!!! Selectable enemy ships! nice!
I would imagine that stronger crew modules mean that hull integrity is increased so that your cruiser stays in one piece longer, albeit only a few seconds longer but that might mean the difference between victory and defeat.
Also, the description for turbo shields needs this line “These aren’t just ordinary shields, they’re M&S shields”
It it was not for copyright, I assure you that it would…
Aw man. Based on that picture I was seriously jonzin’ to be able to select an enemy ship and view its status. 
Maybe one day.
So far I’ve only unlocked turbo shields - need to go back and farm up some more honor for the other items. I’m wondering, though, what’s the appeal of the turbo shields? They have 10% more strength, but less recharge and resistance than level 2 regular shields and they cost more credits/power/crew. They even weigh more and have less HP. I’m really not seeing much of a role for them. Or am I missing something here?
unlockables does not mean they MUST be used by you. There is recharge tanking and buffer tanking. Although latter is quite badly realised in GSB for NOW. Its still beta.
Trading resistance for strength can be wise. if the enemy weapons always penetrate your resistance anyway (big cruiser guns) then basically resistance is futile (haha) and you might as well put that effort into sheer power.
Sure, I get the possible advantages of strength over resistance. I guess I’m just not convinced that 7 more points is ever going to be worth the higher costs and lower regen. Also, the resistance is notably 1 point lower than the fighter laser, which is a pretty big risk to take unless you know you won’t be running into those.
I suppose my complaining is premature, though - I should test them out a bit and see if it makes a bigger difference than I imagine.
ah well the assumption (maybe wrongly) is that if fighters are going to attack you, they likely will do so from within your shield bubble anyway 
Well, there is that. Against frigates, though, it seems like a lot of fighter shots hit the shields, even when they’re set to minimum engagement range. Hmm, maybe I’ll go try a turbo-shielded frigate vs. some fighters right now just to see what happens…
Just did a wide variety of fighter-related testing. Here’s what I found:
- Laser-equipped fighters set to minimum attack range will drop a frigate’s turbo-shields very quickly. I was testing with an anti-fighter frigate that had just over 8 armor resistance and 1 turbo-shield module. The shields went down, then the armor. Total lifespan of the frigate was about 5 seconds. A similarly-fitted frigate with a standard level 2 shield lasted substantially longer, relatively speaking, thanks to deflected laser fire, but it still went down quickly as the armor gave out. Possibly 2 turbo-shields would have the resistance to survive as long? I haven’t been able to tell how shield resistances stack (I don’t even know if they do for sure, though it seems like it). And anyway, fitting 2 shield modules onto any Rebel frigate is tough to do.
- Using the Atlantis hull, I built the fastest laser and pulse laser fighters I could, then pitted them against each other. The pulse laser model comes out with 2.71 speed, the regular laser at 3.12. Despite a 0.1 higher tracking speed and 50% more damage making it nominally a better anti-fighter weapon, the pulse laser fighters lost badly. Not that either had a good hit rate by any stretch of the imagination. This makes me disinclined to ever use the pulse laser - I’d only ever mounted it on fighters intended to perform as interceptors, but it doesn’t seem worth the speed hit.
- Prioritization of tractor-beamed targets still seems poor. Testing with a frigate loaded with a tractor beam and 2 pulse lasers, I counted about 8 shots fired during the duration of a tractor beam’s effect. I never saw more than 5 directed at the slowed fighter. 2 or 3 at best was more typical. Also of note, even against slowed or completely stopped fighters the hit rate was very low, maybe 25% (if that).
- Rocket bombers (and presumably torpedo bombers as well) suffer very badly from the lack of a keep-at-range component to the max range setting in their attack orders. I’d never tested them under controlled conditions before, and was surprised to find that after the initial salvo, they orbited right on top of their target pretty much continuously, only snapping off a very occasional shot if one happened to stray far enough away from the target ship. I tried with max range set at 300, 350, and 400 (rocket min-max range is 280-450). The higher settings seemed to help very slightly at first, presumably because the fighters will overshoot their target on the first pass and not be so eager to close the distance immediately, but soon enough they were right on top of the target and doing very little.
This is a pretty good summary of a lot of the thought I have on fighters. I think laser canons should probably weigh more. Pulse lasers for fighters should also probably use less energy and be more accurate. Speed is still to good at preventing anything from hitting fighters. anti-fighter lasers should have a tracking of 5+ or something. Just lower their dps if needed, but they really should be hitting most of their shots.
On the shields on frigates against fighters. I find adding one shield module with more than 8 resistance is reqired to not lose every frigate to laser canon fighters. The laser canon fighters will still get some shots inside the shields, but not too much. You can stack armor up to 10-12 plus, but with the crit rate on armor, laser cannon fighters get through that pretty fast. If you use shields with that 8 resistance the enemy has to at least use rockets to get through them, and then they can’t hit fighters at least.
After playing a couple rounds of survival with fast frigates on keep moving order I keep finding my frigates under the enemy cruiser even though I set them to 700 range. I know it’s not because there are other cruisers around and my frigates are straying into them because this happens mostly when there is only one enemy left. I think you need to look at how you do the keep moving order and have the unit move to a new position that is exactly at the set range away from your target because at the moment I’m losing more ships to generator explosions than to weapons fire.
I meant to say something about this also. I was messing around with mass frigates with torpedos (1000 range). I set the engage distance to 1200, and keep moving. I’m pretty sure cliffski said that with the keep moving command units try to stay between the engage range, and half of that. Well at one point about 8 frigates went and rammed an enemy cruiser and got stuck until it exploded. Not the best use of LR frigates…
I think this is being covered in http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=3105. You’re definitely not the only one getting stuck on this.
New friend-or-foe color overlay toggle for when both fleets are the same race (or the ‘O’ hotkey)
green tint! YES! great functionality, i hope it will be mentioned somewhere in the manual & tutorial
And mention in the manual/tutorial that there is no link between the ship colour, and the colour of the win/lose indicators in the top corners, as this might initially confuse new players.
I like that the colours are optional, and can be switched on/off mid battle (instead of just pre-battle).
Optionality actually means that casual players will not use this feature, while experienced players will be happy about this feature. Tehre should be more optional advanced features! 
I kinda think it looks crap this way… I would prefer coloured targeting boxes around each ship simply because it would look cooler.
Along with health bars for friendly ships.