Two suggestions; originally brought up
here, and now moved to its own thread.
1: Zero flux bonus should be tied to the actual displayed flux value; maintenance costs that deactivate zero flux bonus should result in at least one point of soft flux displayed. It should be "zero flux bonus" not "zero flux and shields off and no weapons firing and no flux-using systems online either" bonus.
2: Shield maintenance costs should not deactivate zero flux bonus. This offers relatively little benefit to the player, who can be reasonably clever about choosing when to have shields up, but has the following benefits to the AI:
a: Small, agile ships are not penalized for over-aggressive use of shields; currently, such ships will (particularly when encountering asteroids) attempt to both dodge
and shield, resulting in significant slowdowns relative to a player who would pick just one defensive behavior. In combat, with weapons firing and probable hard flux buildups from taking hits, this is unlikely to make a meaningful difference.
b: The AI for larger ships can actually use shields to take asteroid hits while travelling, preventing unnecessary damage (which, especially in some mods, can be rather significant - and even in vanilla, can often result in such ships reaching combat with one or more weapons knocked offline).
c: The AI for ships with front shields can be significantly more pro-active about deploying shields, lowering shields only as needed to clear hard flux - which should bring such ships much closer to human levels of performance. (For reference, I currently vastly prefer front shields for ships I control - assuming at least a 240 degree arc after installing extended shields - but vastly prefer omni shields for AI ships, as the AI still has occasional issues with getting front shields online in a timely manner, and is much less able to avoid letting enemies get behind it.)
Once in-combat, shield maintenance not triggering zero flux bonus becomes irrelevant - you're taking hits, you're firing weapons, you're probably not sitting at zero displayed flux. The one advantage it offers the player is the ability to pre-activate shields - but, by and large, this is a relatively easy decision for the player (activate front shields when they'll be up - or at least mostly up - by the time you're in combat), but a much harder one for the AI. Personally, I don't think keeping that as a decision point is worth keeping the AI flaws I've listed above.