More screenshots, of two major factions (Empire vs Starborn) in a fleet battle:
In a typical engagements, individual AI have priorities that best suit their weapons or speed/agility, ships with anti-fighter or drone weapons will disperse and chase those targets. Likewise, bigger ships will prioritize engaging other big ships where their guns can penetrate high armor better than smaller weapons.
There's a few different damage types, ie. Energy (bonus vs shields, penalty vs armor), Kinetic (neutral) and Plasma (penalty vs shields, bonus vs armor). Armor has innate Armor Ratings that reduces incoming damage by a flat amount (as in Starcraft), so smaller fast firing weapons barely scratch heavy ship armor.
I plan to have ships leave behind a wreck after destruction, player will able to loot it for cargo, credits or rare modified modules (to reverse engineer for a blueprint to craft).
Also, as any experienced gamer knows in these sort of games, a major balance issue is thus:
One of the problems with smaller ship classes is they fail hard in a blob fest engagement, often instant death due to the mass incoming fire. I’ve balanced this by giving ship classes an innate evasion, with a big bonus for fast Corvettes (smallest pilot-able ships), whilst drones have a very high evasion.
This evasion only triggers against weapons which are not designed to engage these targets, so an all-rounder fleet is required, else a few big ships with massive guns might face a bunch of smaller threats which they a) can't track the fast moving ships as they weave & orbit and b) even when they fire, the target has a high evade chance to take zero damage!