At the beginning of most bigger battles, there is a high chance of lag. The mod is heavily focused on ships ranging from destroyers to capital ships (there is literally not a single frigate), so most capital ships have one (turret-heavy battleships) to eight hangars (dreadnoughts), most usually between 4 and 6. This is both because I think vanilla Starsector has rather weak hangar ships (unless you spam Drovers). If you let five Astrals fight five Onslaughts, the Onslaughts win every time, despite the Astral using more resources.
In Starsector Discovery, it's a bit different:
Fighters: 2-5 per wing
Bombers: 1-3 per wing
Gunboats: 1-2 per wing
All of them are significantly more expensive in terms of OP in the mod, with fighters and bombers usually costing flat 20 points while gunboats use up 50 points. The gunboats are also only powerful support craft that don't actually go for the enemy, and they spawn only once per battle except for the Nomad gunboat. To reduce some lag, most battleships have their gunboats built-in, basically as escort, not as hangar pet. This means you can't go for 8x5 wings.
Fighters and bombers are extremely dangerous to any ship - just like in Discovery. If you play any ship yourself, always focus those first. Gunboats are more of a defensive extension of battleships since they usually provide separate shield bubbles and catch snipe shots. The Liberty and Core gunboats also act as long range suppression with their FWGs (Gauss Cannons).
Anyway, at the beginning of a battle, all capital ships release their fighter wings and it slows the game down for a few seconds because of all the engine effects and AI scripts. It's very noticeable during fights with Ishtars. If it had too much of an impact, I'd reduce the amount of effects/engines later.
Ship-wise, I'm making good progress. Yesterday I did the Jormungand, the Vidar and the Hel, although I might need to redo the Vidar because I accidentally added something that looks like a BNUUY to it. A few days ago I also added the Megalodon to the Core's shipline as Dreadnought, quite on par with the Gallic Dreadnought Temeraire, the Bretonian Warwick Juggernaut and somewhat on par with the Ishtar, although the Ishtar really outranges everything.
I've also added a carrier and a battlecruiser to the AI shipline, for a bit more variety.
For the next days, I plan to put all the factions in the game - right now you can get the ships only by spawning them in with commands or getting their rare blueprints through exploration. I've read up a bit about how Nexerelin works, and I think I can make all factions work without making the mod depending on Nexerelin, but as far as I know, the faction perk picker would require a dependency if I added the faction blueprints to them, so I guess that would be a separate mini-mod to make after the main mod is done.
The biggest trouble will be to make Nomads spawn. I want them to behave similar to the Remnant, but without stations to spawn from but instead have them spawn in hyperspace and in random systems. That will likely require some custom coding, or at least browsing through other mods that may have done something similar to copy their coding.
