I have no problem with the lore or art. In fact the art is great! Really well done on the portraits!
The only feedback I have on the art, is that the background glow on some characters hits the border of the portrait which doesn't look good. All the major characters with colored background glow are fine, but I think a few of the male portraits had a grey glow that stretched out too far and touched the edges of the portrait box. So the true black does not blend, it creates a harsh edge in game. It's very subtle, but I did notice it, and could be improved. Attached some portraits which I think stood out in that case.
All combat ships all look amazing, looking forward to when the logistics & exploration ships are more fleshed out, fuel tankers look great.
Now as for balance, I'll offer some suggestions.
We'll start with the ships. Almost every ship has a sea of OP to work with, but especially the capitals. The problem gameplay wise is that there's no tradeoff. For the Isenoria which I'm using as my flagship, I can have several 20 OP fighter / bomber squadrons, all the weapons I want, maxed out vents, and that's before we've even started on hullmods. The point is, I can equip everything. There should be a tradeoff where I can have the awesome high level fighters, but then I have to give up the powerful guns, or the 50 OP I have in vents. Right now it's an amazing carrier, AND frontline battleship wrapped into one. Because you have to consider just how powerful the player gets once they start building in hullmods, boosting vents, and all the other bonuses. So to summarize, a good start would be lowering the OP of the ships and comparing them to other vanilla ships of the same caliber.
What I wouldn't want you to change though, is the overall design of the ships, those are great. There are a lot of hardpoints on the bigger ships, but we can work with that. How do you make a lot of hardpoints work? With cheap weapons.
So the weapons are decently balanced, with nothing being crazy overpowered from what I've seen. The problem I do see, is there isn't much of a spread in OP costs. Every small weapon from what I could tell was either 5-6 OP, and that does create a problem when refitting UAF ships. I want to use all the hardpoints, but the UAF weapons don't have a big enough low/high cost spread. What I'd suggest, is nerfing some of the weapons significantly, but also lowering their OP cost along with it. Something like the smaller weiss PD could do less damage, but make it 3 OP instead of 5. Either that, or add a special UAF flare launcher for 1 OP, that'd be fun. Then make some of the longer range railguns 7-8 OP instead of 6. This would provide a lot more flexibility for refitting UAF ships, and also provide fun tradeoffs. It'll take a lot of tweaking to get perfect, but that's the challenge of good balance.
The fighters and bombers, AWESOME. And probably the best balanced out of everything in the mod. The OP costs reflect their power well. 20 OP for the strategic bomber is quite fair for example. Only possible oddity was their sheer size. That special 25 OP bomber is HUGE, looks like it barely fits in the fighter bays haha.
That's all the general feedback I have for now. Faction as a whole the very fun, and I thought the bakery was cute. Are the keycards actually used for anything? Or just money? I couldn't figure out how to 'crack' the orange card for blueprints like it suggested, unless that's just flavor text. Cheers, hope that helps!
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