My suggestions......

Gratuitous Forum Suggestions
1

First a list of weapons:

Sheild projector: give damaged ships time to repair ot recharge by projecting extra power to them using the rescue command
repair vampire: damage the enemy ship while repairing yoru own.
Repair arm: to repair your own ships in battle using the rescue command.
target jamming: reduce the accuracy of beam weapons.
AOE cloaking device.
Plasm torpedos.

Commands:

ablity to set a chain of commands
Move to location
Orbit current target at X range.
Target sheilded enemys only.
target shieldless enemys only.
the ability to prioratize and distory specific modules or weapons systems with a simple prority slider: shields, engines, repairs, energy weapons, kenetic weapons, missle weapons.

Suggestions to game mechanics:

Increse collateral damage on cruiser explosions.
Allow distroyed ships parts to be repaired.
Shields should never permenantly be distoryed.
armor should never permentantly be distroyed.
Remove the drastic crippling of targeting assistance at 2 modules… make it 80% or something.
Allow excess power on a ships systems to allocatoe power to increse energy based weapons damage against shields
Voice acting for the messages received during combat(raises hand)
Reduce the effectiveness of guidence scrambler and increse effectiveness of point defence.( its rediculous that one scrambler can do the job of 5-6 point defence modules.)
Increse the amount of decoy missle per decoymissle launcher by 2 for a tolat of 6 decoys from a weapon designed for that purpose.
Intorduce scavanging and collecting of damaged parts for repairs to your own ship form debries.

To cliff:

As soon as i saw that awsome person we had sitting behind the wheel of this game i had to buy it. Ive been awake for 14 hours straight playing this and tomarrow im gonna do it all over. Thanks for all the feedback and time you spend here helping noobs like me understand the game. BROVO SIR!!!

2

These would be awesome, although I’d want them to be ‘prioritise shielded/unshielded’ rather than ‘only’. Don’t want a ship ceasing fire and charging across the map to find a shielded target, when it could be dealing damage to an unshielded one right next to it.

To be honest, don’t really even need an order for these - this’d be a good candidate for the normal weapon targeting AI. Weapons with high shield pen/low armour pen should prefer to fire on shielded targets, and weapons with low SP / high AP should greatly prefer to fire on unshielded ones. All the time. It’s a shame watching cruiser beam lasers bouncing off shields, when there’s a perfectly good unshielded target nearby.

3

I’d like to be able to set the ‘fighters/cruisers/frigates’ engagement orders for each weapon type. If I’ve got a cruiser with a target painter, escorted by rocket fighters, but the cruiser has a bunch of missiles, I’d like to set the cruiser target painter to engage fighters at x distance, but leave the ‘attack fighters’ order off entirely for the missile launchers.

Or say it’s a missile cruiser with a couple of anti-fighter weapons. It would be nice to set the anti-fighter weapon to engage fighters, but leave that order off entirely for the missile launchers.

4

I second that motion! for example, my cruiser defense laser targets fighters, and my cruiser laser target frigates and cruisers.