wow thats something i dont experiance every day.... practicly every single change is in the other direction i was hoping for....
CR loss during battle:
how and why would my crew loose combat readiness within 3 minutes of chasing a freakin frigate? why would they start to go insane and disable and/or damage vital undamaged shipsystems? i can understand that my crew is not at peak performance after batteling for what seems like hours and seeing half their friends getting ripped apart and sucked into space, but sabotaging a ship that doesnt even have a scratch doesnt make any sense what so ever.
instead of fixing this mindbogling mechanic it gets expanded....im flabergasted beyond believe.
beams at 1000 range? am i the only one that fought against 4 sunders in a refit battle? am i the only one that outfittet a handfull of frigates with graviton beams and advanced optics and never did that again, because it was gamebreakingly overpowered? now this is standard? as i sayed.... flabergasted.
ammo removal: i can agree with the notion, but not realy with the steps taken. my hope like so many others it seems was a reloading mechanism similar to the recharge of some energy weapons, just in chunks(magazines). a manual reload feature would have been a plus, but not expected.(example: weapon has a 2-3 magazin sized pool of ammo, where every 20-30 seconds a magazin junk gets refilled)
personaly i would even go so far as to extend the reload mechanic to missiles, just on a larger timeframe.(like 3 minutes reload for a torpedo) in combination with reduced magazine sizes this would eliminate the first minute of missilespawn followed by a onesided battle problem.
a simple and universal mechanic, everything that isnt a beam uses projectiles, projectiles get reloaded/generated. no spezial cases: "that missile can get reloaded, but these cant." the reload can absolutely be so long that you only get 1 or 2 shots in a 5minute battle, but the mechanic should be consistent.
circling back to the CRloss:
i do want a CRloss mechanic, the underlying idea is good! the crew needs to relax and unwind a little after a battel makes sense. while in a prolonged battle espezialy after taking some damage and loosing crew, the remaining crew will be rather shaken, sealing breaches, giving first aid, keeping damaged systems running and so on, will all keep em from performing like at the start of the battle. but the current mechanic doesnt reflect any of that, its an arteficialy imposed timer that has no sensible explanation.
when you think of realworld CombatReadiness, what does that effect?: aim of gunners, speed of reload crews, speed of repaircrews, ability of engineers to keep reactors and stuff at 105%, general reaction time to carry out orders. and probably some other stuff.
how is CombatReadiness effected?: shooting lazors at an asteroid or empty space or an enemy that cant shoot back, probably has no effect at all or extremely little. getting your shields pummeld by enemy fire will probably make your crew nervous and overtime affect their CombatReadiness. taking damage to armor is a whole new level of nervous and hull damage will have a servere impact.
i think i just described a rather nice gamemechanic for CRloss, but if for some reason there has to be a "timelimit" for battles i highly recommend another singular and global gamemechanic without exeptions like the ammoreload:
Crew in Battle allways looses CombatReadiness by x/minute, offset by the amount of crew on board. more crew, more replacements(Mike take a break, Hank take over). stat would be -cr/minute at minimum crew. suddenly it makes sense to hire more crew than minimum.
i developed several games myself and i remember that its hard to see when your so close to it. parts of this post may seem harsh or insulting or whatever, thats not the intention, i simply dont have the feel for frasing things.
i actually dont care about the beamrange, that can get balanced afterward.
but bevore going forward and expanding and making exeptions for CR and Ammo. please consider changing the mechanic into a unifying singular rule without exeptions.
you realy dont want your players to have to memorice all the different odditiys and exeptions to your gamemechanics.