I played a Nexerelin campaign with Exigency and reach level 42. Early game is, as expected, incredibly painful for Exigency ships. Even a bunch of Hounds can be a serious threat to a lone Yria as the repulsor isn't a reliable defense system.
I tried at first to farm pirate bounties like i do with any factions but it didn't really worked. Yrias and Elhiurs are defenseless alone. A Zephos can work as it can constantly teleport in the enemy's back but only if it's 1v1, it also get shredded when outnumbered.
So i decided to trade food to earn enough money to afford my first Nasir with two fighter wings. Things went much better after this. I think it's actually impossible to play without fighters as they can act as a meatshield for the rest of your fleet. I would have liked to find more Kaivor as their ability to spam Mx missiles and their repulsor was all an Exigency fleet could dream of. Alas, a bunch of Glynado will do for now. I didn't really wanted to go full carrier, so i also bought some standard ships and glued them around the Nasir to form a protective deathball.
The Zephos have been my flagship for nearly the whole campaign. Mounting a dual Typhoon on that thing was very tempting but i decided to only use Exi weapons. I went first with a modified Brawler variant with two Vindictive arrays which worked pretty well. 500 DPS for 100 flux/sec and the price of an Arbalest AC was quite beastly, especially since i could teleport in the back of enemy ships with frontal shields. The only problem was that the VA is a PD and had the bad habit to track missiles rather than DPSing the enemy ship but it's more because i was too lazy to control them manually.
This loadout worked wonder until late game when i couldn't approach the overleveled enemies flagships, even from behind. I tried to switch for a dual repulsor blaster to try those. While i was able to perform some cool tricks (threw a Kurmaraja wreckage at a Gemini, which ended up crushed between the derelict and the enemy Victory flagship) it was otherwise a very meh weapon. Extremely expensive, nearly no damage... "Repulsing" enemy shots was very difficult (and risky) on top of that.
I switched to a dual Flail. While it wasn't incredibly flashy, at least i could bombard the enemy at a safe distance.
For the cruiser, i was convinced i would love the Pergon. A bucketload of Mxs, a big, long range gun, twice the hull points as a Nasir. An artillery anchor that would have been perfect for my deathball strategy.
Problem, it can't aim for crap.
Either i was monumentally bad at aiming with that thing (the AI wasn't exactly better) or the enemy was making absurd efforts to dodge every single CIGEN shells i threw at them. Thanks god for the Mx40 it wasn't completely worthless but i swear its main gun was cursed. I think it would really benefit from a projectile speed increase to make it less supernaturally inaccurate.
And then i got the big one. And at more than 400.000 credits, it took me a while to grind but it was worth it.
The Irithia is absolutely necessary for every Exigency fleets. Very tanky (for an Exi ship), a gazillion Mx missiles, 6 regenerating torpedoes and 2 launch bays for your swarm of fighters, the other mounts almost feel superfluous on it. And most importantly, the Tethys drive, which teleport enemy ships right next to you. And because i was deathballing all my ships around my Irithia, that enemy ship life expectancy was usually very, very short.
And they lived happily ever after and killed a lot of pirates.
And i got very wealthy and i thought: "wow, one Irithia is very good, why not getting another Irithia?"
And it was a very stupid decision.
When the player target an enemy ship, the Irithia teleport it to your fleet, which is good. But when you have two Irithia, they BOTH try to teleport the enemy ship next to it, which end up in a massive clusterfrack where your two Irithia are playing ball with the enemy Paragon, IN THE MIDDLE OF YOUR FLEET.
And because the Paragon was constantly being teleported around, my bombers couldn't quite catch it. When they did and dropped their bombs, it could be teleported to another place at any second. The bombs however, would keep going where the Paragon was, in this case, my own ship.
And that's how i lost the Irithia i just bought.
So yeah, only one of those per fleet.
Other than this, Exigency felt pretty fun and balanced. Of course they are still incredibly vulnerable to beam weaponry, which i learned the hard way when i encountered a "Tachyon-lance party" themed fleet (1 Paragon, 1 Odyssey and 1 Apogee for 7 Tachyon lances, i didn't knew SS+ could do that kind of things) which butchered all my ships with terrifying ease.
Just another little issue i noted, Kaivors are considered as bombers (they follow rally strike forces orders) which isn't wanted as they are much better on the frontline to soak up damage with the rest of the fleet.
There's quite a lot of stuffs i haven't tried. No Indra for sale, no Naithyr, no Naxos either, which sadly would have worked very well with my strategy. My stations were determined to only sell me Glynados, more Glynados and then even more Glynados. Same thing for guns, lot of guns to try but not enough ships with medium mounts.
Aaaand i think that's all.