OK so I finished my first full CB game. I've played 2. The first one I quit around turn 120. I was just learning the ropes. I thought I'd provide some feedback from the viewpoint of first time player. This is not meant to be a list of suggestions or complaints. It is simply what I think after having played one game and some of the experiences I had while playing it.
My playing style: Always research intensive, always try upgrading ships, always get the Propulsion Expert trait!
First and foremost I enjoyed the experience!!! So whatever else I say in this post should be viewed through this lens.
1) The game lasted until roughly turn 210. This is about twice as long as a stock or TDM game. TDM is the only other mod I've ever played. I was playing against high number of high difficulty AIs with no bonus as suggested in the docs. My feeling is that the game took so long because of the very large number of ships involved, the difficulty/inability to easily destroy planetary defenses, and the overall requirement to basically capture every enemy planet. Adding to this is the relatively slow speed of the ships. I was using basically speed 6 for nearly every design up to the very end. Around turn 170 I started mass producing a speed 8 destroyer design. Normally, at the end of a game I'd be using speed 13 battlecruisers and just glassing every world I came across.
2) I liked the QNP. I hated the fact that the larger exhaust ports were basically unusable because of the loss of efficiency. So I was forced into using warship designs with rediculous numbers of small ports. The only designs I used the larger ports on were non-combatant support ships like the fighter ferry/transports. I would have used larger ports but I felt that the inefficiencies of thrust vs weight basically were too high and would put my combatants at too high a risk of losing full speed due to battle damage.
3) The leaky designs were really freakin cool!
4) It was a complete pain to repair my fleet escorts! The whole repair bay/repair facility thing was pretty annoying and time consuming. I appreciated the whole concept of having to really setup fleet repair facilities and dedicating entire planets to the task with years of setup required. Still the large number of very small easily damaged components left me with a significant management task of constant repairs throughout the game. This got a bit old. I've started my second game and after the initial push I'm considering using the small number of very large components approach. Minimal use of 20mm mounts, larger engine ports, minimal use of 20cm armor. Perhaps this will work out and I won't feel the loss of efficiency too much though even writing the last two sentences irked me.
5) Missiles are just too damn slow. OK this part is a gripe. I had to use ship designs that were speed 6 because otherwise I was going to get jammed up with the whole fleet-outruns-the-missile-bombardment problem. Toward the end of the game when I was using speed 4 and 5 fighters primarily I nearly stopped production of my A series fighter bombers because of this very problem. In the end I just suffered ludicrous losses to this fighter class. I'd like to see the missile speeds increased at higher levels to maintain some sort of parity with the possible combat speeds of ships. Some might comment along the lines of missile speeds are just fine for me because a) I use slow ship designs b) always use strategy X which is superior. Whatever your point of view missile speeds totally do not work for me because they are too slow and don't fit anything in the way of my design philosophy or combat strategy. Along the same lines I never used the nuclear missiles because it just made this problem worse. Then there is the whole multiple salvos chasing after the target because it is retreating. Sets up a situation where 4 to 6 salvos are fired on a target over around 15 turns, the first salvo finally hits the target around turn 16 when the map border stops the retreat. Naturally this wastes supplies and causes target saturation problems. Missiles should be faster than the ships that they are designed to kill. Reference US torpedo design after the release of the Soviet Alfa attack sub for an object example. Speed up the missiles... the end.
6) Plasma cannons are useless in AI games because the AIs never use 100cm armor. Actually never saw them use anything but 20cm armor. DUCs seemed more useful because of their weight and cost. I'm sure that in a PBW game plasma cannons become useful but not against the AI. I never play PBW so... plasma cannons are nerf toys. BTW I only saw 2 fighter designs by one race out of like 8 AIs that used plasma cannons at all.
7) I got the impression that the AIs weren't varied enough. One game isn't enough to tell but they all seemed to use the same ship designs.
8) AIs kept having a problem with what I think were their PD or anti-fighter designs. I killed hundreds of these ships in 1 on 1 engagements. They would not return fire on my ships even though in cases they had range advantages and more than enough of a chance to shoot. Would it be better to weight the AI designs toward generally useful designs rather than specialized to avoid situations where the AI sends out dozens of these essentially useless ships to get blasted. Mind you I'm not saying the designs are useless I'm just pointing out that a more generalized approach for the AIs might be better because they don't use the ships correctly. Alternatively AI strategies could perhaps be changed so that PD ships will fire on ships and fighters, etc.
9) Not one AI used a PBM against any of my planets. OK not like they had much of a chance but they seemed intent on wasting their time using DF weapons against a few planets in totally fruitless and repeated attacks. Not sure what can be done about this... perhaps an AI cruiser that uses a few DF weapons and PBMs get to a very generalized attack strategy.
10) The mount descriptions make to hit chances unreadable in Tactical Combat. Take note I'm not manually fighting ships in Tactical but I do use it to get a feel for planetary defenses (which you can't see in any form in Strategic) or Fleet make-up (same problem). I wanted to go in and edit the descriptions to read 2c, 2cm, or 20 but never did. I get the impression that Mount descriptions should only be 1 character because of this issue.
11) AIs should use more Training Facilities. I think.
OK that is enough... there is more but this is a good chunk.
Again... I enjoyed the overall experience and am already at turn 50 of my 2nd game. Thank you SJ and the entire modding community for making SE so playable for so very very very long!
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