I have a small suggestion to solve the issue.

To enable crippled ships to partially turn on Warp engines, using antimatter to accelerate. Or fly at a slower speed but saving antimatter

I've been on the fence regarding the crippled state overall.

• On one hand, I like the concept of using it to either randomly or sequentially "cripple" the ship as its HP decreases. Losing some/all weapons, losing abilities, or having it's antimatter get set to zero (causing damage = antimatter lost) are neat concept-wise to me.
• On the other, the whole point was to increase the survivability of the capital ships/structures. They are definitely tanky now.. but for a feel perspective it's basically a "hey, you finally got through the shields/armor & hull of an enemy ship! But wait, there's more!! now we have an extra health bar!" The enemy ship can't shoot/use abilities, but it can move at normal speed while it's shields continue to reset. It has a gimmicky/artificial feel to it.

They removed the capital ship limit for sins2, which I really like. They added in the crippled hull concept, which I also like.

If the idea is to help players learn when to retreat, why not attempt to bake it into fleet behavior? If a ship reaches a specified % of it's HP (or is crippled), it will attempt to retreat to the nearest friendly gravity well. Similar to how garrisons have the [hold]/[offensive-roam]/[defensive-roam] toggle, why not have a fleet setting (advanced menu) that toggles between [withdraw wounded]/[hold fast]?

• [withdraw wounded] - any ships that enter "crippled" state automatically leave for the nearest friendly gravity well. The rest of the fleet remains
• [hold fast] - ships never retreat
• ideally the above could also be set as default behavior for AI settings (aggressive AI never retreats; hard+ AI withdraws wounded, etc..)

Per my own tastes I'm not inclined to dive to a subsystems level of detail (for targeting). I'd prefer to have the systems get randomly disabled as the HP drops. The final 500HP would see the ship alive but derelict/adrift; it's salvageable if an external source repairs it - but its own passive regeneration is disabled alongside the rest of its weapons/abilities/engines/phase drive. Of course, I'd also prefer this apply to all ships/structures, not just capital ships/structures.

This being said, if this approach came at the cost of reducing the number of ships that can exist at a given time - I wouldn't make that trade. I prefer massive maps with max players and ideally a hundred or more planets with maxed player supply.

As for projectiles being physical, only the missiles can be blocked right? I don't think the other weapon types can be.. (note that I've not verified this, so I could be wrong).

I've mused at the idea of having components themselves be destructible; e.g.

• starbase/titan armor components can be destroyed before the inherent hull/armor is damaged
• a component that could give planets (or maybe just asteroids) 'shields' akin to what units have, which would be destroyed if the planet's shields reach zero.
• TEC Loyalists having a planet component that is basically an extension of the defensive structures that appears as planet art, which can be targeted/destroyed (in addition to being able to "attack")

..but I've yet to convince myself that something like this would benefit sins2 (or mods) given the time/energy needed to realize it.. There are consumable items in the game, but nothing like what I've pondered.

Agreed as a repair mechanic would add a bit of complexity and micro to the game that I don't think the devs wanted (pretty sure I read awhile back they were trying to minimize micro). I'm not really a fan of micro intensive games as I find it exhausting and tedious to be micro managing your fleet, which is a reason I really enjoy Sins because the micro is minmal.

I'd be perfectly fine with reducing the speed of the ship when it gets to crippled as well as having it's weapons disabled as they currently are. That shouldn't require much if any AI tweaks.

I think several of those suggestions could work well. While I appreciate the design intent, the "hidden" health bar makes the system inherently intransparent and will do difficult for newcomers to grasp.

What I'd suggest:

1. Revert to a single health bar for hull points. When it reaches 0, the asset is destroyed.
2. Activate crippled state at a suitably low hull point level. If the point is to offer a chance of retreat, I guess at least 33%?
3. Maybe make crippled hull points a separate health bar, for even better transparency. Something red or otherwise prominent in the bottom left.
4. Increase total hull points to compensate for a crippled asset losing offensive capabilities, and to make retreating in crippled state more feasible.
5. Maybe - and I accept some criticism on this - increase ship speed, maneuverability, and jump drive charge rate. Immersion explanation: all auxiliary power diverted to "get us out of here".
6. Prominent visual and audio cues that ship has entered crippled state. I think Sins 1 had a "our capital ship is heavily damaged" alert.
7. Include an auto-cast toggle per qualifying asset that it should auto-retreat, if it enters crippled state. Set toggle to auto-cast by default. That should increase survivability for new players while giving more experienced players granular control whether they want to risk it.

On the whole, I'd think these changes would still meet (most of) the design intent to give newer players a helping hand in preserving their critical assets, while increasing transparency of how the system works.

I suppose one more radical alternative could be to make shield and armor the main health bar. As soon as they are depleted, assets enter into crippled state and the current hull points act as the "second chance". Or get an increasing probability of being crippled, in relation to % of hull damaged. Sounds like that would require a lot of stats rebalancing and not sure how it would affect factions differently, so maybe not desirable at this stage. Though would be a much simpler system.

Edit: also, while more granular damage models or mechanics around it would be attractive, I don't think they fit well with a game of Sins' scope.

1. Revert to a single health bar for hull points. When it reaches 0, the asset is destroyed.
Maybe but we've been having a lot more fun since crippled was added. My opinion at this stage is we need to improve signaling and teaching the concept (e.g. tutorial). This isn't the only system (and more coming) that have the same issue.

2. Activate crippled state at a suitably low hull point level. If the point is to offer a chance of retreat, I guess at least 33%?
That's effectively how it works. If your capital ship has 100hp its crippled hp is 50. So when you reach 33% of your total, you enter crippled state.

3. Maybe make crippled hull points a separate health bar, for even better transparency. Something red or otherwise prominent in the bottom left.
Considered but not enough room, especially on the smaller icons where you are dealing with really tight single pixel situations.

4. Increase total hull points to compensate for a crippled asset losing offensive capabilities, and to make retreating in crippled state more feasible.
This is effectively already the case. Ships were rebalanced to compensate for the cripple state. Even if we did this again not sure how it solves any of the concerns noted.

Maybe - and I accept some criticism on this - increase ship speed, maneuverability, and jump drive charge rate. Immersion explanation: all auxiliary power diverted to "get us out of here".
We'd have to think through the side effects more but immersion is broken for my personal taste: e.g. "Why not use this all the time when you are out of combat and just trying to get somewhere fast?"

Prominent visual and audio cues that ship has entered crippled state. I think Sins 1 had a "our capital ship is heavily damaged" alert.
Already planned, just not in yet. The vocal line would be something like "Our capital ship has been crippled and weapon systems are offline!". This would be immersive and teach the player right off the bat.

Include an auto-cast toggle per qualifying asset that it should auto-retreat, if it enters crippled state. Set toggle to auto-cast by default. That should increase survivability for new players while giving more experienced players granular control whether they want to risk it.
Not a bad idea for the advanced menu for players who already know the system but new players might be wondering why the ship is not doing what they last told it to do or wonder why its moving away at all so we just shifted the potential confusing problem to a new one.

I'm unclear what you mean in 3. You said "the lack of green (hull) serves as the more visible indicator. To me that means there is a blank bar. How is that more visible than the blank bar now flashing red?

Those other units are too weak and TTK is so low that it rarely ever be noticed. Even if it were noticed (perhaps with a heavy cruiser) we also didn't want to add the micro advantage of moving small units to safety during crippling thus increasing the APM to be successful. This led to internal discussions about auto-retreat (and other options) but they have their own set of problems. One could argue the APM case with capital ships and titans however there are by design going to be far fewer of them. Given the number, your investment and customization of them, and general 'fun toy' sense of them, we leaned towards cripple and the option to try and save them over the APM concerns. Finally, just like abilities, item slots, etc, we wanted this feature to help indicate that capital ships and titans were more special.

Don't stop! This is a good train of thought. Outside of combat why don't we have more power to speed and jump charge rate?

This would just generally be a nice feature. Ships transiting safe space faster would be nice.

From the narrative stand point, ships have a buffer for power to shield and weapons, once that buffer is full, actively generated power can be shunted to non combat functions.

Once combat is initiated the buffer allows shield and weapons to come online near instantly but in combate, replenishment is slow because active power generation is shared between all systems.

When crippled all power is shunted to escape systems.

Thus you move faster as you would when not in combat and when crippled and its internally and mechanically consistent.

As far as showing people, perhaps there can be UI elements that are grayed out to indicate that this system is being stored in the buffer such as the shield bar being muted in color. But I don't think that's actually necessary.

If the ship has an animation of the shield springing to life that would serve the same function.

But ultimately this doubles as a quality of life feature (your ships move faster when not in combat) and explains a way the crippled move faster system

I thought the "single pixels" was referencing to either this:

or this: 

The 2nd image is hard to see without being zoomed in, otherwise I'm not sure where single pixels come into play (at least for my computer)? I loaded up my last save (symphony patch) and sent a cap to its doom to verify that the bar flashes for me, so there's no bugs. The flashing bar is nice, but I kinda... didn't notice that till I looked for it (I don't normally watch that closely). 

My aim wasn't to allow the other ships to be save-able with micro - it's purely for aesthetics. I'd find it highly entertaining to see a couple random ships "escape" from a bad engagement that are sitting crippled at the edge of a friendly gravity well. If survivability is an issue then I'd end up setting the crippled hull to 100 for corvettes/frigates/cruisers/structures. To me, it wouldn't make caps/titans/starbases any less special as only they'd have a meaningful quantity of crippled hull points. (my own headcannon being that they are made with the intention of getting focused fired by enemies & so have redundant systems & whatnot, whereas the other ships are more mass-production and weren't spared the resources needed to increase their crippled hull points. If you make it, then yay, if not, well..)

Now I want to make a mod that adds a component for vasari orbital labs.. The component would be an evolution to the marauder's aura that impacts the gravity well - increasing allied ship speed & slowing neutral/enemy (if possible).

Regarding the auto-retreat behavior toggle.... I'd be okay if it's limited to AI-players only (flag would be set by either AI type and/or AI difficulty). Seeing a badly damaged ship attempt to flee the battle would be funny & it's something realistic to me (wounded attempting to retreat). I can see where that'd annoy the micro-type players though..

In the spirit of making things more accessible I wonder if the fleet icon could be modified into something akin to the garrison settings toggle? The fleet icon isn't hidden & could have it's artwork change to indicate mode. Would also let players identify which fleets auto-retreat & which ones do not (assuming some fleets are sacrificial). This is just a musing, but I wonder if it'd address the concerns Blair mentioned?

I'm wary of adding invulnerability as a common feature. As for late game crippled making little difference, isn't that where some of the fun comes into play? I tend to take losing my oldest caps personally.. resulting in the offender's empire being reduced to a bunch of shattered planets before I end the game. With how easy it is to replace caps late game (and them starting with bonus levels) it seems odd to want to make caps even harder to kill. I'm only looking at this from a PvE perspective though, maybe I'm blind to a PvP need?