Here this may help.

here are some things that aren't ridiculous 

- "Auto-attack but don't rotate" behavior toggle is absolutely needed
- Engine needs to take into account back weapons for overall DPS calculations
- Up hardcode limit on flair points & weapon FX points per bank (10 is too low)
- Structures owned by AI "players" defined in galaxyscenariodef cannot be spawned in orbit of planets that are uncolonizable or that they do not own, preventing for example pirate bases in orbit of gas giants
- Modifier AngularThrust/DisableAngularEngines should work on rotating structures such as turrets
- Ability to specify a min. follow length while using move toward first spawner modifier with a negative value 
- Removing PlayerPirate appears to crash the game
- Ability to force unit icons not to rotate 
- Ability to edit relative positioning of elements in infobox or shift all elements leftward for larger boxes
- Limit of "applies to" entity types in research box (e.g. weapons research) restrictive & confusing, seems to take into account very limited subsets (e.g. only ships and structures using the last enhancement)
- Can't add more than two ResearchPrerequisites
- Ability to expand borders on hardcoded UI elements such as the main menu - at the moment they get cut off if larger than a specific area, which seems originally defined for 1024x768. i'm not developing a mod for people with monitors from 1996

Did you completely remove pirate bases from your mod? If so how?

It's easy to remove Pirate Bases... Get rid of them in the GalaxyScenarioDef random counters and don't put in a PirateBase in a map setup. The issue I believe is that if there are no Pirates you can't set that pirates are inactive/active setting which causes the game to get confused and crash, much like giving fighters shields.

perhaps giving ships an engagement area or allow your ships to defend particular structures.  I know you can use local engagement, but still...  Some sort of patrol mechanism would be nice and probably wouldn't be difficult to code either.

Wait... giving fighters shields crashes the game? Then that is my next suggestion:

Make it possible for fighters to have shields.

That would be nice.  I was working on a mod a while back that would have allowed a capital to give fighters surrounding it shields, but caused the above problem..

Yup, we've even managed to technically get shields on fighters, but as soon as they take damage the game just doesn't know what to do and crashes. This discovery was quite disappointing to the modding community, but perhaps it will be changed in Rebellion.

Indeed. That day was first nice, and then saddening due to the mini-dump that followed.

I sent this stuff to yalaran a few days ago, and i just stumbled onto this thread, so i might as well post it here

Max weapon count from 3-8

Minimum weapon range.
Target count by weapon and bank (Not sure if this is already in, though i have a sneaking suspicion it is....)

Weapon1

targetcountfront

Starship firing orientation.

When ships have more damage on one firing bank (Or equal for multiple banks)  than all others, the game tries to make the ship orient to that side. However. If the ship is symmetrical and it has a bank on the left and the right that are more powerful than the front, it will turn around to always engage with the left bank. Even if the right side is already facing the target. (A hotfix for this would be nice, Even better would be the suggestion below)
I would like to see is some orientation behaviors available in the ship files and in game (Similar to fleet cohesion) which allow you to figure out what kind of orientation you want you ship to take. Orientation forward (Do not turn to fire side weapons if they are more powerful), and Orientation most powerful (Turn to fire most powerful weapons)

This would allow things to look proper as well as establishing more interesting fleet battles. if everything is oriented forward with one fleet, they can power right into the ranks of another. If it had side orientation, it wouldn’t be half as maneuverable in battle.

Planet disturbances

Ability to change planet type Via bombardment or abilities

firingAlignmentType "Default"

You use this line to fix that issue.

Is that an Entrenchment+ thing? I'm not seeing it in base.

This does not fix the issue; if you set it to TiltFoward plus an angle, the ship will keep moving about; it will not merely turn that angle and sit still, which is what the50first is referring to in his post. 

i would like to see more available weapon types not just Gauss, laser, plasma, beam and anything else that is already in the game but the ability to add more

Dear God YES!  Modders being able to insert new weapon types is a must.  Also, more to the damn fleet and formation entities than

TXT
entityType "Fleet"
defaultCohesionRange "Near"

TXT
entityType "Formation"

Speaking of orientation, it would be nice if that would be dynamic.

If you lock up weapons and only unlock them by research, the AI tries to use the most damaging bank, even it isn't unlocked yet. So if you lock up a Radiances beams and plasma, it will sit in front of the enemy completely helpless and unable to fire. But if you tell it to use broadsides, it will always use broadsides, even when the all weapons are unlocked.

So it would be nice if the oriantation would either be calculated from active weapons only or if it could be changed by research subjects.

Another nice thing would be if you gave certain weapon types passive abilities, for instance, it would be nice if wave cannons actually did something for once.  You could make Waves degrade enemy armor slightly, or perhaps make a new ion type that deals extra damage to shields.  I'd love it if certain weapons only affected shields or hull, and if the hull-only weapons get fired on a shield, either negligible damage is incurred or absolutely nothing happens to the target.

I think that's actually currently possible.  It can't be done globally, but ship weapons can be made so they affect their only hull or only shields.  In a ship's .entity files each weapon has an entry called DamageAffectType, and I think in addition to "AFFECTS_SHIELDS_AND_HULL" "AFFECTS_ONLY_HULL" and "AFFECTS_ONLY_SHIELDS" are acceptable entries.  I haven't tested it, but that's something I recall from an old pre-Entrenchment thread.

You can do this with a passive ability, if I'm right.

This is possible. Use the line "AFFECTS_ONLY_SHIELDS" in the weapon's data. Edit: Sparda, I've tested and confirmed it before.

This would be interesting to see. Currently, AFFECTS_ONLY_HULL will deal direct damage to the hull, even if shields are up. Maybe you could get some obscene shield mitigation penalty for the weapon, so that when fired at something with shields, it does virtually, or no, damage as you want it to.

That's good to know.  Do any ships in SOGE use this for ion cannons?

At the moment, no. Though, after 2.0E is out, there's plans to redo the stats of most of the ships in order to accommodate ion cannons. The reason it hasn't been done yet is that this will pretty much turn the entire mod atop it's head. I'm also thinking, as an additional passive ability, to add in a bit that if the shields of an enemy's ship is down, for the ion cannons to have a high, or guaranteed, chance of partially weakening a ship, like the ion abilities already ingame, but far weaker. However, the upside of this is that these bits will pile up with multiple ships, and can possibly mean the end of a ship.

I've also wanted to do such a passive ability, but the problem is I'm not sure if there is a sure fire way to only apply a buff when shields are down. Indeed, if Sins shield regeneration is constant instead of per second the only time shields are completely down is immediately after a normal weapon hits.

From my understanding normal shield recharge adds shield points every few seconds in a lump sum, not constantly.  Abilities that restore shields apply every half-second from what I've seen.

There is an if shields are down finish condition, ShieldFailure. So it'll have to use that... I imagine it'd have to make use of a "check" buff, that is the weapon sees if the shields are up once it hits, and if so, apply the ion thing. I'll admit I'm not entirely sure how to work this out, but it's a start. Edit:

This is true, the devs did this in order to discourage focusing fire.

Oh yes there is.  I've done it.  It's a rather complex buff, but I've done it.