Finally got around to doing a more complete playthrough with the faction instead of mostly trying their ships by themselves in a vacuum.
Had a cozy start with a bunch (4) of Oiehou heavy survey frigates. Very AI friendly, even lategame they do a pretty solid job of surviving an encounter. Not something that kills quickly though, a lot of my early fights vs pirates was mostly outlasting them, my own fault for not picking up a couple of the lighter speedy frigates.
After a nice set of exploring, I could afford to snag a couple of heavy destroyers as a new fleet core. These have also been fairly reliable. Their impressive stat blocks and wide turret arcs are very impressive, though the lack of backup missile slots leaves them without a trump card if things get difficult, fair. Started out having them be fairly HE focused but moved them into a more kinetic suppression role as fights got larger. I picked up one of the destroyer size carriers too cause eh may as well.
Now at this point, we get into my only slight gripe with the ship selection. There is a lack of a clear early cruiser to pick up that's fast enough to keep up with the frigate/destroyer fights. The Cheborogs are very impressive, but just buying one isn't going to be that useful as you'd want them as part of a slower battle line formation. Some moderately fast and inexpensive cruiser in the 15-20 DP range with some of the same design traits as the Panrelka would be great for padding out the edges of battle line formations and working as a core for smaller fleets.
Now there were 2 choices (outside of shopping out-of-faction), either just keep buying destroyers, as their stats let them work relatively well for larger scale combat. Or save up for a Panrelka. I went with the latter choice as having 85 speed on a capital ship range weapons platform seemed like a great idea, and this worked out as well as I'd hoped. This thing is a beast for small and large scale fleet combat. Being nigh unflankable and having enough speed to relentlessly pursue most things outside of some destroyers and light cruisers. (Random note: AI should probably be a bit more spammy with the flare system, they're very handy offensively). Firepower is perfectly acceptable too, probably one of my favorite overall ships in the mod.
As of right now, I've since picked up a couple of Cheborogs now that my fleet is large enough (aaand another carrier), a second Panrelka, cause everything good is worth having 2 of, and a Pharrek for personal use. Big fan of the Pharrek, I like that it actually has some PPT to work with compared to most superfrigs. Still haven't gotten around to trying the Occuklop but I'll make sure to snag one sometime later.
Guns feel pretty well balanced though I haven't tried all of them yet, only minor outliers I found so far were the small Shtir (1000 range on a smol ballistic kinetic at 1.07 efficiency and 100 dps is very strong), and the large Zakrep (the proximity fusing utility isn't quite worth the low dps, suggest increasing it to 300-330ish). The HE projectiles from the Zakrep and Steizok in general could do with being slightly more visually apparent (being HE damage). They can be hard to spot in the middle of kinetic bullet barrages when really zoomed out.
Great mod. Gonna keep playing with it.