Progress update:TLDR: Here is some of my thought process on station balance and a few concrete changes already in the dev version, and I'm hoping to have an update available in a couple of weeks.
Anytime I make significant changes to weapons, stations become very unbalanced. Mostly this is because station mechanics are complex. A lot of the balance comes down to small things. For instance, when ships are facing a primary weapon battery module, the only thing that matters most of the time is: 1) can the ships get there before they have high enough flux or are otherwise armor stripped? and 2) do they then have enough dps to cause significant or fatal damage during that brief window before they have to retreat? This concept will come up again later in this post.
I've had recommendations in the past to not worry about station balance too much as station battles are often not player-facing unless the player is assaulting another faction's station. I agree that the point has a good deal of merit, but I'm not convinced that attempting to balance stations is not worth the time and effort. Part of the reason for my opinion is that I want to eventually limit station designs for the player to either a standard variant or their chosen commissioned faction's variant. In that sense I don't want one station to feel obviously better than another. I'm not saying the balance will be perfect because there are too many variables, but I want to come close at least if possible.
Now for some details as to the changes I've made, I've significantly reduced the defenses of low tech stations across the board. They were so tanky precisely because they had low-tier and unreliable missiles and mostly relied upon short range guns for defense. Therefore, they had to withstand a considerable amount of punishment in order to deal damage back in a large enough amount to cause ship losses. Before I continue, keep in mind that testing for this revolves around unofficered ships. Officered ships will without a doubt perform much better as a whole, but for a baseline I don't want to rely too much upon high level officers for players to take out a basic orbital station. They really should just need a lot of ships or a few really strong ones. Battlestations and Star Fortresses are a different story. They should be very difficult to destroy for the player as they often guard colonies that are extremely important to the faction: faction capitals, heavy industry worlds, and major resource deposits, etc.
The first thing that I tried (really on a hunch after some very basic math if I'm completely honest) was to test a fleet of only Fire Support ships against the basic stations. As it turns out, stations in their current form are fairly exploitable. Only their missiles could match Fire Support ranges for artillery and modified beams in many cases. This meant that the player could outfit their fleet to snipe stations before they could do much in return. That simply wouldn't do and is too unfun imo. The changes to missiles helped a tiny bit, but not nearly enough. So, the first major change to stations was a massive buff to Targeting Supercomputer:
(Notice that any station modules with fighter bays get the same missile interdiction bonus a carrier would - only with additional perks from Chassis Storage.)
And now I come back to the idea that fighting combat modules boils down to two things - getting into range and having enough dps to cause damage during that window. The reason its so important that both things happen is that stations can literally kill an unlimited amount of unofficered ships otherwise. CR isn't a factor and so the only attrition to the station is raw damage. Even a completely new max DP deployment wave (at the default battle size of course because I need to balance around that at least to start off) will not cause enough damage to eventually win the battle - also assuming no support ships for the station.
Anyway, I bring this up because range has such an important impact upon the two requirements. As station range increases, the ability for a max DP deployment to actually do anything is exponentially diminished under the standard steady enemy AI. Yet, the extra range is necessary because station battles should rely less upon a specific fleet composition and more upon either power creep from progression/ship acquisition or the skills of the player either tactically, personal flying, or both. As a result, I've had to pay more attention to station design at every level and rely upon an admittedly small amount of sample control tests to determine how to approach balance as whole. I tried to diversify the composition in the tests to include all tech levels and various weapons and roles since the sample size has to remain so small. Station battles take a long time to play out and waiting that whole time is necessary. There were instances where a single module is powerful enough to eliminate all ships in the battle - albeit over a long period of time. The idea is to try and reduce the instances where that sort of scenario occurs. Player intervention will make them occur less just by the player being involved (which can allow for more aggressive and decisive AI decision making). While that's certainly true in most cases, Allied AI-assist battles where the player has limited deployment options are an exception that I feel I must address at some level. They
do occur and are more likely to occur when running the mod alongside Nex after all.
Almost all stations have had an increase in weapon count at the first tier as well. The majority of the time this is solely to add more point defense to modules in order to prevent LRMs from being an easy station counter when massed. I'm very close to having Orbital Stations balanced across the board. Once that's done, the higher tiers are generally easier to balance because they have a solid foundation to build off of.
Finally, I have come to a point in the dev version where I feel pretty good about releasing an update soon. It will take a couple of weeks to really nail everything down enough for me to be fully confident, but I am excited for this update in particular because battles feel more... fluid? Hmm, is that really the right word to describe it? The strike weapon, carrier and missile changes kind of come together to improve the feel of battles both viscerally and tactically. Support ships have a greater impact and that creates priority targets for the player depending upon their own fleet composition. If the player is relying upon missiles, PD ships are going to be a primary target. If they lack interceptors and dedicated interceptor carriers, then bombers are going to give them a hard time and so those carriers equipped with them will be a primary target. An interceptor carrier sending its wings to support an ally has an immediately visible effect to its general defense. I am able to tell the difference between carrier interceptors and warship interceptors during a large torpedo salvo, or during swarms of LRMS. I think these are all good signs that the mod is in a better balance state than before. I'm sure there will be more to do and experiment with after the next update of course, however I think the general direction is positive.