[Arkcon]

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
By carrying a few phased weapons, you may force the enemy to use the weaker phased shield generators, and take advantage by bLasting away with your more powerful normal damage weapons.
You may not even need to have any phased weapons in your assault fleet, but if your opponent believes you do, he will have some decisions to make. Psychological warfare anybody?

Your method from P&N may be better balanced than the stock game. And MM maight want to implement it, or people could just play P&N. Like you said once, its fun even if you don't play as a pirate or nomad.

However, in the stock game, once you start achieveing 1 or 2 levels in phased shields, conditions are essentially the same as you suggest. You have to make some hard decisions on how to defend your ships. The difference is, you have to spend a lot of research time and research resources to achieve it.