I'm glad Stardock is so willing to allow us to have input into the game.  I'm a lifelong fan because of this and the ship designer.

Couple ideas though I'm not sure about feasibility.  When I offer numbers, they're guesses.  I'd need to separate the battle system from the game and run a couple thousand battles to graph how these would actually function.

Ion:  Medium fire rate, medium range low attack potential, medium accuracy.  If this weapon does damage resets the cooldown on enemy ships weapons.  This would absolutely devastate ships using weapons with long cooldown times.  Ion would act as more of a defense than a weapon.

Pulse: You could add a function that varies the cooldown time.  3s charge and then a rapid succession of three of 1s shots. Low damage potential, 75% accuracy, and medium mass.

The strategic use of these weapons is to act as anti-air for capital ships.  I would bump kinetics to 3s and beam to 5s, making this the fastest firing in succession weapon.  Capital ships in the past spent all of their firepower on single ships. Destroying them, but then needing to wait to fire again.  This would allow the capital ship to target lock a new ship as soon as it is destroyed even mid pulse.

Exotic: Slow fire rate, 10-20% chance to hit (this can't be modified by evasion), extremely high damage potential (one hit can destroy a battleship but not a dreadnought), high mass, low range.  This weapon could be limited to battleships and dreadnoughts only due to the extreme mass of the weapon.  It functions as a capital ship killer.  You want to stop a battleship or dreadnought, this will do that at the cost of other weapons and defenses leaving you vulnerable to smaller ships.

First, thank you for pulling back the curtain on some of these mechanics. Now we can actually have a debate!

Why? So its clear that dreadnoughts will take more damage per attack on average because they will be hit more often, but there is nothing that suggets that bombers get any special bonuses here (do they get some accuracy bonus against dreadnoughts?)

Or do you mean its the fact that bombers attack dreadnoughts first in orders, so if I have a dreadnought versus dreadnought with bombers, the dreadnoughts will fire at each other while the bombers go to town?

We will use our previous example, and now try armor. Again this is how I understand the mechanic:

• First the weapon rolls a d100. The missile must roll 50 or lower, the kinetic must roll 75 or lower. Otherwise its a miss.
• Assuming its a hit, the point defense rolls between 0 and 20. If its number is higher than the attack roll, the attack is a miss. (for this example, we won't include point defense).
• Assuming its still a hit, you roll armor from 0 to its max value. That amount is subtracted from the damage of the weapon (minimum 0).

So lets look at our previous example numbers.

Kinetic

Mass: 1
Accuracy: .75
Speed: 1 shot per sec
Damage: 133.33
DPSM: 133.33 * .75 / 1 mass / 1 sec = 100

now lets make missiles do equivalent DPSM

Missiles
Mass: 1
Accuracy: .5
Speed: 1 shot per 9 sec
Damage: 1,800
DPSM: X * .5 / 1 mass / 9 sec = 100

The simulation is a little trickier, but will simulate 900 seconds of firing. So 900 shots for the kinetic, 100 shots for the missiles.

Kinetic (on average): 73116 Damage / 900 seconds = 81.24 DPSM
Missile (on average): 88729 Damage / 900 seconds = 98.58 DPSM

So in this scenario we can see that a slower, harder hitting weapon can be more effective against armor.

So we can see that the defenses are more effective against some weapons rather than others, so there is a least a "soft counter". However, its not as intense as the previous version (whereas a defense was cut down by the square root in effectiveness against improper weapons).

I personally prefer the current vague idea of combat outcome pre-battle, as I find the idea of accurately knowing detailed combat performance characteristics without any form of intelligence gathering to be immersion breaking. In my mind it risks destroying replayability value (ironically shortening the time for combat to be "solved", which was your issue in another post) depending on its accuracy and usefulness. The knowledge that targeting AI RNG has an outsized impact on a battle, or added randomness like individual ship performance RNG (maybe fluffed as pilot competence) between ships would reduce this risk. A more involved ship design process, giving you more to tinker with, and more variables (like relative positioning of components and form factor of the ship), would also increase replayability for me, but probably doesn't add enough to the core experience of GC4 to be worth the dev time.

I love your simulation idea, with the above caveats regarding the risks of demolishing replayability; maybe it could have a cost, perhaps a built project costing exotic resources? One of the extra benefits of this idea is that stardock could then make a version accessible from the menu, and it'd help players test / break / abuse the combat mechanics and so improve the test / fix / patch cycle for combat during early access. If they could make a simple, replayable, stand-alone combat combat simulator, we'd know the combat was *chefs kiss*.

My suspicion is that adding a tiny degree of player control (and therefore AI civ randomness) to targeting priorities for each fleet would nudge the emergent result enough to be hugely replayable and deep without altering many mechanics. Combat balancing would stay as a mathematical / AI problem, with the desired amount of variability in each combat (both player induced variability and natural variability) being controllable via the types of targeting nudges you allow the player to have access to, and the stability / instability of the targeting system.

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Many techs currently appear to provide flat bonuses to armour, to shields, to point defence, that affect every ship equally. Is that the case, or am I misreading things? The weapon bonuses only affect weapon modules, but the defensive ones appear to affect everything. The flat bonuses to weapons may already be messing up the mass/damage payoff of weapon modules, but combat's obscure enough atm that I can't tell.

If defensive mitigation techs do just affect every ship the same, it generally immunises every ship, even one with no survivability upgrades added, to incoming damage. I've experienced this phenomena in several play throughs, meaning pirates and precursors quickly become irrelevant. I didn't use many frigates in those plays, just cruisers and experienced flagships, hence me being unsure of whether it's an issue - sorry if this isn't how it works! If defensive techs add percentage bonuses, and are hull / component / module based, they affect specialised ships more, have a proportional affect on different hull sizes, and make ship design in general more impactful.

DPS is generally a good way to show weapon stats.  I came up with something similar that also to into account mass and accuracy. The problem is DPS ignores a lot of the stats.

On the subject of an easy to understand interface I had a couple ideas.  The first one is the one I proposed in my own thread.  Basically it's a cooler version of a bar graph.  It would act as a way to determine how the fleet was built.  Each weapon and ship would have a rating for what kind of enemy ship size it is good against.  The red arrows get bigger if the fleet is good against that ship type.  I would organize by ship size because they look distinctive, but you could feasibly do this with ship class as well.

In the case above I have 4 cruisers in the fleet.  Based on Frogboy's list above cruisers will go after cruisers thus the red arrow will be the largest. This would be followed by the large and huge arrows being the next largest, with the small and tiny arrows being the smallest.

A more sophisticated option to show the same information is to have a spiderweb diagram popup to the side of the information above. I'm struggling to find an online creator so I'll just show some examples:

Now the cruiser example above should look something like this:

(This was made using MS paint, it looks bad but gets the point across)  

Basically if the point is closer to a ship size that fleet will do better against said ship size. You could in theory use ship class instead of size and use a heptagon. I think that doing that would limit possible design space for the possibility of future classes, but it would work.

This graph could also be affected by weapons being carried by each ship.

Kinetic being short range and fast firing probably make them most effective against tiny and small ships.

Beams land in the middle so I'm not sure they really have a use against certain ship sizes.  Would need to test this to find out.

Long range will probably be most effective against larger ships.  You can get more shots in before they reach you.

Ok lets talk range for a moment, and more importantly, tactical speed.

I've already made the case that I think range should probably be dropped, but if we are determined to keep it in, than its best to make it as clear and useful a tool as possible.

First, we drop the notion of distances, that doesn't mean a thing to a player. Instead, we change everything in the game to combat rounds.

Distance and Cooldowns -> Combat Round

A Range of 1 means: "This weapon starts firing on combat round 1". Whereas range 3 means "I don't start firing until combat round 3".

Further, we do this with cooldowns as well. A cooldown of 1 means "I fire in every combat round". A cooldown of 3 means "I fire, then fire again 3 rounds later.

So taking our current weapons, this is what it looks like:

Kinetics: Range 9, Cooldown: 1
Laser: Range 3, Cooldown: 3
Missile: Range 1, Cooldown: 9

Now put out in round form, it looks like this:

Round
1: Missile Fires
2
3: Laser Fires
4:
5:
6: Laser Fires
7
8
9: Missile Fires, Laser Fires, Kinetic Fires
10: Kinetic Fires
11: Kinetic Fires
12: Kinetic Fires, Laser Fires

Speeding Up Missiles

I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that missiles have a slower travel time than lasers and kinetics. And I can respect the rationale why, but again its just another layer of obfuscation that makes the range seems more impressive than it actually is. So we make it that when a weapon fires on round X, it hits on Round X. On the viewer its fine for them to travel slower for looks, but mechanically they are all hitting when they fire.

Removing some Clutter

Now we drop tactical speed. It sounds cool but all it really does is shorten the distance, which is just a small piece of the actual combat. Its not worth having a whole new mechanic dedicated to it, as its not effective enough to care about (distance is barely important enough to care about). So its gone.

Next we drop weapon cooldown adjustments. This one will likely be more controversial, but I think its good for consistency. We already have plenty of other levers to pull, and by keeping the cooldowns consistent we keep our nice clean round firing chart. If you want to add more damage, just making the weapons smaller or deal more damage, or XYZ.

We need to recognize that every new mechanic makes the obfuscation problem that much worse, so every mechanic needs to justify itself. We can already bump DPS (which is the thing that really matters) in a number of other ways, so we don't need to further make adjustments there.

I don't think range (and therefore tactical speed) is meaningless at the moment, and I think that even if it was, it'd be easy to make it meaningful; range, weapon firing arcs, and tactical speed are three of the ways you can ensure your weapons have no downtime, and three of the levers you can pull that affect your ship's ability to spend the maximum amount of time targeting what they want to. When you have the kind of emergent combat system they're going for here, these small variables can have quite the impact so long as the ranges, firing arcs and manoeuvrability of ships are well tuned.

To be honest, if they simplified combat too much, it'd really turn me off, as the promise of interesting combat mechanics is one of the draws for me. If combat was simplified and turn based, I'd expect to be able to fight combats manually, and have meaningful choices to make in combat turn by turn, which would involve a LOT of dev work in a different way. As it is, the promise is that fleet composition matters, and that there are enough degrees of freedom in designing ships and fielding them that it's meaningful. If combat is too simplified and becomes a mere vehicle for illustrating that your building up of industrial capacity / tech / resources sufficiently outstrips the AI, I'm less interested in a 3.5X game when there are other 4X games out there with great combat.

One other thing that would be nice is designable Military Starbases, so I can have a long range missile bombardment Military Starbase chipping away at invading fleets, or a chunky defensive pile of HP protecting my colonies and buffing any fleet in the same battle.

In each case, we always have to communicate very clearly to the player what is happening but at the same time not overwhelm them with data.  This is what makes this so difficult.

In general, I feel better about the weapon systems than I am feeling about the defense system designs.

If carrier modules will remain in the game I wouldn't make them complicated this time around (Maybe in a future expansion you could add custom loadouts for carrier modules)

I would suggest two modules.

Fighter Carrier Module:  Provides 2 fighters that have a mixture of the highest non special kinetic or beam weapon and the highest non special shields or point defense.

Bomber Carrier Module:  Provides 2 bombers that have a mixture of the highest non special missile or beam weapon and the highest non special shields or armor.

Well, I'm having trouble reading the new fleet cards. What does a combat rating of 13 mean? Do I have good weapons and good defense? I find that a good mix of weapons and defense is usually required, so a single rating is misleading to me. I used to be able to take a quick look at the attack types, defense types, and hit points.

Though the numbers can be a bit odd for me since I like having high hit points and high repair speed instead of any traditional form of GalCiv defense types.

I have read this thread with interest, and so far have the following observation.

If players are not able to control their ships in a battle then primarily it is the game's management that ultimately will determine how effective ships are and what weapon systems, etc. are the most efficient. A simple example, there is little point in designing a ship that is suppose to engage at a distance, when the game runs battles in such a way that it hurls the opposing fleets at each other and that ship will only get one shot off before the opposition gets to close range and begins to make multiple attacks. So perhaps some consideration should be given to what the Devs have devised as the battle management.

This is what Stellaris does, and its necessary if one wants to add a strategic layer to the combat. Otherwise, the offense and defense are all the same. If every weapon just "does damage" and every defense (except PD) just "absorbs damage" then what will happen is players will figure out the optimal defense and offense in short order, and design all their ships that way. 

Considering Kinetic Weapons have the greatest rate of fire and Shields recharge, the meta will probably be those two things. It will be unwise to research multiple defense types - since Shields and Armor are basically the same (with shields getting the nod thanks to recharging) then it wouldn't make any sense to research both. One might as well research all the way down a single tree for the greatest defense-to-weight ratio. Same with weapons. Since there is no functional difference between a Beam and a Kinetic - they just 'do damage' - then rate of fire becomes king. Kinetics win. 

This would be different if range actually mattered (and could be maintained by individual ships in a fleet, like in Stellaris) and/or if weapons actually did different damage to different defense types (again, like Stellaris, where Kinetic weapons do more damage to shields and Energy weapons do more damage to Armor and Hull). 

But, since the weapons here don't do any of that - they just do flat damage to flat defenses - then there's no reason to worry about choosing more than one weapon and one defense. 

Sorry to say it, but the rock/paper/scissors system was actually elegant and did force players branch out along the research tree and trade for tech they wouldn't otherwise research, because they needed to counter their enemies. This system here is overly simplistic. The only way to make it more interesting is to go full Stellaris with it, or go back to R/P/S. Where it stands right now, it's gonna be boring as soon as everyone figures out the meta. 

At least with the old R/P/S system, every galaxy - every play through the game - would be different. Sometimes Missiles ruled the galaxy. Sometimes it was Kinetics. Sometimes it was Beams, because Elerium was abundant, or whatever. Here? Just figure out the meta and make every ship the same.