Thank you everyone for the feedback about missiles! I appreciate it; took some notes.
I am a bit curious where your ideas for the elite Impact Mitigation effect are going, given the 90% max mitigation being duplicated in Polarized armor. Where you looking for something that helps at high armor levels and or small weapon hits (which is what the 85%-90% does), but doesn't quite stack so much (1/3 less damage during the maximum mitigation period extends it by a factor of 1.5,.e. 50% more, while 2/3 extends it by by a factor of 3).
...
Would something like a simple 10% more real armor, or +75/150/200/250 (tweak numbers as needed) real extra armor based on size, repaired instantly at the end of every engagement work? Where "repaired" is just the has an elite Impact Mitigation officer piloting it at deployment time, so it adds say +250 to whatever the armor was there as the ship is deployed into the fight. At the end, if it's over normal maximum in any cell, just remove excess.
I'm actually pretty open to what the effect might be - ideally it'd be something that's at least semi-interesting gameplay-wise, and also doesn't come with the problem of, for example, making most kinetics near-useless vs hull, like +150 effective armor did.
The issue with +X armor (not effective, just at the start) is that it wouldn't apply once command is transferred. Generally, the goal of the design is to have skill effects transfer over - although a couple do break that rule; most notably Missile Specialization. I kind of wonder - is "giving your intended flagship to an officer with Missile Spec, and probably Reliability Engineering, and then transferring command to it after deployment to benefit from about an extra skill's worth of stuff" at all a thing? I'd guess it's probably not quite worth it, but if we pile on more bonuses that work like this...
I do really like the idea of linking officers to fleet wide carrier bonuses. Which in some way lets you say "These fighter bays are more important than those fighter bays". This is perhaps a silly question, but would it be simpler to tie "fleet wide" fighter bonuses to the presence of an officer on the ship just like how Wolf pack tactics works? As opposed to the more complicated double the bonus if officer is present interaction?
It's not a silly question! It's a really good one; it's great to consider whether simplifying something drastically is a viable or not, and I know sometimes for me it can be a bit hard to step back enough to see the simplification options.
In this case, though, I think keeping the option of "non-officered carriers as support ships to your officered ships" is valuable. Especially in light of Support Doctrine being a top-tier skll in the same tree as the fleetwide carrier skills, and that providing bonuses specifically to non-officered ships.
(Wolfpack Tactics with some frigates and destroyers to get maximum officers on the field, supported with some carriers, sounds like it could be fun!)
Ordos with Radiants make every other recurring fight look like midgame chumps, even named bounties that are worth about 350k. (It was less extreme before 0.95, the gameplay changes really benefitted the Remnants.)
I keep forgetting that all of my recent testing has been with Radiants at 60 DP; that skews my viewpoint quite a bit. Of course, they also basically never get "dud" loadouts now, either...
Though I do have a question. With the Elite effect of damage control, does this apply to beam weapons like the Tachyon lance that do more than 500 damage, but not in a singular hit?
It doesn't - as you noted, beam damage is not dealt in a single hit!
(This reminds me, I've been wanting to tweak the Tesseract fight. It's *supposed* to get harder once you destroy one of them, but that doesn't seem like it's holding up at all.)
In my experience, it really does work that way - the worst thing to do against the Tesseracts is to just kill both of them at once, and taking out all the shards is where the meat of the fight is. My most successful fights against these things typically involve using my flagship to lure one of them away and keep it busy while the rest of my fleet deals with the other, just to avoid killing the second one off until the first one's shards have been at least mostly finished off.
I agree with Wyvern re: tesseracts. A whole one with an aggressive loadout has more danger of just singling out and popping a destroyer (or sometimes cruiser if the AI drops its shield at the wrong time), but once one splits things get very hectic and ships get flanked badly. I also try to stall one while mopping up another.
Hmm, interesting! That wasn't the impression I'd gotten from watching people taking them on, so that's especially ... well, interesting. Maybe it's just not harder-*enough* compared to what I was aiming for.
(One thought I've been mulling over was swapping ship systems around on the Tesseract and the Facet. It'd make the Tesseract tankier but less dangerous, and seems like it should up the danger level of the Facets quite a bit...)
Yeah, I wish I had better footage on hand 
. It's sort of a popular enough opinion on the Discord that no one's felt the need to do a dedicated showcase for it, I suppose.
I'd still say that yes, it generalizes. The point about not having allies to retreat behind is valid, but in fleet scenarios you could similarly have cases where a ship is blocked from behind by its allies. And PD grids are a thing, but even then it doesn't take many Harpoons to knock out any overloaded ship on the front-line before it can retreat (excepting solid interceptor / Paladin PD coverage).
Steady/Timid Tesseracts would be nightmarish, but they have a combination of speed and tanki-ness that is unmatched excepting Radiants (kind of, and they're Fearless as well anyways), Auroras, Hyperions and maaybe Medusas. I doubt that personality changes would save any other ship. Fair point regarding RFC here; I wanted to make a more general point that even armor-tanking the Sabots wouldn't be great here despite the EMP damage reduction, but it's a rather clumsy exhibit for that.
I would wager that the nature of Sabots providing extremely easy overloads (or, while not particularly relevant in this instance, shutting down the entirety of a ship's weaponry and easily winning the flux war) compared to needing a sustained combination of various weapons does make this fight significantly harder than without them.
(I guess it's not super helpful since I'm arguing the opposite side, but I would not be excited to have to try to win this same fight refitted without Sabots (half is still probably reasonably doable but honestly I'd doubt it'd outperform Vlad's current loadouts), and I love a challenge :p)
Hmm. I wonder if maybe halving the EMP damage on the Sabots would put them in a better place, then. I still think they need to have an effect when armor-tanked, but the specific numbers on it, on the other hand...
And, hm, just making the AI better about armor-tanking Sabots could make a big difference here, though that's tricky.
Regardless, I appreciate your elaborating!
Do NPC fleets get access to player skills? There are quite a few skills that provide major boosts to a fleet and could dramatically impact its combat doctrine. If human fleets seem lacking, maybe that's the extra edge they need?
They do, yeah! But so do the Remnant fleets.
What factions will have access to the new ships, aside from pirates as it's obvious from the patch notes? I'd take a guess and say Hegemony will at least have some but I hope other factions get a bit more distinguished from the rest. For example I don't know if Luddic Church has anything unique in their roster. Sorry if I'm mistaken or if this was already answered somewhere.
Some will; I don't remember off the op of my head.
As opposed to just getting wiped, I'd say. My issue with story points to escape a tough battle is that you can only do it before even trying. When you try to win against superior enemy (which I do most of the time, because those are the most interesting fights) but the battle goes badly, story points won't save you, and you will still be tempted to alt+f4. I'd be really cool if you could use a story point during a fight to instantly escape.
Hmm - interesting idea - let me make a note to have a quick look! (And a bit of a think, too...)
