Well that does seem to be a bit too strong, may I ask how many other factions mods do you use in your game? Personally I play with pretty much every faction mod for compatibility testing and it takes them some time to become a threat. I haven't tried a game with no faction mods so maybe there is an issue with them being too op for a vanilla faction run.
In past patches I added a third system across the map to sort of force them to travel the sector. And in the last patch I was able to turn their aggression up via fixes in their Nex files. Perhaps having both fixes tunes them a bit too much. I'll play around with a game where they only have the top left systems and see how it goes.
so far i've been running the mod alongside dassault-mikoyan, Diable avionics, Interstellar imperium, and Kadur Remnant.
i'm of course rather unfamiliar with creating a mod for starsector, so i'm not entirely sure how causing hostility and how the 'behind the scenes' portion of invasion logic works, but would it perhaps be an idea to start their worlds off as small in terms of population and logistical capabilities but well defended (to prevent other hostile AIs or the player themselves from just wiping them out) and have a rapid growth modifier of some sort on them, to make their capacity for launching invasion fleets scale up over time?
Have you looked at the alternate ship pack I have imbedded in the RAR? It contains non-bug designs that are cleaner but still have an alien feel to them. I am no artist and have done a couple passes at cleaning them up, if you could list the ones you feel need some work I would appreciate it so I can see what I can do.
i have not, but i'll be sure to. it's not like it's a big issue or anything - they're already sufficiently horrifying to think about
![Smiley :)](https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
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as for the balancing aspect on a ship scale - less ships would certainly make it easier on you as a modmaker to get a comprehensive balancing done with less work, but i do not think that the variety of ships is an inherently bad thing, since they do make for more interesting fights. what i'd focus on during a balancing run are:
Flux/damage ratios of weapons systems
damage output capacity of missile systems with infinite/replenishing ammunition
speed vs tankyness vs equipment capacity of the ships themselves
since these areas are, at least to me, the biggest factors in the balance of a combatant.
again, i'm not a modmaker so i've little idea how hard or easy it would be, but the option to make each ship and piece of gear weaker but have a lot more of them in each fleet would also be an idea. they are a swarm, after all.
still, it's a very fun mod to play, and the concept is fantastic and horrifying in equal measure.
Edit: to clarify a bit what i meant with the "speed vs tank vs equipment capacity" point, i figured i'd slap some of the vanilla cruisers into a diagram to show a bit how i'm thinking - picture related. (bear with me, i'ven ot used a standard forum board structure in a while.)
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