with it without me micromanaging it right now, but this setup is exposing weird flaws with the AI -- ones that I remember from 2017.
One thing specifically I wanted to point out; you said my destroyer with heavy burst lasers is losing a ranged war against the mauler it's going up against, and that's why it's darting in, firing off 1 round then backing out. The thing is... that's... the absolute worst thing it can do when it's losing the ranged war. If u lose the ranged war hopelessly (ur maxed out before u even lay hands on the enemy) u should, back go in on them & lay the smack-down, vent once in their face (unless they have a hangman's noose loaded in their missile slots) and then see if u can make them vent before u have to vent a second time.
Also, yeah my fleet requires focus fire. The thing is, I had been trying to get my fleet to focus fire for most of this playthru & aside from manually eliminate ordering my entire fleet onto 1 enemy I can't figure out how to get them to do it -- the reason my cruiser has the cautious officer is bc if it attacks an enemy then the destroyer (even when it had ion & graviton beams, back before it blew up & I lost them) & the frigate sit in its shadow & don't help it. Also don't put too much stock into what officers I have on which ship, I've been cycling them seeing if there was a setup that made them Perform
I actually was just about to make a feedback post for Alex about this, I was testing what happens if u go into missions, give an Aurora maxed flux cap & all defensive hullmods, mining lasers in all its small slots, ran a simulation and faced it off against the assault wolf and discovered that the Aurora, despite being theoreticaly
undamagable by that wolf, will actually lose that fight over time (not accounting for timing out), bc the Aurora will sit back at its own max range(less than the wolf's) & strafe, back out some of the time despite being given theoretically 0 threat by that wolf letting the wolf get in a bunch of free shots, and also sometimes drops its shields in the wolf's face & eats several shots from its medium energy slot despite being at less than 1% flux. Something is
definitely up with the AI. When I pilot (yes I know AI wont perform as well as a player, shush im testing here) having stripped all mining lasers & giving the ship just 1 , if I press R, T, 2, M2, hold shift & w and just test what happens when the ship is piloted by the simplest AI possible (same level as a TF2 pyro bot, or worse,
a TF2 pyro player), "move towards enemy at all times with shields up letting the gun's AI do all the thinking, vent then pop ship's mobility system when the enemy is too far to shoot me", I max out the wolf's flux stats before it can do any damage to me or even get my flux off of the flux.
In fact, Alex might be playtesting this game with people who know how the game likes to be played, let me restart with no mods (god i hope i remember which mods break my game if i activate them...) & test this like I hate this game. Um, well first thing I've confirmed is that in the vanilla simulator there is no non-pirate wolf? huh??? Anyway, against pirate wolf variant 1 (

?) my maxed out defenses & flux cap Aurora with 1 ir pulser in its front radial mount on autopilot knuckled up to the wolf, and after the second blaster hit from the wolf vented in its face & ate missiles blowing thru its armor immediately so it immediately fails this test. So I take the ir pulse laser off, equip it with all mining lasers, start the simulation, then realize how long this is gonna be
without the speedup time mod, restart the game in windowed mode so I can leave this running on my side monitor while I harass people I like on twitter until they fear for their lives. I re-did the 1 ir pulse laser test to confirm that it wasnt a fluke that the Aurora dropped shields & ate blaster to the face for no reason, confirm that it wasn't a fluke. Testing the mining lasers, I leave it running & type "POGGO" and "PLAY A DIFFERENT GAME" and "LOL IMAGINE ONLY HAVING 100K VIEWERS KEKW WASHUP" into the chat of the highest viewcount twitch streamer until the wolf starts to break down from CR loss & I can confirm that it didnt take any damage aside from dropping shields in the Aurora's face, which my Aurora also did. Now to idiot test this setup; I reset, same wolf, R T M2 2 SHIFT+W & press F every time it gets out of range, and the wolf vents while being focused by 9 mining lasers and is melted after, like, 4 seconds.
I got bored of the Aurora so I booted up the Medusa, threw beams onto it & it seems fine in the simulator against both bigger & smaller targets, same with beam TTBrawler. So I guess issues I was having with the brawler in-game was down to too much threat for it to function? One thing I did note (having reactivated mods so I can test this with the mod mission with all ships in it) is the Brawler having trouble providing close support against a carrier, but its proving too hard to test this bc anything large enough to be an overwhelming threat by itself has so many fighters that I get insta-died before I can get into range of it -- nothing has as poor of a fighter contingent as the Astral with a couple wasps I faced IRL bc in try mode everything gets exactly what their specs call for, & I cant customize enemies in sim. Plus recreating the conditions I was in of a 30 ship battle with plenty of stuff to distract the fighters while me & my wingman burned up to the flagship is proving too much work & now Im too tired to keep doing this atm