Gave the mod a try, what I found is it did not meaningfully change anything regarding the combat AI in vanilla until titan class ships. Thanks to Klackon uncreative I was using dreadnaughts, and I found that they suck ass unless you hit hold position with them at the start of combat and use them as static defences. They frequently spin out attempting to manoeuvre (as do most ships in this game) and their slow turning speed is actually slow enough for this to matter significantly. They actually work better in the hands of the AI because right click moves random rotate ships for no reason when performed by the player, and command attacks are in general inferior to fire at will while moving when facing numerous smaller ships.

I also found that while torpedoes are weaker (less damage, and no semi-guided), they're still just as fundamentally broken when allowing player commands as they always were. Torpedo phalanx is still alive and well (get a large number of torpedo boats and move them all forwards individually to form a wall, they will all fire at once and the battlefield is so covered in torpedoes not even a frigate can slip through) the AI will usually do this for you if you let them control it. On the flipside, AI torpedoes are a joke against everything but static defences if you have command, as you can still use formation shift powerslides to evade them (stay in line formation by moving individually, then when the AI fires torpedoes, select 2 ships and move them in wedge formation, your cruisers/battleships/titans will now slide sideways to get into formation, evading the shots). Trigger discipline doesn't really matter anymore; I find in this mod it's better to just fire at max range all the time anyway.

I didn't get get a chance to see this earlier, but thanks for trying the mod and leaving some feedback! Hopefully I can shed some light on a few of your points.

For cinematic and autoresolve (both use the tactical simulation on full AI control) I don't know you'd see a huge difference beyond what I hope is significantly improved AI blueprints and better cohesion with the ship roles but there's nothing I can do to improve how the AI functions once tactical combat starts.

The dreaded opening moves you mention are hardcoded into the game and not something I can change, but I've not seen larger ships negatively impacted by it in any of my hundreds of hours of testing. It's unfortunate as they are pretty lame so if you're hoping to see that go away there only prospect would be UCP and convincing Sol to remove them. I'd love to see them replaced with some more logical placement of ships based on chosen roles than the haphazard lines currently there.

Unfortunately, It's also impossible to do much more when it comes to torpedoes. The AI literally has no awareness of incoming torpedoes which means it can't respond to them by altering course. I will say that Sol did recently adjust their targeting so the AI will attempt to fire on the largest ship in range and arc with torpedoes rather than wasting them on frigates which helps somewhat. Displacement and Teleporter are also fairly effective vs torpedoes due to Sol's updated logic. I'm looking into significant production costs increase for 3.5 as a means to balance them better by making it harder to replace or upgrade.

Could you give me a bit more insight into how you were building your ships? What weapons other than torpedoes? What facings? What ship classes were you using? What roles? What other mods (5x UCP, etc.) were enabled? I'm curious because you should see some significant differences in how weapons perform with regard to range and it sounds like you didn't see much of that at all.

Could you explain more about what you mean by "trigger discipline" too? Are you finding hits too common at long range?

Ran your mod with the full suite of 5x, UCP, that custom asset mod, and the unique planet specials one. (in the load order the 5x mod recommends on its page)

Way back in vanilla I remember at long range beams/cannons would basically never hit especially in early dogfights, and yeah I found the accuracy with this mod is really good even at max range at the start of the game fighting pirates (normal mount, I don't think I tried heavies much). Vanilla I remember you could never hit anything at max range and it was just a waste of cooldown when you could instakill up close in the earlygame.

What I was saying about enforced trigger discipline doesn't actually mean much as I've learnt recently; I used to play on assisted command and the game "helpfully" turns on auto-fire the instant you turn it off, so I never knew until recently you can actually switch off guns to hold fire. But basically what I would want to do is turn off energy weapons until ships get closer; how I would do that in assisted command is force the frigate to face the wrong way and turn around when I want it to fire.

My first game was klackon, so I was pretty much forced into running pure torpedo cheese since I didn't actually have any other options besides lasers and neutron blasters with bad computers. One of my subsequent games I tried out some of the energy weapons; mass drivers, gravitons, ions, and plasma beams I found very useful and used a lot.

As to how I build my ships; generally I throw at least one torpedo in every ship, then pick a weapon (that might just be more torpedoes) and fill it with front arc versions. The exception here is when my "main" weapon was something like graviton or plasma beam I'd need something to support that. I use bomb ketches if I need bombs (loaded entirely full of bombs) and move them in after the combat. If I know the opponent doesn't run missiles or fighters I don't even put in point defence weapons. If I know they have a lot I put in so much point defence that those weapons are worthless. I stopped using torpedoes after I got plasma beams (I was mostly using enveloping torps as graviton support at that point, and plasma beams made them redundant).

I tend to mass the largest hull I have access to that is not the titan/dreadnaught because I hate the titan's turning circle. I did find the Ironclad is really good hp/production value though, so if economic cost were the main concern I'd be using those. I generally pick whichever option has more hull points. I tried fighters for a bit in one game and immediately got rid of them as they felt pretty useless despite my best point defence being mass drivers. I've had similar experiences with missiles in the early game frigate dogfights where they just get completely shut down by point defence, so I wound up never really using them. The AI does run circles around me after the initial head on fight since I have only front facing arcs, but unless I'm fighting with a solo ship this doesn't matter, since I just get them all to turn in different directions in the brawl at the end and shoot down the ships harassing the rear of the other ships. Much like with the torpedoes, they can't really dodge if there are no safe locations.

The other advantage of running beam ships in the second game onwards was that I could click auto with no worries, as it's pretty rare the AI doesn't just do what I'd do on its own during those close range brawls against frigates at the end of combat. When I was running torpedo klackons if I clicked auto, I'd lose half the fleet unless it was just static defences I was up against. Multiphased hard shields sort of felt like cheating, but I imagine if any of the AI got plasma beams I'd stop using them.

If I were to assign roles; there's generally 3 types of ship I build: the bomb ketch bomber that is basically a non-combat ship, frontline tanks with the best front facing weapons I've got after loading it full of defensive specials, and torpedo snipers which are just pure torpedo boats (generally gunships or bomb ketch hulls) with no specials. (How I use the torpedo snipers is I never issue attack commands, only move commands with auto-fire turned on, or just deliberately never move them from their starting locations. That way they all fire on different things as they come into range at slightly different timings.)

Thanks for all the explanations! This is really helpful!

Way back in vanilla I remember at long range beams/cannons would basically never hit...

It's been a while since I've run vanilla, but I have been looking into the hit chances of early game weapons. I have two ways to controls this. The first is using the accuracy loss at range and setting it much higher and the second is to rebalance the damage fall offs so that max range does a lot less damage. I may up the range loss a bit but I don't like that option because it's a flat percentage of X number of shots that would have hit, this percentage just miss. I don't think that scales well and I need to be careful it doesn't go too far. The second I think has more promise. I want to shift the curve so that there's more gradual falloff vs a much shorter falloff like now and maybe make the difference between beams and cannons more pronounced.

What I was saying about enforced trigger discipline...

UCP did fix those weapon toggles. They shouldn't automatically revert to AI control after firing once which should help with your trigger discipline. It still gets clunky because you have to do it on each weapon bank on each ship/squadron vs everyone at once.

re weapons...
I've upped fighter hull strength so they don't die nearly as fast now. I tried them out a few games and you really had to load up to get them working so this should make them more useful.

In theory, missiles are much better than other weapon types early game. They should hit nearly 80% of the time unless intercepted or ECM is present, but it never seems to play out quite that way. However, once you get mods, armored + MIRV will usually out perform cannons until you start getting a lot better computers.I feel like cannons do hit more than they have right to as well. Their hit chances should be something like 35% early game but that never seems to play out.

If I were to assign roles...

Ah sorry, I meant what roles in the ship blueprints are you assigning like blitzer, sniper,brawler.

I'm also really surprised the torpedoes are so deadly. Even with massive saturation I always see a lot of misses with them, but I'm game to future tweaks like slowing them down a bit and making their cooldown 20s. They've been flagged somewhat because Gnolam like using them and they somehow always seem to outperform everyone else.

Originally posted by vaaish:

Ah sorry, I meant what roles in the ship blueprints are you assigning like blitzer, sniper,brawler.

Oh sorry, in that case I usually set everything to either sniper or brawler after the earlygame frigate fights are done (those scouts tend to be blitzers). Sniper is my go-to default, and only if I've got something very tanky with lots of defensive mods and/or high dissipation weapons do I set it to brawler.

As for why I think torpedoes might be so deadly; they have 15 seconds of very high DPS frontloaded into a single volley at decent range. Even more DPS and frontloading if you slap overloaded mods onto it. A lot of ships get toasted from the salvo before they really get a chance to do much. It also obviously completely obliterates static defences with massive overkill in the first volley.

You can also abuse the range with smaller ships by fleeing immediately after firing; pretty helpful for the bomb ketch snipers if you're using manual control cheese. Works against everything but heavy mount weapons and orbitals with the range upgrade.

But yeah, I don't think there's any way to balance the torpedo properly due to the issues that literally cannot be fixed. I would like to play around with the idea of massively nerfing their range and leaning more into high damage, turning them into essentially a melee weapon; but that sounds like it's way too big of a change and everyone would hate it.

Oh, and I found that MIRV missiles are particularly useless since now you get a 4 for 1 deal on point defence interception. I think this is primarily why missiles underperform; the point defence is too common on everyone's ships and it's very effective at its job. Especially since allied ships will cover for each other with their point defence weapons, so the more clustered the enemy is the more impossible it is to focus fire.

I'm testing an increase to 20s reload for torpedoes and much higher production cost. Will see how that goes. The biggest issue is just the ai can't see them to attempt dodging.

MIRV consistently performs well in all my tests but is a bit different than standard. You get 3 missiles for the space of 2 and the fragments are full damage. They generally should fragment before hitting pd range too. Eccm an heavy will help alot with ensuring they get through too.

I'm also working on a damage falloff rebalance that may help with the all long range problem. Haven't touched that since I started the mod and got falloff to 75% at max range. I've got a better understanding of how to generate the curves to make it more interesting now. If you are interested I can ping you and send you a beta.

I am pretty interested in testing out that beta. Btw, I tried out frigates after you mentioned their bulk, and holy hell Psilon mass driver frigate rush is totally a thing. Got class 3 shields and I'm just shredding star bases with them without much damage back. Basically the only thing that can hurt them is missile spam, but the frigates are way better at PD saturation by grouping up than larger hulls.

Mass drivers can be pretty powerful, but once better armor shows up they start to decline. Still, all weapons in tactical mod have longer lives than vanilla. A modded out laser will still work at least through class iii shields.

I'll ping you tonight and send you a link.

Oh right, I have a question about better armor. Does it actually do anything? I've never really tried exploiting it, but the tooltip mentions the minimum damage of a weapon is 75%. Most of the early and midgame weapons have around 10-12 penetration, meaning even just regular 15pt armor hulls are going to hit that cap, right? Is the heavy armor mod just a counter to gravitons and other high penetration weapons? Does the plasma beam still do 75% of its massive damage to hulls? Is there any purpose at all to the continuous mod on the plasma beam, considering even titanium armor is going to cap the damage at the minimum? If I'm understanding this correctly, don't low AP weapons get better the more armored the enemy is, since it's only the high AP weapons that get hit by it?

For reference:
Yes, better armor is very important. You can skip here and there but you do need to improve this or you will find that you will get toasted once your shields drop. I tend to take Reinforced Hull when I know I'll have good armor and take Heavy armor when I'm behind or plan to skip an armor to get a higher level resilience factor.

Tactical mod changes the cap to 10% for the minimum damage which makes armor more important. This is because a higher AP against a lower resilience will boost damage while targeting a higher resilience will decrease damage significantly.

For weapons like Plasma, the super low ap combined with the high damage means it will do very little to a hull but quickly chew through shields. The opposite is true of Graviton.