This looks very interesting! Are you aiming for the faction to have a power level about like vanilla Starsector?
Well, for the power level, My thought is that, it should be a faction having about tens of millions of population. And it has many different departments to support the research and other functions as a large military lab. It should only be a faction with about one percent of the faction power compared to battlegroup XIV, but according to the lore, Hegemony was quite weakened by the two AI wars, and so the Phase Lab end up having about a tenth of the faction power as Hegemony, which is, considerably strong in the vanilla game sector.
My plan was to make them with the power comparable to Sindrian Diktat, or slightly stronger, but with better naval force strength. I can see that for now I'm giving them too many planets and markets, I'll have to change that, probably in the next update or so.
Oh, I meant how balanced are the ships and weapons added by your mod?
OK, so for the ships and weapons, what I’d say is that their ships are in general weaker than the equivalent ships in vanilla. First of all, most of their ships (especially the larger ones) only have energy slots, so they will lose in close combats and flux wars, and they are not very mobile, meaning that it’s hard for them to choose what battles to fight. But they do in general have longer ranges, and so keeping distance is very important.
For their weapons, their general weapons are comparable with tachyon lances and plasma cannons, but in general focuses more on emp damages and slowing enemies down. They do have some omega-equivalent weapons, but only with very limited supplies. Those are more powerful, but are only good under very special circumstances.
The idea is to add some more variables to the min-max problem we all love. Under most circumstances, their ships can’t support their weapons, their poor mobilities will not allow them to choose what battles to fight with their shields up, and they are not going to survive if you V-dissipate in the middle of battle field. But if you make right decisions, about which enemies to eliminate and which to avoid, they will win the fight before the enemies could touch them.
And so a good battle with their fleet is really like an orchestra performance. Without good commands, even two eagles could beat an entire well-fitted fleet of their ships. So you have to be there and make your commands at the beginning, and make corrections along the way. It takes some practices to get a sense about how their fleet could be powerful. And the missions are a good place to try out.
