Holy moly. Work sends me away for a few weeks and I missed a lot!
Overall, love the sound of the changes made so far. In particular the re-worked PD mechanics are great. I also like the addition of more components that can be added to missiles, giving reasons to decide to build larger ones.
I'll add two points that I picked up from following Nebulous: Fleet Command's missile re-balance. They had a similar problem: All-or-nothing missile combats, dominated by massive swarms of cheap missiles to overwhelm PD. A couple of the solutions used there could be applicable:
1. Add more penetration aids, to make larger ship-killers with expensive features more lethal by giving them more options to penetrate PD fire.
I see the ECM has been re-worked, which I think will prove to be a good move. ECM is a good way to abstract many of the specific penaids that Nebulous allows (decoys, jammers, more decoys, evasive terminal attack profiles etc), under one heading. I'd just ask that if we're only going to have the one penaid option (ECM), can we make it non-binary? I.e. I'd like to see the option to pay more mass to get more ECM.
Perhaps instead of a tickbox, on/off arrangement, we could enter a value like we do for sensors, and get certain number of ECM points per MSP. If it was scaled exponentially relative to the racial ECM tech level, that'd make going over the current ECM tech expensive and of limited value, keeping useful ECM values close to the racial level, but allowing some variation and design compromises.
2. Put limits on salvo sizes, to make a doctrine based around large salvoes have significant trade-offs in terms of fire control.
I see this did get brought up in the discussions, but mostly dismissed. I think this was probably the biggest thing in Nebulous that forced players to start experimenting with smaller, more lethal salvoes. I think we should consider it further for Aurora. Something like an MFC tech line that increases number of missiles that can controlled at once? Or maybe just the number launched at once?
The idea would be to add more of a trade off to going for large missile swarms. Combined with making smaller, more lethal salvoes more viable, it would hopefully give a wider range of viable tactics.