MOD Request

I would really like to see a fairly simple balancer mod that ONLY tries to fix some of the bad AI and make weapon diversification useful. *note that much of this is would be nice but the CORE need is the AI only*

For example we all know that as things stand weapon X is the best beam in the game and there is never any reason to research let alone use any other weapon... same with seekers there's a single seeker (capital ship) that's simply better than any other and leaves no reason to use any of the others.

Granted some have a minor range boost over the "best" but the damage or size or cycle rate or combination of those is so much worse that the few blips of extra range are worthless. (when one does 243 damage and the 3 notches shorter does 1000 damage there's just no contest.)

Essentially I want the basic framework to stay the same as in the number of levels and such but I would like various weapons to have meaning... for example depleted neutronium might do massive damage but have half the range of anti-proton or something... DP would suffer no degradation at range and a-p would etc. make them BOTH viable but in different ways. atm with DP being 90 and AP 120 with DP doing 3x the damage there's no use for A-P IMO.

but MOSTLY I just want to see the AI make decent ship designs and be somewhat more aggressive and not use stupid crippling treaties and so on.

Another thing that would help balance without gutting the game would be to massively increase shield strength... ATM one shield can protect against not quite 2 hits from a no mount weapon X hit... and not even one hit from a massive mount weapon X hit... This is silly... I think fixing the shield power-up curve to around 10x normal might help... Instead of nerfing all the guns to make shields useful just power up shields to make them useful... I like the 100 levels of tech so that if your L1 ship is attacked by a L100 your toast... even if your using a baseship and they are using a frigate... that huge a gap in tech SHOULD be a total loss.

Nothing against Kwok but I really dislike his mod because it forces balance by reducing the scope of the game to almost nothing in tech. almost everything seems to be limited to 6-10 levels and that isn't much fun for me. granted it does balance things hehe. Please note I am probably wrong about that but I am not saying how it IS just how it FEELS to ME so please don't quote me on it or take my word and go ahead and give it a shot because YOU might love it cuz most do.

If I could make it work I'd have 1000 tech levels just to make it impossible to have "maxtech" in everything in every game or heck even in ONE thing in ONE game lol... It would almost force people to choose a path and stick to it... and make capturing tech vastly more important. I would have most weapons do a specific TYPE of damage and various shields that can protect from a range of damages. or probably MODS for shields (5kt units that give a mod to shields to protect vs different weapon damage types ala star trek and re-modulating shields and stuff like that.) so instead of 500 shield type there are "shields" and then there are "upgrades" so you install 10,000 points of shields and that's fine... then you meet an opponent that uses a weapon type your basic shields can't block so you learn "polarized" shields and instead of new shield modules you add a computer upgrade that gives the bonus of +polarized shields etc. with a mod for each type of weapon damage but this mod only comes from research of that weapon type (capturing it and getting the level that way works of course) the mod should be fairly well along the tech branch of course and each tech branch would unlock a "basic shield" that blocks only that type so you would have a basic shield for each weapon type and a mod for each weapon type as well... I don't know if you can do this but the shield strength should be the LOWER of two fields the weapon TL or the shields TL so that if you have L100 shields but only L1 in say photon weapons then you would only have a L1 photon shield.

Anyway those are just wishful thinking I guess... the only thing I find really vital is fixing the AI's shipbuilding and treaty stupidity hehe... making them better at colonizing/expanding and such would also be a big help.