Hegemony has all-around good ships both stats and utility wise and together they don't have many obvious weaknesses, also beefy. So factions with narrow specialization can struggle against them sometimes. And nomads is one of these factions, though it's not something bad. It something like rock/paper/scissors and Hegemony has all 3 (maybe not strong, but good, and all three), while nomads have only strong paper. And maybe nomads paper a bit stronger, but they don't have anything else. With built-in weapons it only makes weaknesses more apparent.
There are 3 parts of balance. Stats. Utility. And ships lineup, or in other words how good factions ships coexist together. And for so called "balance" it is necessary to balance each part separately. Because if we will try balance utility part by pumping stats it almost never will come out good, probably it will just create more imbalance. And as I said Hegemony has all those parts balanced very good.
As for facts about nomads:
- they have very specialized weapons, which in certain situation creates great disadvantage; it is utility part. Fast example - komodo or even sandstorm are capable of wasting big chunk of flux while they try to shoot down one very fragile but fast threat. And still miss all shots.
- nomads lack in ships lineup. Komodo mk2 is first attempt of nomads to deploy something beefy. But still not enough. Nomads lack a big variety of ships between komodo and capitals. And by this I don't mean that they need 10 new ships, I mean that they need 1-3 bigger, tougher cruiser like ships which are capable of doing cruiser size tasks. Also almost every ship has same task on the battlefield (which is also limited by weapons). Only frigate with long range maser and scorpion have distinct jobs. Built-in weapons don't help too, making it impossible to add variety to nomads fleet. It means that if you ever run into situation where you want your ships to do something else, you are screwed, because they have only one specialization(and mostly same!) from frigate to capital. I will continue previous example - now imagine that long range enemy appears while fleet struggles with evasive threats.
I like nomads and I appreciate your awesome work, and I often use some ships from nomads faction(thats the funny part - some nomads ships are very good when used in fleets of other factions). But because you brought up balancing against hegemony, I decided to post my thoughts. In short it is hard to balance nomads against other factions, because they require some depth development to be fully independent faction capable of taking on anyone in Starsector.
But because I am not that huge fan of all this balancing stuff, in my opinion nomads are pretty good as is. But they definitely have potential to become even more interesting faction.
(Also both new frigate and Mother are very cute)