Well good to know you know about the balance. But about the weapons: most are underpowered for frigates and destroyer fights, but the cruisers lasers (coughVenatorcough) are quite powerful, and the caps can be unstoppable if you are willing to sacrifice smaller ships...Missiles and torps are a different story. I never thought those things could be so terrifying...And that's good. At least it's a rapid and massive pain vs the slow pain of ten million harpoons coming at your venting Onslaught from SEEMINGLY EVERY CORNER OF THE BLOODY MAP.
Trust me when I say the missiles are not nearly as scary as they once were...
Lets just say a single wing of tie bombers could almost destroy a capital ship by itself, and I mean a capital with 0 hard flux and raised shields...
As for sprites, I'd say just making them smaller (and not take up half the space on the Combat Radar...LOOKING AT YOU HOME ONE AND ALLEGIANCE!) and they would be fine. Yeah the Venator could do with a bit more detail, yeah the Nebulon-B could use a little editting here and there (though it and the CR-90 actually look pretty good!), but over all the LOOK fine. It's just, as I said, size that is the problem.
I have already made clear that I want ships to be as immersive to the game as possible, given that it's Star Wars we're talking about with all the limitations it brings. The thing with using textures from the "real" ships is that they do not fit into the game and thus not many players will like it. It could work IF I made this a total conversion mod, although using that kind of images for the ship sprites brings a whole lot of new problems I really wanted to avoid...
As for the Home One and the Allegiance, ever heard of the "International Bounty Board"? I forget which mod it comes from, but putting them as (EXTREMELY) high bounties could be a way to put them in-game.
Yes I have, and I have already spoke on discord regarding adding more ships to the Bounty's list, but those two ships need to be handled
VERY CAREFULLY before I even add them to the game, regardless of where I put them. Missions outside the campaign seems like the best choice for OP ships since it doesn't really break the game, but who knows
I'm going to throw out a completely random and off topic guess and say that the mod will be somewhat balanced by the 0.9.0 update.
Starsector v0.9.0 ? It depends on so many factors I can't give an ETA, specially when it comes to balancing the mod.
I am planning on having some ships ready and
balanced in v0.6.0 of this mod, along with all the crap I've been messing with since the last release. It will be the largest update so far (which isn't that hard right now) and
may be the update that will finally put this mod into the mod index.