Defense updates:
Outpost:
Primary Weapons: Missiles, Cannons (front sides rear)
Secondary Weapons: Beams (front sides)
Tertiary Weapons: Cannons (any), Beams (any)

Advanced Outpost:
Primary Weapons: Beams ( front sides any)
Secondary Weapons: Cannons (front sides rear), Torpedoes (front)
Tertiary Weapons: Missiles

Goal:
Early outposts focus more on missiles and cannons with fairly balanced weapon facings. Each facing can be reinforced by the all around weapons and the forward arc is overall stronger. Late game advanced outposts are stronger forward arc but have a much larger all around weapon complement. They mount torpedoes to help tag large ships. Advanced outposts also switch to higher beam count as beams get stronger late game.


Starbase:
Primary Weapons: Cannons (front sides any)
Secondary Weapons: Missiles, Beams (front any)

Goal:
Starbases focus on higher frontal firepower to engage ships but have a weak rear arc though their all around weapons can still hit hard. Starbases and the advanced versions are meant to act as an anchor to other orbitals that can have higher damage output. Starbases also focus on any fleet boost tech you have like wide area jammers.

Battlestation:
Mostly a boosted starbase but with more emphasis on beam weapons and a higher number of all around weapons.

Starfortress:
More balanced between cannons and beams with a small number of missiles.

Missile Base:
Increased space slightly to allow more specialization. Missile bases and Advanced versions also mount torpedoes.

Batteries:
These have been redesigned and given a bit more capacity as well. They focus on frontal weapons with a very small number of cannons that can fire all around. Advanced versions focus more on beams.

Fighter Garrisons:
Space reduced so they aren't as crazy powerful.

Goal:
The different orbitals have more focus and fill in gaps that a starbase itself can't fill. The intention is that some will be better options for some races while others will be more useful for a different race. I've tried to change the weapons and load outs so that the overall result is a more interesting tactical battle against planets. The secondary goal is to make orbitals a touch less crazy late game.

Race changes:
I'm considering limiting orbital defense blueprints according to race disposition to make battles and assaults more varied.

Aggressive races: Only build starbases but will build other defenses if you trade the tech to them.
Defensive races: Build all orbital types they research and will build defenses you trade tech for.
Balanced races: Build starbases plus orbitals matching their tech affinity. (eg, races that like missiles build missile bases, races that like drones build fighter garrisons, etc.)

Defense Preferences by race:
parenthetical items are defenses the race may not always build.
Alkari: NA
Bulrathi: MB, AMB
Darlok: MM, AMB, AGB (GB)
Humans: GB, AGB
Klackon: (MB, AMB, GB, AGB, F, AF)
Meklar: F, AF (AGB)
Mrrshan: AGB
Psilon: MB, AMB, GB, AGB, F, AF
Sakkra: GB, AGB (AF)
Elerians: NA
Gnolam: MB (AMB, GB, AGB, AF)
Trilarians: MB, GB, AGB, F, AF
Terrans: NA

Tech Tree changes:
Advanced Fusion: Choice between Fusion Drive and Missile Base
Robotics: Choice between Orbital Batteries, ARU, and Shield Capacitor

These tweaks allow for more specialization between races for the amount of defense and type of defense that fits their personality.

Phasors:
Phasors reduced from 17 to 16 damage and accuracy increased from .2 to 1.5
(phasors hit a sweet spot that makes them one of the best weapons and massively boosts fighters, trying to tone that back a bit.)

Anti-matter and Plasma torpedoes:
Minor adjustments to base speed to account for fast torpedo mod being a bit too hard to dodge.

Hyper X Capacitors:
Base size reduced to 4.

Reinforced Hull:
Changed HP bonus from 50% to 75% to balance better vs Heavy Armor. This may increase a bit more.

Nucleonic Charges/Anti-matter charges:
Range reduced from 50 to 35, damage reduced to 10/25 respectively. Rationale: you haven't lived until you faced 28 Klackon frigates armed with charges. Individually they really aren't all that great, but at scale they are way too good. This change should make it more balanced.

Reverted internal test names for alternate ship blueprints to default names. These were left in by accident in release 2.7

Module changes:
ECM dropped to 30 Missile Defense
Cloaking Device increased to 60 beam defense
Hyper-X Capacitors size modifier dropped to -25% from -50%.

Weapons changes:
Nuclear Missile reduced to 20 Missile Attack.

Drones:
Drones tend to get pretty strong by the end of the game but aren't as good early on. I'm looking into tweaking these a bit to even out the progression. The goal is to make fighter degrade more evenly by making them easier to kill but more of them while heavy fighters survive longer but do less damage per sortie. The intent is fighters do well against poor point defense while heavy fighters do well against heavy point defense.

Fighters: 4 drones per bay
Bombers: 3 drones per bay
Heavy Fighters: 2 drones per bay.

Fighters: 4 hp per drone
Bombers: 8 hp per drone
Heavy Fighters: 16 hp per drone, 2 energy weapons and 1 bomb.


Firing Arcs:
UCP 5.9 is adding the ability to adjust the size of firing arcs. Currently each arc is 120 degrees which makes side and front/rear arcs a bit too forgiving as range increases. Initially I'm looking to change this to the following:

Front/Rear: 90 degrees
Left/Right: 90 degrees

Reduced the cost of the 360 degree arc to 225%

Race AI:
Tweaks to Meklar personalities to make them a little less expansionist They tend to build critical mass pretty fast each game.
Tweaks to Klackon personalities to make them a bit more expansionist. They don't build up fast enough to be a threat most games due to slow colonization.
These are randomized changes

Blueprints:
Klackon tweaks to correct underperforming ships.
Elerian tweaks to correct underperforming ships.
Updated Antarans:
I see two options for these. first is traditional weapons that do heavy damage to planet infrastructure, the second is antarans that blow up planets. This option makes antarans more of a threat and combined with their new blueprints should make them more challenging.

Changes:
Mass Driver damage reduced from 15 to 12. This ended up being just a little too good and the change brings it back in line.

Inertial Stabilizers increased from 25 to 40 beam defense
Inertial Nullifiers increased from 50 to 70 beam defense.
Cloaking device adjusted to 70 missile defense and 55 beam defense
ECM jammer increase to 35 missile defense to make it more viable.
Multiwave ECM increased to 60 missile defense.
Wider Area fleet defense increase to 35 to match ECM jammer and 70 for self.


Missile Changes:
Nukes: Missile attack now 30, HP increased to 5.
Merculite: Missile atack now 30, HP increased to 8
Pulson: millsile attack now 50, HP reduced to 8
Zeon: Missile attack now 50, HP reduced to 8
Quantum: Missile attack now 55, HP reduced to 8

These changes make ECM more relevant and changes early game PD to be less effective as better armor is researched while later game PD is more capable of destroying missiles.

Computer Changes:
Base Energy Weapon Accuracy reduced from 25 to 0. These changes extend the time needed for beam/cannons to outpace missiles and increase the benefit of the battle scanner for early game use.

Shield Changes:
All shields now have a 3s cooldown before they begin recharging.
Multiphased shield set to 175% bonus shield to make it more attractive compared to hard shields.

Fixes:
Fixed incorrect entry in Trilarian Gunship which would prevent it from adding drones.
Pirate weapons updated

Tweaks to Human blueprints for better tactical performance.
Adjusted Inertial Stabilizer and Nullifier to +25/+50 respectively to make beam and cannons viable late game.
Shield values tweaked. Class 1 protection reduced and less shield strength gained for each new level.
Multiphased shields gain 1.5x shield strength to balance better against hard shields.
Torpedo speed increased slightly and acceleration lowered to make unguided torpedoes more usable.

Missile first round missile revisions:
Missile attack reduced to make ECM viable, missile space used increased by 50%, Cooldown set to 15s. The goal is to make missiles more of a volley fire long range weapon and account for the 360 firing arc. This arc was present in MOO2 so I'm going to keep it that way. The effect of these changes are that you need to design your ships to counter missiles and ships using missiles tend to fire early and do a lot of up front damage if you don't.
drones per launch bay reduced to make them more manageable. Drone health adjusted to compensate.

Weapons second pass:
Cannons and beam weapons now have some variance in each weapons accuracy at range. The goal is to make combining weapons and specials more interesting. For example, Rangemaster works better with Gauss or Ion Pulse than Graviton or Phasors.

Some weapons values tweaked for balance: Mass Driver, Gauss, Phasors, Fusion, Ion, and Plasma got minor changes.

Min damage reduced to 25% from 50%. At 50% weapons tended to fall of to similar DPS too quickly. This allows weapons that should be bad at hull damage like Plasma to stay bad against higher armor resilience.

Added Elerian blueprints.
Increased the base/best speed of gunships titans and dreadnoughts a touch
dropped mauler AP to 15.

Minor tweaks to a few blueprints I missed to bring back weapons preferences lost giving phasors CO.

Added blueprints and composition tweaks for Gnolam and Trilarian fleets.
Bumped up the HP of the Ironclad to offset it's reduced ship space.
Bumped up the HP of the Gunship to give it a bit more staying power.
Sakkra HeavyArmy setting changed from 7 to 4.
Gave Phasors Continuous Fire.
Adjusted blueprints for races that preferred graviton cannons so they weren't affected by phasor change.

Fixes for a couple of improperly formatted blueprints:
Human: Titan weapon entry missing size priority
Mrrshan: gunship sizePriority and prioritizeMods value swapped
Sakkra: Battleship mods key not commented out for weapon entry.

This is the 2.0 release adding the first phase of updated ship blueprint templates and AI adjustments for fleet composition.

Custom blueprints added for:
Alkari, Bulrathi, Darlok, Human, Klackon, Meklar, Mrrshan, Psilon, Sakkra, and Silicoid.

Please report any issues or oddities.