First I'll give some context as to how I play the game, starting with a mod list which I use to facilitate needs/wants and as workarounds for specific mechanics; I don't use any ship pack and I play vanilla with each major update to get a feel for the newest version.
Mods:
A New Level of Confidence (40 standard speed)
Adjustable Skill Thresholds
Another Portrait Pack
Concord
Console Commands
Fair S Mods
Interesting Portraits Pack
Lazylib
Magiclib
Nexerelin
Officer Extension
Speedup
Terraforming and Station Construction
Transfer All Items
Unknown Skies
Self Imposed Rules: No purchasing warships above destroyer, civilian ships above cruiser, or marines except from military markets that I have the required reputation/comission to do business with. Tempest is an exception and the above rules apply. Anything from contacts or bar opportunities is fair game.
With that said, I'll Start first with my rules, then mods, and lastly move on to other suggestions
*It is too easy to walk in and buy a cruiser or capital ship or three in pristine condition from the black market, which also seems to have better selection and quality than the open market. I feel like this also undermines the purpose of developing contacts for their benefits and searching for other opportunities.
*The rule for the Tempest is because I can acquire it at the beginning, use it forever, and I feel that there is no better choice for later game frigate duty, Omen comes in second but it has far less bite. Everything else has to be overdriven to compare thus ruining it's combat longevity.
*Contacts and bar opportunities: Contact bounties are almost always ridiculously far away, and have no in system location description like normal bounties. If you find yourself in an enormous system, it is possible to spends weeks or even months searching for your quarry.
Trade contacts start really small scale and even when built on still don't compare to the lucrative deliveries that you can be offered in the bar (the ones that scale with your cargo capacity). The old freighters that they offer are typically small and have multiple d-mods, which can make them neigh unusable because they will always get the same very bad d-mods; like degraded drive field.
Any contact that you make first has to be found as a bar opportunity first, and after the completion of their task only has a chance to become a contact. Fly to the corner of the galaxy to take out a way less convenient target only to get no followup on that contact? I would rather have it guaranteed but cost a story point, and also cost no story point to abandon a contact.
Lastly on bar opportunities, I don't bother with a lot of them because they scale poorly, or were never worth doing in any circumstance.
Next are suggestions related to the mods that I have chosen:
*The first suggestion based on a mod is a big one: I use a level cap of 40 despite the ability to become overpowered simply because its fun. The biggest reason I was able to play Warband for thousands of hours is because of the slow drip of improvement. I could always improve my character and my followers, even at a slowing rate, and it was fine because it is a single player sandbox, and I never felt a lack of satisfaction for it there, or here despite the skill system being designed around 15. In fact the only time i get that kind of cheaty, unsatisfied feeling is actually just from smuggling. I also find the pacing to be off, like not even having a colony or being finished with the story before I am nearly 15.
*Skill thresholds; I don't have much to say about it really, I just don't like not getting the full benefit of a skill when it is one of the few choices that I get. There are also some silly things, like shepherds counting against your carrier count, thus hurting the performance of your real carriers.
*Allow autoresolve for things that are just a waste of time. I find myself using the console most of the time to nuke enemy fleets that I'm going to win against with no losses, like derelict groups or fragments that can't be autoresolved. In addition, autoresolve is very generous when it comes to deleting large amounts of enemy ships, but it is very bad at actually cleaning up rabble like it is supposed to do. I frequently have to chase and watch my second in command only get one or sometimes none of the remaining enemies until they have no CR left, at which point you have to engage manually anyway.
*The only real suggestion that I have about hull mods is that there should be an appropriately priced +1 drive field upgrade as an alternative to the +2, so that I don't feel like i have to build it in. After all, burn speed is one of the comparative benefits of using a cruiser or battlecruiser instead of a battleship, but they all require the same +2 augmented drive field to land on burn 20, except battleships handle the OP cost better and cruisers just lose out.
*Something more than a superficial need for colonies is something that I would love, and my personal rules are aimed to facilitate that. But I won't go further into it in this post.
Miscellaneous Suggestions:
*Ordering friendly AI in battle is by far the most frustrating and weakest facet of the game, and also one of the most important. Anything that has a leash range involved needs to be tightened, escort needs to be reworked badly, and there needs to be something for ships to cooperate with each other, like having some frigates hunt on the edges as a group and not as individuals; perhaps escort could be made to accommodate this. Most of all the orders need to be more intuitive, because a large part of improving at Starsector is learning what the order will actually do, how how to get the results closest to what you want them to do.
*Friendly AI break down against unfavorable odds, making things worse than they already are. I noticed this particularly against Ordos, to the extent that the only order than has any reliability at all is eliminate, which I have to babysit, cancel, and reorder in order to get anything done.
*Things that exist only or almost solely to be obnoxious and annoy the player: Regarding the drive field drain mote, I would remove it from the game if I could, and interdicting it away is beside the point.
Asteroid Impacts: It is an extremely rare occurrence that an asteroid impact affects an enemy negatively and the player positively, all the rest of the time it is casually slapping me in the face, much like the aforementioned mote, for no good reason. In the last playthrough that I did this month I got mugged by the same tiny patch of asteroids around a station no less than three times in a matter of minutes. Each time it was going to cost all 15 of the supplies that I and my lone Omen started with to undo this. Now I could addsupplies them back through the console, but this wont change that my ship is now damage and not combat ready wherever I happen to be. As for going slow, I don't want to do this anyway, but doing this while system bounty hunting is not only unreasonable, but also not viable, and I don't think the infinite supplies pirates care about it one bit.
*Officer skills should not be random. If a player wants uniform skills or anything else in this single player sandbox game, then let them have control of it, simple as that. My current workaround is to increase maximum officer level and to use Officer Extension which allows for demotion, though at the cost of a story point, but I just refund my story point if I feel like it. Random officer skills and not being able to change them also directly contradicts the wide array of ships and setups that you may need to utilize through any of the random opportunities. With that said, the random opportunities, ships, and even weapon choice that I end up with keeps each playthrough interesting. An officer skill system that I don't have control over and can't change to adapt to my circumstances just doesn't synergize.
*Some star coronas and solar flare animations are very disconnected from where their actual effects are. The sound is also too quiet.
*Friendly AI don't respect the player's personal space or fields of fire, even if the are blocking a capital with a frigate. Furthermore, they will sometimes just run into you if you don't yield, which can result in ship destruction. In the event that an enemy station is overloaded, they will crowd around each other like a frenzied mob, and small ships can get destroyed through crushing each other. Although sometimes small ships will kill themselves without any other ships involved just by ramming into the station itself. Because of this any many other problems, I feel like I have to play with hull restoration, which is another reason I don't feel bad for having a level 40 level cap.
*The AI also likes to send missiles into the dead side of a station instead of the live fragment that has rotated away.
*Enemy fleets are too obsessed with capturing points on the battlefield and it tends to drag the fight out. It also can be exploited to defeat them in detail as the AI is very single-minded about this task.
*Retreating enemy fleets sometimes fly into star coronas to hide from the player, this is very lame.
*I feel like the AI's reaction and precision is still too robotic at times. Example: firing a projectile where it will hit the shield but miss the hull if the shield is lowered. The AI will calculate the trajectory and lower their shield so that the shot misses by a pixel. They will do this will total confidence and in less than half a second to react. This is more pronounced with something like the antimatter blaster, because the weapon has a micro wind-up before it fires, and the AI reacts as soon as you click, not when it fires.
*I have seen a lot about friendly AI being passive when the enemy is vulnerable, and that it was fixed, but I still see it from time to time, just less pronounced than it used to be. I typically use all aggressive officers and I still watch them float and stare at a target that is overloaded and about to explode when no one else is around.
*I like the story point system, although it still feels like a waste to build in with a ship that I wont be using as part of my permanent fleet. I tend to end up with an inflated bonus pool and no story points.
*AI will still unnecessarily lower their shields and get themselves killed, I noticed this particularly with Omens. Which is strange because most of the time they won't lower them unless they are totally out of weapon range.
*I don't think an officer's personality should be tied to their PD usage. I don't necessarily want my officer to use their PD as a primary weapon if I also want aggressive attributes.
*I noticed that when a hostile fleet is pursuing you through a jump point, that they often emerge faster than they should have, catching you in the process.
*When a changing of the guard happens with patrols, the new one should not detect you the instant that it exists. Moreover on patrols, they are way too obsessed with the player transponder, and not caring enough about the raging pirates attacking their station and nearby friendlies.
*I don't expect this one to be well received, because there is no way to say it honestly without coming off harshly. The Ziggurat destroyed any sort of mystery or immersion that I had before encountering it. It completely annihilated the mid game fleet that was more than capable of meeting every other need that I had. I feel like it's just a huge example of the meaning of imbalance; you either have to have such a fleet that the game is already over, or some ridiculous composition that you painstakingly trial and error'd together (or looked up on youtube) in order to win against it. None of these options are becoming of something involved in the story line; at the very least at that point and pacing, and your reward allows you to trivialize the rest of what is left to play. So much in this game is done in the name of tradeoffs and balance, and I just don't why such an abomination even exists. I felt this way to a lesser extent about the Doom before the Ziggurat existed, and I honestly would not be sad if they or all phase ships were gone.
*It would be nice of UI configuration or even player ship loadouts could be saved from playthrough to playthrough.
I decided to leave a few less important things out, in hopes of not making this too long, and I hope that what is here will help to improve the game.
