Rally points didn't work as well as I hoped. I had a bunch of shipyards point to the same rally point. I wanted them to form fleets there, but often they would sit there as separate ships. If I wanted them to be in fleets, I had to get involved make the fleets myself.

I tested one of the repair modules "Structural Enhancement". It does work, repairing a ship slowly while in battle. However, it didn't seem to have any effect outside of battle. I was hoping for it to fully repair my ship after the battle was over, or at least be repaired by next turn.

I like specialisations. What I would like to see different is if the specialisations had paths, not just a tech each. If this happened, and you traded for a tech then you would just recieve the tech. Not the path that would require research for it.

I do agree that the AI should make a difference between transports and colony ships as far as loading.

2) Bad for balance. With the recent buff to large hulls hp, I stopped building medium alltogether except in emergencies. I also stopped putting defense onto them, because it's entirely unnecessary with this amount of hp. More weapons are more beneficial. If I could now also put a single component on it, which totally repairs the ship after each battle... I wouldn't even have to do the occasional replacement of a ship.

I'm not completely unsympathetic though. The repair mechanic is a little awkward, because fighting small ships, can be better than putting a ship in the dock. It also has an awkward spot in balance, because it is a bad combination with other defensive modules, because while the other defensive modules are being used, repair is not used. You get amximum value out of repair, when you are taking hull damage. It does however work well, if you stack jamming, because they AI doesn't like targetting systems on its ships. 15 repair ontop of 90% jamming is a really tough nut to crack.

What I would like to see is:

1) The ship can't be repaired past the hp it has at the start of a battle.
1b) Optional: Defensive structures aren't completely restored at the end of a battle
2) Repair components boost strategic repair, too.
2b) If 1b is implemented: Strategic repair can restore defenses after hull is repaired.

The defense points of all types are completely regenerated after each battle.

1) Ships are simulated to be at a certain distance (depends on ship role Capital, Escort, etc. ) to the enemy fleet at the start of the battle and will move towards each other

  Exception: support ships. They stay where they are. If you have ever seen your frigates circling an enemy transport but not shoot it for some time, than that's because in the actual simulation they are not close to the transport yet, even though they are shown to be close.

2) Depending on your ships role, it will have a certain order in which they will target enemy ships of certain roles. I don't know how it decides between targets of the same role.

  Example: Your Escort ship could be shooting an enemy capital, assault or escort ship. It will target the assault ship first and if it lives long enough it will proceed to shoot first the other escort ship and then the capital ship.

  Example 2: your Assault ship will first come into range to fire at another assault ship. It will do so. But soon after it gets in range to shoot at enemy escorts. It will start targetting the escorts instead.

3) Weapons are fired not individually, but in salvos. Your 5 doomrays will not deal 5 times 32 damage, but rather 160 damage once. Remember what I said above? Yup, it will be blocked by a single shield point instead of 1 shield point blocking 32 damage and 4 attacks damaging the hull. The whole salvo. However you can split weapon types. If you have 3 missile launchers, 4 kinetic guns and 2 beam weapons, you will not fire 1 salvo with all of them, but each of the weapon types will fire salvos independently of each other. Keep this in mind when fighting fleets of many smaller ships.

I guess that's the gist of it.

Since crusader is pretty much changing how every weapon will be built/cost, my experience with the current weapons and modules will pretty much be obsolete.

But to answer, in my experience I never use the prototype weapons as I dont tend to build many if any ships until I have researched some better weapons. The cost of the resource is better used in a resource building IMO. Ships are updated so frequently that its generally better in both the short and long term to use the resources there instead. That being said I have seen some people use the prototype survey module to great effect early on. Since some of the things you can pick up are extra construction ships or even better free tech, depending on the frequency of them you can get ahead easily buy focusing on them.

Later on I generally make a fleet of ships then add a single support ship which contains all the fleet support modules that would matter. I then fill the remainder of the ship with sensors and some minor defense systems(no weapons). By doing this I can use the space im saving by not having sensors on other ships for more weapons or defense.

I use:
The module that increases fleet movement speed
The module that heals your ships in battle (although I have no idea how effective it is)
Depending on my weapon focus I sometimes add the modules which give bonuses to fleet defense/weapons but they arnt a priority other the other things.

I tend to avoid anything that reduces logistics on individual ships except the Hyperion buildings, it becomes to difficult to micromanage which ships are what logistics size so I try to keep them even.



One thing that is limiting to me is that some resources, mostly Thulium, seem to be way to rare. In my last few games Thulium has been SO sparse as to make most of the modules or weapons for it useless. I had 2 Thulium in my last game (huge map), little Promethean but TONES of antimatter. I was able to out fit over 70 ships with antimatter weapons.

Im not sure off the top of my head what other modules might be worth it, and even the ones I use im not sure how effective they actually are. The move speed one seems to be the only one im sure is good.

Well, I played a map where I tried to use resources to make combat ships whenever possible. I found that prototype weapons were competitive with the second last weapons, same firepower but cheaper in price (unless you count resources as expensive). I ended up focusing on elerium for beam weapons. My first opponent ended up being the Krynn who was also using elerium weapons. I even went so far as to destroy a few of their starbases so I could claim their elerium for my own. Prototype weapons, that might explain why early AIs can be a problem.

Elerium weapons seemed useful early on, but later I had trouble siegeing planets. Elerium weapons or not, it was hard to break through. I wasn't able to use them often because they kept dying. My defenses weren't suited late game. I was keeping production to 1 shipyard (high output) to I could watch and control resources. Next game, I'll try to increase production and control defense types.

Late game, I had well over 60 elerium. That was enough to supply 2 fleets of elerium weapons, either medium hulls or large hulls. I had set the conditions of the map to large size and common resources, so I may have had unusually abundant resources.

Edit: I forgot that I specialized in anything that increased military production, and avoided anything that increased the costs of ships. This meant that the quality of my ships had minimal improvements throughout the game.

That's a good question. It seems the AI is building up a huge military force from the start, however it does that (playing always on gifted), and since I postpone building my military until a threat arises ( so that I don't have a lot of outdated ships which are too expensive to upgrade), I always get the "ripe for conquest" condition nearly from the start and usually around until I defeat my first opponent.

Hm, but where does the military strenght factor in those calculations? After all I see myself and have read that plays not a small role in being "ripe for conquest" or not ...

As DivineWrath says above, its calculated by thier military strength vs your military strength. The Military Ship graph is pretty spot on to see this, amount of ships and the strength of ships is taken into account. The overall Power of a civ is not taken into account.

I've used the prototypes in a pinch, however, I agree resources are better used elsewhere, especially as these ships are quickly obsolete by research, and one can't upgrade a ship if they are at max resources, even if not using any additional resources.  

I figured that I would provide some more feedback on what I've seen. I've been playing this game lots lately.

Prototype weapons. At first I didn't like them because of the resource cost, but now I can see myself possibly swearing by them. I have used them to devastating effect. They give substantial firepower early in the game. You can start building them as early as your first tech, and build up a significant fighting force by the time you can start researching planet invasion. I have found that antimatter is easy to get most of the time, elerium not so much, and duranium is not worth making into weapons because they deal half the damage as the other two. Better to use duranium to build factories. Also prototype missiles seem to get the first shot because their range, so its possible to kill the enemy before they get to shoot back.

Starbase defenses. I don't think starbase defense are worth the cost. At some point, they get eclipsed by bigger ships, fleet sizes, and more guns. I'm not going to argue about if starbases should be able to compete with big fleets and big ships. That fight hasn't yielded much good in the past. Instead, I would like to be able to hide all of those defense systems that I'm not going to use. That way I can focus on systems that are worth while.

Administrators. I don't like them. I haven't been hitting the limit often, mostly because of my play style. I find it easy to fall behind on combat ship production if I build and upgrade too many starbases. At this time, it seems that artifacts and mining starbases are the only starbases worth building. Anything else seems to be far too local of an effect.

Building shipyards. I find it best to build shipyards using constructors. A bare bones constructor costs about 50 units but a shipyard built from a planet is 150 units. On top of that, constructors are easier to move than shipyards. Easier to set them up to get more sponsors.

Shipyard production. The UI feels a little clunky. It can be hard to select a ship on the right side of the screen. To reorder, delete production, set up continuous build, etc. More so if you have a lot of ships queued. The list seems to set the focus at the top of the list every time you make a change.

Guard command bug. The game seems to hang often if I use the guard command. Move a ship 1 parsec then tell it to guard. The game will probably hang when you click end turn. It doesn't hang every time, which caused me much difficulty figuring it out. I have to save the game and reload in order to proceed. Hopefully this can be fixed quickly.