A couple of notes:
- In terms of nonlinear scaling of timeframes for larger ships, that may be something we do. For now I've made some other changes to the timing of all of them, to keep squadrons more spaced out in general.
- Regarding overall behaviors for the enemy fleets, there is a ton of that coming up soon, along with the framework for more of that to be added. As noted, at the fleet level right now the only logic is "get the flagship as close to the enemy flagship as possible, and produce fleets in whatever queue order the player handed me." The squadrons themselves have various forms of AI, but there's nothing else at the fleet level. That's changing in the next version, so that we'll have proper AI at both levels.
- I should have made it clear, but didn't think to, that the races are not remotely meant to be balanced. It's not like you get to play as them, to begin with. The Thoraxians are meant to be much much harder than anyone else, while the Peltians are meant to be way more pathetic than everyone else. The Andors are also pretty bad, while the Burlusts are also unusually good. And then many of the other races are more in the middle. There will be more variance in the future with the sub-pilot-types for the various races, and there will be some special more-difficult versions for some of the weaker races that will be able to become available by various in-campaign circumstances.
-- These racial strengths and weaknesses also play out in the combat between the races themselves, so Thoraxians eat Peltians alive, etc. The differences in racial strengths, when put into the context of the main game, make a lot more sense. You have to choose who to ally with and who to fight, and those choices can have some major consequences both to your own personal survival as well as to what happens to the solar system as a whole. Right now in combat practice you're really seeing that out of context, so the fact that this is unbalanced seems like a bad thing; it's very much intended.
-- When it comes to "why would I ever pick pilot type X over Y," that is in some cases a fair point, but commission rates are lower for the worse pilots. Which again is something that you don't have to consider in combat practice.
- Having said that, SHIP balance is intended to be good, although some of the racial special flagships probably will wind up being better than others.
- Another thing that will be coming up during the real game is that the fleet level of the AI will often be one higher than you. Sometimes even higher than that. Not always, but it will happen enough that you need to be able to win battles against forces that overmatch you. Similarly, by the late game the AI will tend to have more squadrons, so you'll want to win before they get them all deployed, or else make use of the (coming up) caches of goodies to even the score. Battlefield control is going to be one of those things that helps you equalize the situation through skill.
-- Additionally, AI ships are able to get upgrades that you cannot get based on technologies that they research. You can help or hinder them in getting that sort of thing, though, so to some extent if they get massively powered up then that is your own fault.
-- All of the ships have random ranges of stats, and so they don't always work out exactly the way you would see in combat practice. Some fighters are slower than others, depending on the race, for instance. Your ships will match the starting race at first, and then whoever you steal later hull techs for. Ultimately if you keep stealing hull techs (even ones that are duplicates of what you already have -- say, Burlust fighters when you already have fighters), then you can combine the stats of the ones that you've stolen, just keeping the best parts. If you keep that up enough, you can have equal to the best underlying stats of all the ships of that type in the solar system... but you'll have made some people very angry along the way.
-- There are also places where you have serial fights, such as with pirate bases, and you need to be able to win 3 fights in a row with no replenishment of your forces in between. Any of your non-flagship ships that are not completely dead get repaired between battle, but any ammunition expended by your flagship, any ships that were destroyed, and any hull health your flagship lost, are all carried between battles. So those can prove to be challenging.
-- The enemies when you are fighting their main armies won't ever have pirate craft, so if you capture pirate craft from the pirates, you'll have some stat advantages there when you come into the battle.
The TLDR of all the above section is that basically a big part of winning a battle is preparing for it, and making sure that your forces are superior. If you are able to walk over an enemy in a battle, then you've prepared well. More often than not it will be a tough fight, and occasionally it will be unwinnable and you will have to simply retreat. But generally these things would not be surprising to you in the context of the larger game, because you'd be seeing how things are progressing and part of your decision of "do I get into this fight or not" is based on evaluating that sort of thing. It's much like in AI War: sometimes you take on a Mark IV planet early in the game, other times you are just slamming through a Mark I planet late in the game, satisfyingly and easily. But there as here, those actions have larger-game consequences, so even if you slam through an easy battle that doesn't mean that was always actually in your best interest.
I also just want to say that I'm hugely grateful for all the feedback that is being given so far, and my notes are just to help provide some context so that you know what our actual goals are. IE why the ships should be balanced but the races should not be, etc.
Thanks!
