I feel like once I have a fleet up and running, the game is already over. The game play is most interesting when working within the logistics constraints to fight the best I could with what I could find and afford.
I feel like the opposite. To me, the early- to mid-game is filled with a bunch of tedium, basically exploring and opening Skinner's boxes looking for loot, running fetch quests, gradually getting more ships, etc. To me it's a bunch of busywork before I get to the "fun" part. It's gotten so boring that my first actual playthrough in 0.96a (as opposed to using console commands to test fleets) once the hotfixes are over is going to be to stick a colony in the most difficult faction system I can (I'm not sure yet if that would be Aztlan for Hegemony or Askonia for Sindrian) as early as possible and see if I can build up a fleet and everything despite having to defend the colony against saturation bombardments from the very beginning. There's just no challenge to developing my fleet from the start to an endgame fleet. Hence the remaining question is
what endgame fleet to work toward, and hence testing out different endgame fleets.
There's a certain amount of interest in "hey I'm used to relying on this weapon or this hullmod but I don't have it yet so how can I make do and still kill fleets without what I'm used to" in the early- to mid-game, but I don't consider that particularly fun. As an analogy, I'm not particularly interested in "how do I drive if I can't use my left hand or if I can't use my right foot" -- i.e. when under an artificial limitation -- and more interested in "what's a better way to drive assuming all my limbs are intact". Different players have different interests in the game though so it's perfectly legitimate, just not something that I personally am interested in.
I truly believe ship and fleet concepts should be viable and tested in the early and mid-game, and that balance and interesting game decisions are much more important at those stages than late game, simply because the majority of players are going to spend the majority of play at the early and mid-game.
No, because the early- and mid-game won't have the full spectrum of challenges available in the game, pretty much by definition. It's the endgame where the player encounters the full suite of possible challenging enemies, and where the sunk cost is higher and the cost of rebuilding the fleet back to where it was is higher (i.e. the fights are less forgiving). So there are plenty of strategies that are viable in the early- to mid-game that don't work in the endgame, since the game is still essentially hand-holding the player through learning the different intricacies of combat mechanics. Thus centering the testing around the early- to mid-game is going to lead to bad recommendations on fleet setup when the player gets to the endgame.
An easy example of this is Safety Overrides. The early- to mid-game is filled with relatively docile and forgiving enemies, so it's easy to just put SO on everything and steamroll through pirate fleets. Thus testing against early- to mid-game fleets will likely result in "use SO". But that is pretty bad advice when it comes to the endgame, when the enemies are much more vicious and when diving headfirst into a fleet means almost certain death. So the player who looks at testing based on the early- to mid-game -- where the results will most likely say "use SO" -- will be in for a rude awakening when he gets to the endgame. Then all the effort put into developing their fleet around SO basically goes to waste.
As an aside, that's why I don't feel like SO needs much of a change -- its power naturally fades as the player encounters harder content. I've noticed that most of the discussion claiming SO is too strong basically centers around a few specific ships -- Hyperion, Monitor, LP Brawler -- or around a
player-controlled SO ship, since a human player is much better at maneuvering and managing flux than the AI, so
of course a human player can make much better use of SO; or demonstrates it in the sim or against weaker enemies (i.e. "stick SO on ship X and look you can kill ship Y in sim easily"). I've yet to see someone actually show that SO is stronger than non-SO against endgame fleets, say double Ordos, outside of these cases. That's because the opposite is true; a non-SO Eradicator fleet will do much better against double Ordos than an SO Eradicator fleet, for example. So SO naturally becomes a non-factor at the endgame, so I don't see it as needing a change, despite the constant forum complaints about it from certain posters.
I'm pretty sure Alex does playtesting at different points in the game, from the tutorial all the way to the end. Which is probably why the more he adds to the game, the longer it takes to test each time.
Sure, but I would expect it to be more along the lines of "is the player gaining hullmods at a good enough rate" or "is it too easy/hard for the player to get desired ships" not "does this particular fleet setup or that particular fleet setup work well enough" the way that I'm looking at fleet strategies for the endgame.
As for capstones, the only ones that look like primary material are Systems Expertise in Combat (for some ships only), Support Doctrine in Leadership (but needs Leadership 8 if taking BotB too), Automated Ships in Tech, and Derelict Operations in Industry. Those have a certain... plan in mind. Otherwise, it looks like I should get BotB for its own sake (I guess what you call "primary capstone") and some of the vital lower tier Leadership along the way to BotB.
Eh actually I think pretty much most of them have a certain "plan in mind":
* Systems Expertise if your flagship has a system that you want to spam, otherwise it's likely (close to) useless.
* Missile Specialization if your flagship is missile-heavy, otherwise it's likely (close to) useless.
* Support Doctrine if your fleet has a significant amount of non-officered ships, otherwise it's likely (close to) useless.
* Neural Link if you're planning on running two flagships or switching to another flagship for whatever reason, otherwise it's likely (close to) useless. You might take it if you want a second ship to get your combat skills if you went combat-heavy I guess even if you don't switch.
* Automated Ships if you're planning on using Remnant ships or Derelict ships, otherwise it's useless.
* Don't know about Hull Restoration because I don't use it, but from the looks of it it's for the early game when the player might want an alternate way to remove d-mods without spending money or something. But also likely (close to) useless if your fleet doesn't have trouble with dying.
* Derelict Operations if your fleet has d-mods, otherwise it's useless.
Basically all the capstones
except BotB push the fleet composition in a particular direction. BotB is the only one that's generally beneficial regardless of what fleet you have. And hence unless the player is trying to build the fleet in multiple directions and end up with not enough skill points, the player will generally take BotB. That's why it's so commonly used.
