I like your ideas.

How about having Trade ships be able to defend themselves?

I'm not sure what faction would use that idea though.

Edit: Hmm. If Rebels get more money from killing trade ships, perhaps the Loyalist can weaponize them as a counter?

And Rebel trade ships do some sort of small explosion when they die, hurting attackers?

Also certainly possible. The only thing is that neither side seems particularly better at trade than the other. I only gave the rebels the extra resources thing because I was having trouble thinking of economic bonuses for them. But I don't especially care which set of bonuses the devs choose on, as long as they start playing more differently from each other in the early game.

Of course, balance comes first, and I'm not saying the Devs must take my ideas and do them exactly the way I want them. I just wanted to point out that there is a lot of things the Devs could do for the subfaction diversity, especially early game. I just didn't want this to be one of those threads with only complaining and no ideas.

That said, as an old pro I'm curious what you find objectionable JJ, as I might implement many of these later in a mod if they aren't officialized.

Meh. Loyalist bonuses are more general and much more useful. +tact slow, +7,5% income,
 repair bay bonus (give any buff to already powerful tech reps and they're OP), cheaper trade. All good/too good.

Rebels get crap. free krosov tech-crap, extra credits for trade ships- epic crap, extra xp for caps- crap, frenzy- dpends on balancing, extra weapon banks- depends on balancing, cheaper weapon techs- good. Crap prevails.

I agree, this list was more for showing the diversity of things they could do that would fit the themes. Its not a recommended to be taken unmodified or as a package. You're absolutely right that its easier to make good general bonuses for a faction that is focused on winning a war of attrition than an aggressive one, which you really need to reward decisive military action.

I certainly agree that Titans are overpowered, and I admit my suggestion is just part of the problem. However if you want to press for a specific unit to deal with them this is not the thread for it. I'd rather they do moderate nerfs to them throughout the beta, such as implementing my suggestion or moving them up the tech tree, until moving on to more extreme steps like a major all round stat nerf or creating a counter for them.

I noticed most of your suggestions on loyalist are impossible for rebels to get, but the loyalist can get most of the rebel tech with just with a slight adjusted cost.  

Killing trade ships barely affect trade to be noticeable and currently a player I believe gets 50 creds per ship. Maybe instead of getting free credit, rebel can decrease the overall income rate per each trade ship.  Penalize the loyalist for letting trade ships die.

Rebels need passive buffs on enemy territory. Promotes attacking then defending.  Frenzy is a good start.

Rebel max weapons research level not only should be cheaper but higher. How else can they break the better defense of the loyalist. 

I do see that tec rebel has extra research for damage but the cost is the same for all and not reduce. Maybe research time can be decrease as well.

I was reading on all the titan ships and looks like the devs did a decent job and differentiating them.  Advent ability to take over a planet as an ultimate will end many entrenchments.

Micro phase jump for vas titan will be fun to use.

At the moment a starbase seems to be capable of dealing some serious damage to a titan. If you have two starbases in the same gravity well, you could counter them being a TEC Loyalist.

The TEC Rebels could bring in a massive Pirate fleet and have all of these ships focus fire on the enemy titan.

There is no need for a specific anti-titan ship if you ask me, though I agree that titans are a bit too early accessable at this point.

In my mind, corvettes are the logical choice to make as the anti-Titan ship...

They have debuffing abilities that, if made properly, would be vital to dealing with titans...imagine a stacking penalty to ability cooldown, or AM regen, or weapon regen, or linear speed?

If 100 Corvettes could get a Titan to more or less constantly suffer from massive ability cooldown penalties or weapon cooldown penalties, then even early game you'd have a pretty damn good counter to titans...sure, it may not be easy to kill them but if they can't use their abilities and aren't doing ridiculous amounts of damage, then it isn't as problematic...

Corvettes also have the added advantage of having very light armor...making Titans and caps awful against very light armor would not affect their effectiveness against caps or frigates, only corvettes...

Furthermore, Titan abilities themselves could be made to be weaker against corvettes via the damage tables...

We really do already have all the tools necessary to make a good anti-titan ship with corvettes...no need for ogrovs (which already have a solid niche) to do that job....

Ion bolt should not work against Titans....it just shouldn't...every faction has two ability interrupts, and for each faction only one of those can (and should) affect SBs and presumably Titans...

For TEC, this ability is magnetize...if magnetize isn't good enough, then the ability should be buffed or reworked...

I don't know boshimi, it seems you want a new system rather than improving the current one (not that I particularly like the current system). There are always mods for that later, so exactly what they pick is not a huge deal to me.

I'll add some of the ones I like though.

IMO I think all of those would be better base buffs for the corvettes than the ones they have now. Hull repair is extremely slow in battle as it is so that bonus is almost negligible, while taking longer to phase jump won't be needed until the end of the battle, by which time many corvettes will be destroyed.

This seems like it would be better for the Vasari loyalists.

GoaFann77, I like your idea about the factions having inherit differences from each other right out of the gate. This reminded me of the different generals from Command and Conquer Generals: Zero Hour. For example, the air force general had way better planes but no tanks, or the tank generals tanks were cheaper / started out at higher exp.

I think the sub factions need some permanent small differences to help differentiate them from each other.

For what it's worth Goa, it'd be nice if the inherent faction differences were very unique ie not more population at certain planets or more crystal production, etc...things comparable to the uniqueness of techs like Truce with Rogues or Twin Defenses (or whatever it's called)...

Understandably, you don't have a lot of options with diplomacy so what you got now is pretty good...but with the new entity modifiers and stuff being added, things will hopefully be quite different...hopefully...

at the very least, there is room in the policy sub-tree to move the new policy techs to tiers 1 and 2 instead of 3 and 4.  I'm referring to Pillaged war chest and Savage Fury for the rebels and the fast shipbuilding and Field promotions for the loyalists.  I don't think they are so overpowering that they can't be researched right away.