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[DatonKallandor]

All those changes sound good. Beams have needed a buff for years since not generating hard flux is a gigantic downside with no upside. Ballistic Ammo wasn't really a factor anyway and those few weapons it did affect it crippled. The soft limit on battle length (through Combat Timers even on bigger ships) would have made ballistic ammo an obsolete concept anyway - no reason not to do away with it entirely. Combat Timers on big ships is also a huge buff for Low Tech ships, since it forces the High Tech ships into a fight.

The missile change is a good start but doesn't go nearly far enough - every missile should regen ammo. That finally lets you start balancing them properly and gives you an additional lever to do it with: Regen time (also a great candidate for skills!). Slap some proper reload times on missiles (almost all of which are a joke right now or don't exist at all) to stop them from dominating and a lot of ship configs open up that were simply not viable before.

[Hopelessnoob]

Not sure I like removing hard flux buff, I've got very few reasons to choose ballistics over energy weapons now.

[Sabaton]

 As far as I see it, the best way of solving the weapon controversy is with the clip idea, main points being:

-All ballistic weapons could have their own clip, you could still see the numbers go down in the UI for each gun before they stop shooting to reload.
-Reloading time would depend on each weapon, with the tendency of smaller/pd swapping clips like crazy and heavy hitters taking more time.
-No need to modify the expanded clip mod.
-No need to complicate things by giving the player a reload button, just have it be an automate only process when guns go dry. So what if players fire the last 2 shots to reload? The AI is punishing enough with rockets while venting as it is. Just give it a way to sense you reloading and it will charge like a shark at the smell of blood.

 This approach could bring the best of both worlds: make ballistics retain their flavor while sneaking in infinite ammo.
 Either way something should be done, cause right now ballistics and energy are like 2 strangers in an elevator, uncomfortably close.

[Lucian Greymark]

My 2 cents on this are as follows:

I play Starsector for the late game giant battles with the large fleets of the biggest factions. Because of the nature of ammo limitations this meant I almost universally had to have energy boat ships for the late game, lest my success in those large battles was dictated by my ability to keep firing. Now that this limitation has been removed it has literally doubled my end game options, I approve, greatly.

Beam weapon changes are a fantastic Christmas present, thank you so much Alex I've wanted this kind of thing for a while.

I'm not super keen on the peak efficiency time for destroyers and cruisers, it seems to just enforce the capital ship race that I find myself in when I play the game, as I mentioned I like the long winded late game battles with big fleets, I essentially have to have a capital ship as my flagship to make those fights work now... we'll see.

Otherwise everything seems pretty straight forward, missiles have needed a buff for a LONG time, I'd like to see more of the missile types get the same treatment as at the moment it more or less funnels missile usage into those three types. Because of the continuing limited ammo for harpoons and sabots they're going to be even less useful now compared to the other kinds, but again, we'll see.

That seems like it's about it. Just my thoughts on the matter.

[Wyvern]

Speaking of missile reload times, I'd suggest giving the single shot missiles a relatively long reload time - make it so that the +1 ammo skill perk is more "you get a second shot" and less "you get to spam out two of these for double damage when you decide to fire".

I am uncertain on the beam changes; will have to see how those play out.  That said, I am slightly worried about beams having longer ranges and not being stopped by missiles when used as PD - I foresee a high potential for friendly fire incidents.

I would strongly suggest adding a "soft flux" flag to weapons and corresponding Codex information - it would really open up some interesting options (especially for modders) if we could have, say, ion cannons & salamanders dealing soft flux, or have one or two beam types that deal hard flux (maybe that could be the niche for the HIL now that it has lost its range?)

I agree that the loss of ammunition from ballistic weapons is a big thematic hit - and also agree that they need to have ammunition that's not a long-term limit.  Short term, however... I'd like to see ballistic weapons that have limited ammunition and ammunition regeneration, with the expanded magazines hull mod increasing both capacity and regen - some of the smaller ballistic weapons (and especially point defense weapons) with the hull mod should just never run out of ammunition, while weapons that are currently very ammo-limited (gauss cannon, for example) would still be able to run short for a bit in heavy combat.

I'd also like to see reloading for ballistics happening in chunks - this isn't the "clip reload" mechanic you (rightly) disapprove of, just a cosmetic thing: instead of regenerating one shot every second (for example), have it regenerate 10 shots all at once every 10 seconds - especially important for theme if you have, say, a light machine gun that (with the expanded magazines mod) literally can't run out of ammo; you'd see ammo decreasing until it hit its reload time and then jump back to full.

CR changes... not so keen on this; I've eschewed frigates since the CR timers went in in the first place, since my preferred play style is to pilot a single ship.  Can we get at least a few specific vessels that - like the Brawler - don't have CR timers?  Will wait to see how it plays out, but right now not a fan; yeah, I can swap to flying a Conquest or Onslaught or Paragon, but I'd like to have a few more options than just those three.

[TaLaR]

Actually clip reloading could be implemented even without forced reload button - by having clip automatically filled if particular weapon hasn't fired for reload duration (or double to not make partial reloading too convenient).

[DatonKallandor]

CR changes... not so keen on this; I've eschewed frigates since the CR timers went in in the first place, since my preferred play style is to pilot a single ship.  Can we get at least a few specific vessels that - like the Brawler - don't have CR timers?  Will wait to see how it plays out, but right now not a fan; yeah, I can swap to flying a Conquest or Onslaught or Paragon, but I'd like to have a few more options than just those three.

There is absolutely nothing stopping you from flying a ship with a CR timer solo. A single Wolf can kill a ridiculous amount of stuff if player piloted and that thing has a CR limit. What you probably mean is you won't be able to cheese the AI to win fights solo, which - yeah that's exactly the thing that should be stopped. Keep in mind that your flagship is going to have a higher starting CR anyway so even if you were fighting a mirror match, in most instances there'll be a window where your ship is going to be in perfect working order while the enemy is already suffering from CR related debuffs and malfunctions.
CR timers simply encourage people with low timer/high power ships to get in there and finish the fight and gives high timer/low power ships a secondary win conditions (outlast your enemy).

[SatchelCharge]

Suggested fix:  force all of the player's fleet to be deployed, up to X DP, and do not allow reinforcements.  The whole concept of reinforcement in a space battle never made a lot of sense; instead, just force the player to decide what ships are possibly going to get killed and force them to deal with it.  That means no more endless-frigate nonsense, but it'd mean real changes would have to be made to how Command Points worked.

It would really change the game, but I would be very on board with having both sides forced to deploy all ships, with NO max fleet size. Its always bugged me that civilian ships are never in danger - raiding civilians is effectively impossible when the AI has any combat ships left. They can hide on the edges, or try and stay on the opposite side of the players ships from their escorts, or whatever. Of course, the civilian ships could just retreat at the start of the battle, so I guess some other change would be needed.

This totally makes sense but it seems like it would comprehensively change the flow of battles and require a partial AI rewrite... and open up new avenues of AI abuse.

I agree that the loss of ammunition from ballistic weapons is a big thematic hit - and also agree that they need to have ammunition that's not a long-term limit.  Short term, however... I'd like to see ballistic weapons that have limited ammunition and ammunition regeneration, with the expanded magazines hull mod increasing both capacity and regen - some of the smaller ballistic weapons (and especially point defense weapons) with the hull mod should just never run out of ammunition, while weapons that are currently very ammo-limited (gauss cannon, for example) would still be able to run short for a bit in heavy combat.

I'd also like to see reloading for ballistics happening in chunks - this isn't the "clip reload" mechanic you (rightly) disapprove of, just a cosmetic thing: instead of regenerating one shot every second (for example), have it regenerate 10 shots all at once every 10 seconds - especially important for theme if you have, say, a light machine gun that (with the expanded magazines mod) literally can't run out of ammo; you'd see ammo decreasing until it hit its reload time and then jump back to full.

Actually clip reloading could be implemented even without forced reload button - by having clip automatically filled if particular weapon hasn't fired for reload duration (or double to not make partial reloading too convenient).

Came here to make this type of suggestion. In my mind it would be cooler and more clean to have an 'individual weapon heat' mechanic control this, rather than spaceship-sized 'clips', but it would basically work the same way, so.... just an aesthetic suggestion.

[Dark.Revenant]

The beam changes are well-done, but I think that the hit strength for armor reduction should be changed from 50% to 100%.  This makes underused weapons like the Phase Beam and High Intensity Laser more worthwhile because they can chew through armor at something better than a snail's pace.

I agree with the infinite ammo for ballistic weapons, though you should perhaps add an ammo limitation to some of them, such as the Vulcan Cannon, which is otherwise a far better point defense weapon than all types of Machine Guns, and the Storm Needler, which was previously balanced by having a limited firing duration.

The missile regeneration for fire support missiles is a good change.  Other types: never.  Only fire-and-forget missiles should have this behavior.

The loss of the flux boost is worrying because energy weapons won't have any mechanical differentiation other than the fact that they do energy damage.  "Fixing" this by giving ballistic weapons magazines, reload timers, CR loss, or whatever is not correct; that would make ballistic weapons more mechanically complicated/significant than energy weapons as a whole.  If you want to do a mechanical parity sort of thing, try having most ballistic weapons fire more quickly at the start and then slow down with sustained fire (this would decay in the same manner as reload).  The opposite would apply to energy weapons; they would speed up with continuous fire.

If you decide that weapons should cause CR loss, it should make the CR timer tick down faster (rather than implementing some phantom CR loss thing).

[Wyvern]

@DatonKallandor: May I suggest re-phrasing your post in a way that doesn't come off as accusing someone of "cheesing" things or "playing the game wrong"?  The reason I prefer ships without CR timers is the same reason I (currently) prefer high-tech energy-weapon-based ships, and it is based on not liking the feel of racing against depleting resources.  It does not matter that CR or ammunition will generally not be an issue - I do not like playing with the feel that it could be.  So, not a question of "cheese", just playstyle and personal preference.

[TaLaR]

Actually clip reloading could be implemented even without forced reload button - by having clip automatically filled if particular weapon hasn't fired for reload duration (or double to not make partial reloading too convenient).

Came here to make this type of suggestion. In my mind it would be cooler and more clean to have an 'individual weapon heat' mechanic control this, rather than spaceship-sized 'clips', but it would basically work the same way, so.... just an aesthetic suggestion.

That actually sounds good. Could also be nicely visualized with yellow/red glow similar to current flux bonus glow.

[SatchelCharge]

Exactly      Something subtle like that to go along with little heat bars at the bottom of the combat screen... they could be red instead of the green color we have for weapon-cooldown bars

[Vind]

Now we got CR timer for all kinds of ships and only 3 orders per battle to order zero CR ships to retreat. How about ships with CR 0 automatically try to disengage and exit the battlefield? Also with CR for heavy ships AI ships CR can be easily drained down by some specially created fast cruiser with heavy PD. CR will hurt AI side more every time as AI prefers to stay away from battle being too careful. You can set battle timer at 5 or 10 minutes based on fleet size instead of CR with same result to prevent AI fleet kiting with solo ship. CR instigates fast battles with AI not willing to fight and running away if possible.

[miljan]

Not a fan of this changes.

Destroyers and cruisers now have a peak effectiveness timer like frigates

    Roughly 5-7 minutes for destroyers and 7-9 for cruisers
    High-tech/faster ships have shorter timers

So now almost all ships will have a time limit in the game? The reason I am trying as fast as possible move from frigates to something else  is because there is a timer.
This is really a big thing for me, when playing games. I am not interested in playing and fighting under time pressure. From this changes it looks like I will be forced to play under it for 75% of the game and even more until i get to battlecruisers now. This is a huge game breaker for me, and I hope you will change it until the game is released. The moment you start to balance the game around exploits and in that process remove the fun from people that dont abuse the exploits, you should stop for a sec and rethink it.

The only thing I can suggest is maybe make timer for ships that are fast and can kite, but for others please remove the timer, so I can at least play with some ships. So maybe a special mod for fast/high tech ship to have a timer, while others dont have it.

I am sorry that I sound this negative, but this is really a huge deal for me.

[Megas]

Also with CR for heavy ships AI ships CR can be easily drained down by some specially created fast cruiser with heavy PD

What fast cruiser do you mean?  The only two I can think of that might want to do that instead of simply killing the enemy cruiser is the Heron (because it is a carrier, not a gunship) and Falcon (destroyer in cruiser chassis).  If I have an Aurora or other cruiser out there, I rather simply kill the enemy fleet because I have enough firepower to do so.