Dont worry psychoak, I figured it out!

The solution is actually partly texture based.

The game knows not to render black/near-black textures. Black shows up as clear/transparent in the game. This is the key to Advent's instant beams. I'll explain:

Beams in the game are made up of 2 parts: Core and Glow. Supposedly one is meant to be the middle of the beam, and the other the...well... glow of the beam. However, glows can simply be applied to the textures themselves, so it seems a bit redundant to have glow right?

Thats what I thought at first. Until I looked closer at all the beams. Advent have their ACTUAL beams named "PsiCapitalBeam_Glow.dds". Their regular CORE texture (PsiCapitalBeam_Core.dds)? Its black/grayish. It doesnt render in the game.

-Okay, so Advent beams appear instantly because their TEXTURE is named to the glow category? Not quite.

The real defining factor for beams fading in or appearing instantly is in the .entity files for the ship, under their weapon effects for beams.

Under a beam's stats you're allowed to set their effects. There are 2 parts here, beamGlowTextureName, and beamCoreTextureName, the same way as stated above. Under these conditions are the key to instant beams: Any texture called to from beamGlowTextureName will appear INSTANTLY in game. Textures called to from beamCoreTextureName will fade in.

Simply:

beamGlowTextureName=Instant Beam Texture

beamCoreTextureName=Fading Beam Texture

You can see this displayed with TEC Starbase/Titan Beams as well as Vasari Planet bombing beams. Their .entity files have their main beam textures set to CORE, meaning they fade. Further, their textures are named "TechStarbaseBeam_Core" and "PhaseCapitalBombingBeam_Core", with their respective glow textures being nearly black.

-Okay, so how do I make TEC/Vasari Beams instant like Advent's?

There are 2 ways to do this.

1. The simpliest solution is simply to swap the names of the glow and core textures themselves. This way, any ship that uses fading beams will have the main beam texture appear instantly.

2. If you want specific ships to use fading beams and others instant beams without modifying the beams for the whole faction, you can go into each ships' .entity file and swap the textures that are called to under beamGlowTextureName and beamCoreTextureName in the ships beam weapon sections.

TL:DR

Advent beams appear instantly because the .entity files have their beams appear under beamGlowTextureName.

To get instant beams, use the texture you want under beamGlowTextureName in a ship's .entity file.

You just need a batch file.

For GameInfo, it goes like so:

for %%a in (*.entity) do ConvertData_Rebellion entity %%a %%a txt

Make a new text file, copy this line into it, change the file type to .bat, and double click in a folder that contains ConvertData_Rebellion.exe and the offending entity files.

If you're really lazy, you can just get the SOA2 mod, which comes with conversion folders in each applicable directory that have the files set up for it.

Yes.  There are work-arounds though via ability spawned titans.

Dude, that is literally the last question that was asked and answered...

Sorry new to the forums, that giant pinned post in this thread was annoying so I literally just scrolled all the way down to the respond button without actually reading through the thread, so my bad.

Is there any way to make the mines so that they are not invulnerable?

Okay thanks.

Is there any way I can prevent the AI from building carriers, or at least tell them to build less of them. Their carrier spam is causing my game to lag to the point where the game is unplayable since I am only getting 8 FPS late game.

Don't believe there is one, but if there is it's in gameplay.constants.

No, you have to scale up the mesh files. There are tools to do this easily however.

resize.exe

I would not agree with that advice. I'd just edit the carrier research entity files and change the priority line on them to 0.00000.

I'd like to know where you read this, do you remember (or have access to) the link?

I figured out a solution, gonna make a high priority no tier research where the ai declares itself to an ai only faction that ends up removing the carrier as a research and build option.

kudo's to Lavo for helping me with the details.

That hasn't been my experience actually. Of course I'm only doing this for special strikecraft research, so it may be different for required roletype frigates.