I like a lot the work you've done with this mod, NoFood. I especially like how you've changed the weapon mounts on the ships themselves.
The ships are substantially more powerful than vanilla, however. Like flatten entire flotillas with a few ships powerful.
Which is fine if that's what you were going for, but if you wanted to get closer to vanilla balance, i'd increase the deployment costs across the board for basically everything.
My experience is you can do that with just about any good ships, the game is pretty easy when you know how to outfit/use ships. I was going for the typical mod fashion: slightly better than vanilla ships, but not outright overpowered. They're supposed to be tough, but with very poor flux stats and have difficulty doing high sustained DPS; this is innately strong against AI that often don't know when to push the advantage or deal with highly specialized fleets, however, so it's gonna be tough to get right if its even possible. Their stats closely match low-tech ships of the same tier but with worse flux stats, more varied but similar number of mounts, and better engines. Anything specific you think makes them overpowered?
I'm not the person that wrote first, but if you're open to feedback?
1. Absolutely love ship firing arcs/slots rework. Especially great job on Ion beam cruisers.
2. Mixed energy/ballistic faction like Hiigarans looks more like Midline, rather than Low-tech, at lest for me. So i strongly disagree with flux/armor stats on destroyer/cruiser sized ships. Strangely, capsize is more similar to Midline stats, or so it seems to me.
3. Carriers are super meh (in current meta, where wing slots are everything), but honestly, that's ok.
4. Battlecruisers all have 7 Burn, and destroyers have 8, which is strange, since Vanilla counterparts have 8 and 9 respectively. Mmaybe it's a holdover from earlier builds of the Starsector and was norm, but alas.
5. Sajuuk-Khar feels mediocre for a 105/145 cost super ship. Hiigarans really cut costs on outfitting their flagship. Flux stats on it are from a ship one size too small. It need either a lower cost or better flux stats (maybe at the cost of armor/hull stats). Also maybe Advanced targeting core instead of Integrated.
6. Hiigaran Medium and Large ballistic guns are straight up garbage, compared to Vanilla guns. Example: Why use Dual chaingun (HE), when assault chaingun has same range, more dps/damage-per-shot, better flux and takes less OP? With those pitiful ranges, they either have to have godlike DPS or Flux stats, ATM they have neither. Also, large guns and their weird 23 OP cost.
7. Missiles cost too much for infinite type. Using Pilum as point of reference, they should have better dps and/or cost less OP. Yes, they are faster than Pilums (honestly, my grandma is faster than Pilums), and that's a consideration too, but nonetheless.
Some bugs i noticed:
1) Sajuuk-Khar has 6 Large hybrid and 1 Large Universal slots, but forward facing Universal and Hybrid have the same coordinates, so its impossible to fit Hybrid slot. Balance-wise deleting this slot (or not) really depends on the resolution of Flux/Cost problem of this ship.
2) PD drones "Pulsar" (ships system) spawns drones that, despite having a weapon, do nothing. (Adding "No_flux" mod solved this problem, but they still won't target missiles, probably because Pulsar isn't a PD weapon anymore).
3) Maybe it's just me (but i even started a new game to test this): Hiigaran ships have some fundamental problem with ship variants. Ships in the bounties and in the defense fleets have
absolutely no guns. Ships built by player have the same problem.