Wow this sounds awesome. Watching my capital ships go after drones while ignoring carriers totally made me cry. Such blatantly failed design. However since the player has control over the designation of the ship, whats to prevent me from making attack ships and labeling them as Support (so they dont get attacked first), and having some tanky ships that arent full defense but still more heavily defended and labeling them as attack ships? Or does this mod somehow see through that and look at the actual setup of the ships?

this is a problem with the combat system imo while you should be able to set the behavior your ships take ( roles) this should not control the way your opponent responds to your ships they should still treat your ship as if it had the auto assigned role

If you build a slow heavy armored ship and call it an interceptor thats fine it will try and "rush" over to the enemy however your opponent should recognize it as a defender and ignore it unless its in combat range

Ensign ricki :sir theres a ship coming for us it has low weapons and high armor i think we should ignore it for now and focus on more dangerous targets

Captain Sam: this is why your an ensign and im a captian look it has interceptor literally written across the front of its hull, there must be something wrong with your equipment. Focus all weapons on that ship and fire

It depends on what you call a defense ship. Now ships that are mostly defense with no offence and no support are pointless, because they pose no threat. But ships that are balanced and tilt just a little toward the defensive end will get to dish out a ton of damage before they get targeted. This is also why everything but the attack roles targets defensive ships second. I'm sure people will find optimal strategies, but I think this mod favors balanced ships that have just enough offence to fall into the attack category or just enough defense to fall into the defensive category.

As androshalfoc points out, the problem really stems from the fact that your ships' behaviors and your opponent's behaviors toward those ships are dictated by the same attribute. If these two were separated, then more possibilities would open up. It would work better if your ship had 2 attributes, one that you designate that decides what it targets and one that is based on the modules that are attached, that decides what targets it.

Another change I thought might be interesting would be to change the interceptors so they use a defensive maneuver instead of an attacker and start them a little further back. Ideally this would get them to stick close to the capital and support ships rather then racing out on the vanguard. A possibility that might add value to more defensive ships would be to give either escorts or guardians the attack maneuver and have them target support first. The idea being that they can take the beating it takes to charge through the battle lines and hit the most vulnerable targets. Any thoughts?

It's your mod, and I agree its abstract but I always imagined the defence heavy ships acted sort of like aegis cruisers, a specialist at shooting down incoming missiles so that other ships could focus on their speciality.

Just a coincidence, but a long time ago, as a young sailor handy with those new things called computers, I worked on the proof-of-concept Aegis cruiser, which wasn't even a cruiser, just a big support ship with an Aegis system replacing most of the super structure as a research tool.  It was an old and clumsy ship, but even using prototype unarmed missiles, the system occasionally knocked the incoming supersonic drone missiles out of the air by direct contact.  That was impressive test results.

I find your analogy quite appropriate.  The escort should be primarily shooting anything smaller than it is and work its way up.

Back to OP.  This is fascinating work.  I play very peaceful games, so I wouldn't be a great tester for this mod.  However, I like where it is going and admire the cleverness of the approach.  I am hoping the devs steal any of the concepts here they can, or at least make it even easier for this kind of work to happen.  Sooner or later, I am going to be itching for a fight.

The basic system is a bit weak, tbh. It's a nice concept but in practice it's not great. Vanilla currently offers a system whereby the best fleet actually mirrors an MMO raid group - a tank or two, a support or two and a bucketload of DPS. 'Escorts' should be the majority of a fleet, not the one or two ships with a metric ton of armour strapped to the front. It feels incredibly gamey.

What I'd like is for the way ships are given roles to be changed. First, I'd ditch the 'defend' priorities, and just let ships target down the targeting list. Escorts should defend capital ships by killing things that want to kill capitals, rather than by catching bullets til the DPS is ready to kill the attacker. Then I'd just let you pick the role, since it's really just assigning the ship a target priority list. Ships fire at the highest thing on the priority list that's in range. This would encourage including a bit of defence on every ship, and including a wide range of roles in every fleet.

It'd also be nice to see roles that actually take the ship's armament into account - I like to see my short-range ships blazing toward the enemy, but I want my long-range boats - even the tiny ones - to sit back and hammer the enemy with missiles. But presently, any small well-armed ship is likely to be an interceptor. My bombers are interceptors. This is like using your archer is a swordsman to charge the pikes.

Alas, this is all beyond the reach of a mod, as the game picks the AI's ship roles based entirely on it's internal logic (even though it has a 'roles' stat listed in the blueprint defs, and the player is allowed to choose them). Modding the targeting lists is pretty much all we can change. So frankly, it's good that someone is doing it - he might find a great balance for it.

No worries, happens to me all the time.

The truth is, there's only so much that can be done with the tools available. I am playing around a bit with how big an impact the attack vs. defense maneuver has to see if I can figure out a better feeling for defensive ships. I may end up going in and manually changing roles in the blueprints too to try to get the AI to make ships that make more sense. Right now though, the role system, and how it is by default tied into the threat/fortitude/value system is a pretty big handcuff. This mod loses some of the rock/paper/scissors aspect that I think is supposed to be baked into the base game, and I'm trying to figure out how to get at least some of it back.