Military Hit&Run type. You have strong shields with good regen but barely any hull and armor. On top you put -100% emergency warp damage. This way fleet engages for as long as shields work and then jumps out safely. Countered by inhibitors and anything that can bypass shields.

I was thinking of adding a neutral/andor pirate based military. I could play around with that. Good suggestion!

I couldn't thoroughly playtest it yet but does the massive firerate bonus of the freelancers also apply to point defences? Because that would basically render any missile and/or carrier oriented fleets entirely useless unless freelancers themselves (which would still result in slaughtered fighterwing swarms though)
For the Great Alliance, which I am currently playing with, their bonus does seem to apply even though I could only test point defences in rare occasions close up against other ships so far (haven't faced any AI with missiles this early on.. aside from the occasional drone base)
Especially Hive fleets might run into big trouble if faced with any oh so small amount of freelance point defence as Hive naturally benefits from massed fighter swarms later on.
In any case, it might be something to look into.

While I haven't had the chance to field test this yet, with the much larger numbers of Hive and their very quick respawn rate it should balance out relatively evenly. At least that's the idea in theory, playtesting could prove this wrong. If you do test it out please let me know your results!

Would it be possible to add bonus damage to planetary fortification for Rift Walkers? In the early game bombarding a planet with a few corvettes is dreadfully slow. Ive been using full orbital bombardment with 4 corvettes for a solid 5+ years on a capital planet and im only 1 / 3 done. That + their slow fire rate makes wars feel needlessly dragged out.

I would suggest to REMOVE the trait cost and make it completely free.
However, of course if you were to do this I would suggest to allow the AI to also use these militaries on startup; with just a random selection.
WIth everyone with an advanced military the player would not be op and would actually make the game much more interesting; introducing rock, paper, scissors type combat.

Even if you were to have a popup at the start of the game with all these options; it would be a guarantee the AI would also choose one. However, this is just my two cents.

Would it be possible to add support for the New Ship Classes and More mod ? It almost feels like cheating spamming dreadnoughts because battleships are so useless and expensive compared to them.

@Chris, I will absolutely be adding in compaitbility patches once I finish reworking the traits into techs!

Sorry to keep posting like every 5 minutes , but when you start working on compatibility patches , could you add one for Military Power fix ? http://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=688573776 , ive been using it with your mod and have been getting some wonky looking numbers , which the author, Chihayafuru, had this to say about it -

"MP calculation includes certain values and completely ignores others (because Paradox), so I can easily see a mod like Elite Militaries which adds lots of different bonuses per static modifiers and traits having really weird results.

I will add that to my list of things to look at, thanks for the update!

@Chris I've sent a request to chihayafuru hoping he'll give me access to make a compatibility mod, we'll see where it goes!

As Chris pointed out way earlier, and this is just for somewhere down the line. Stellaris has inherited the same inate issue that Crusader Kings 2 suffered from. When it comes to orbital bombardment (and sieges in CK2) the game completely ignores the actual power of your fielded force and simply sees numbers. This is a huge issue for the militaries that have strong ships but field very few. I'm guessing the game has some set damage/day depending on ship class and the actual firepower of the vessels have very little or no impact at all, meaning sheer numbers will bombard more efficiently even if that means 20 corvettes with point defenses.

Not exactly an immediate issue, but it makes for a very strange bottleneck in wars against inferior opponents. Drop their fleet in seconds, drop their planets in 8-10 months. (Or years if you're running Rift Walkers.) I'm positive this is an issue with how the game calculates orbital bombardment damage, it just becomes a glaring obvious issue when running with your mod. (Which I love, keep up the good work!)

I've been meaning to look at orbital bombardment lines to see if I could do some simple readjustments for each individual tech to help that out some. After I Add some flavor traits and a compatibility patch for the New ships mod I'll be looking at that and other things!

I'd say nerf the freelancer Firerate. Something around 400% to 500% should work. As it is currently the freelance RoF is so high that everything it fights seems to be instantly killed before the enemy even gets off 1-2 shots.

Hmm, I'll look into it. I haven't had that kind of result at all though, every EM that Freelancer faces in my game they lose to o_o. Does anyone else have playtesting they can attest to?