Having a lot of fun with this mod in my current pirate playthrough. I think it's a great addition to Starsector, but it does have some balance issues for me, personally.
The price seems just right (if you make it more expensive it might not be a good alternative to early colonies). However, being able to just have access to a 100% hazard colony, with solid ressources, Starport and the Industry already built is really really good.
With my first 2mil and my first alpha core, I made a Siphon and Mining Station and got them to put out a solid 100k per month with minimal investment.
Feel free to ignore all of these suggestions, your mod, your vision, but here's stuff I would do to balance these a bit.
- Set the base hazard rating to 150%. Yes vanilla stations are at 100% but these are ramshackle player stations put together with superglue and good intentions. This would limit their output and not make them automatically on par with extremely rare planets.
- Would it be possible to have the starport and mining industry be in construction when the stations spawn, instead of having them already built. Right now I can skip one or two months of setup time of my colonies. It also takes away the (to me) interesting choice of whether I start with building defenses or industries first.
- Limit station size to 4 or 5. There are now millions of people living in my scrapmade little Siphon Station and it is continuing to grow.
Right now stations seem like better planets to me.
Technically, it seems fine, only issue I had is that I built a Mining Station in an asteroid field (instead of ring) close to my first base and it has now moved out of that field and is just somewhere in the system. Not a big deal but I was hoping the stations would stay together to support each other defensively.I see now that this is fixed in the newest version I am not using yet.