eraser, the basemaxnumfighters is IN the squad entity and is the line to be changed.

harpo

Stress might have forgotten to rebalance the mitigation on the research side. it should only be 1-2% increase at most per upgrade. anymore than that and the ships become very difficult to defeat the shields. Also if they get a 15% to shield mitigation from the race bonus,it should be removed to match feds starting point. 

No i'm not back, but i'm trying to follow whats going on when it comes to the balances. I'll make some changes if need for stress. 

yea i got some time lately. i still have all the balancing information and original scenes, but i no longer have the ability to edit or create new ones.  

Jpaa1701:  You can adjust the ships speeds in the Game Options screen.  I wouldn't suggest changing any of the values in the entity files due to the delicate relationship between each of the movement factors (speed, accelerations, and turning).  That could turn into a days-long project in order to achieve the correct balance for every ship in the game.

Are you playing the Entrenchment version?  If so, you can't possibly use the vanilla Sins speed stats because of the incorporated fighter-style movement of every ship.  To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure why it's taking so long for your ships to cross a gravity well.  I just tested this with an Akira class in my home gravity well, and it took it right at 2 minutes to cross the entire gravity well. 

I think you're simply noticing that the gravity wells were doubled in size to allow for more battle room and more realistic strategy.  I wouldn't plan on this changing, especially with half-size and half-speed in the books for every ship in a future release.  There may be something we can do for the time frame though.  Try submitting a report on the debug webpage listed in the OP and see what happens.

As I said, the gravity wells have all been doubled in size over vanilla sins.  This was to increase the level of strategic planning required in addition to giving the ships room to fly around.  I'm not the decision maker, but I don't think anything will be changed in regards to this.  Capital ships also move slower than other ships in this version of SoA2, so it's natural that they should take more time to cross a well.

If you don't mind me making a suggestion, you should try multi-tasking with your fleets.  If one fleet is traveling, find something to do with another fleet, or build some structures at one of your planets, or play around with the research screen.  You can easily keep tabs on where the traveling fleet is by keeping an eye on the left pin-up window frame.  Not only will this take your mind off of the traveling ship/fleet, but it will also contribute to an earlier finish by helping your empire expand more ubiquitously.  I only suggest this because I've never personally had to just sit and wait for a ship to cross a gravity well, though it could simply be a difference in our play styles.   

I generally only use small fleet sizes in options so I usually don't have enough ships to spread around to other fleets(yes, I only play with one fleet).  I do this because my computer is 5 years old and large fleets don't go over very well.  I spend my resources really quickly so I spend most of my game time waiting for resources to build to fund my latest research/building projects and waiting for my fleet to get where I sent it so lot's of staring at screen and doing nothing.  A usual fleet for me is 5-7 capitals and 10-20 frigates/cruisers.  I usually only play medium maps so that fleet size is max without crippling me economically with fleet upkeep.  I do alright because of judicious use of heavily fortified choke points to slow any invading force.  I only posted to see if there was an easy way for me to speed things up a bit on my end.  I know that the speeds are where the mod team wants them to be and that is fine.  I just got spoiled in regular sins with sending my fleet from one end of the map to the other and it taking less than 10 minutes.  Thanks again for your time guys.

I personally love the 2x gravity well sizes!

thanks Mystic Angel...changing usesFighterAttack to TRUE did the trick for me...now my light frigates learned how to move and fight at the same time...how cool is that:)

I'm glad the fighter movement is working out for you, but bear in mind that the speed stats weren't designed for that type of movement.  If you can track down that Dynamic Battle System Mod you'll be amazed by the difference adjusted speed stats can make in how realistic the "piloting" seems.

"preferstoFocusFire" isn't a line that I've experimented directly with yet, but I believe you're correct.  You've noticed, of course, that the line exists in the general ship info section and not within a weapon-specific section of the entity file.  I therefore assume that it refers to all weapons in a ship's arsenal and, consequently, general targeting.  It could certainly be my imagination, but in my experience ships in vanilla Sins go after a single target (even if they switch that target every few moments).  In SoA2, you'll notice that a Federation ship (or Borg Cube, for that matter) will lance out at various enemy ships with phasers from all sides.  So, my best guesstimate is that it does indeed give the ships multi-targeting abilities should they have the weapon hardpoints to accomplish said task.  I haven't looked at the hardpoints for all vanilla ships, but I'd say that turning focus fire off would have very little effect considering nearly every frigates fires in only one direction.  By all means, give it a shot, though.

PreferFocusFire: TRUE/FALSE effects if all ships in your fleet/group focus on a single target, or break formation, and engage multiple targets. Though Mystic is right the ships dont show that much difference behavior wise wether it is set true or false. If set false fleets with all of the same roletype will break formation and engage different targets instead of focusing all fire on just one. At least that is how i believe it is supposed to work.

Roletype is a factor as well, because certain roletypes prefer one type of target over another. LRM's will almost always engage a heavy frigate, or capital ship before anything else. Flak frigates will always engage strike craft first. ALL ships will engage a colony frigate before anything else. To see what i mean watch an AI vs AI replay of vanilla sins. Look at which ship types engage what other ship types. Especially when re-enforcements jump in. It is also funny that fleets will disengage, and will all go after a colony frig when it jumps in system.

No progress to report on 0.5 Its been a busy week in RL