I have two suggestions:
1. Make turrets/guns set to Final Defensive Fire randomly choose which salvo to target
- Currently, if I shoot a salvo that targets 4 enemy ships, and the enemy can shoot down half the missiles, I know that always only 2 ships will be hit, since salvos are targeted in a set order.
- If instead each weapons randomly chose which salvo to target, then damage would be spread more equally unless all missiles were targeted on a single ship. This would also effectively increase the survivability of ships under missile attack, since you wouldn't have a only a few of the targeted ships taking all of the hits.
2. Make Auto-targeting choose targets based on size instead of seemingly randomly
- If Auto-target assigned weapons in the following order, I think it would generally work better, since bigger ships tend to be more dangerous
- Proposed order of targeting list: Largest to smallest ships with military engines, then largest to smallest ships with unknown engines, then finally largest to smallest commercial ships.
- This way, when you have less ships, the largest (and therefore usually most dangerous) enemy ships are targeted first, and once all military ships are targeted any ships that may be military are targeted, and then finally commercial ships are targeted. It also ensures that if you are using lots of small ships, the larger enemy ships are targeted more in general