My post was very much a "How I see the balance right now", not a request to change anything. Well, I did ask for a few things, but I clearly marked those bits with "I wish...."
I kind of like that some factions are stronger than others. If the Hegemony has to sling two or three onslaughts at every neutrino cruiser just to knock them down, that just makes the game more interesting.
I do wanna clarify a few things I said though.
On the Thule, their frigates and some of their destroyers are top notch and their kinetic guns and SRM missile pods are also great. However they seem lacking in cruisers and cap ships that are actually capable of doing anything. All of my stations fill up with troop transports and hospital ships, which do not make a good armada. They also have that missile cruiser, which would be a beast if only they actually had any large missiles to put on it. I never saw any large missiles other than the meteor show up for sale.
On the neutrino, the shields are not actually the big issue that makes them so strong. The shields are just the obvious one. Neutrino ships also have very high armor and hull amounts and high flux pools for the weapons they mount. Several of their weapons are also either OP or just pure BS. The photon canon revolver thing comes to mind. I am not sure if yall are aware, but those photon shots are infinite range. They also function as missiles so PD fires on them but because of their speed nothing but a solid wall of burst PD can kill them. The AI doesn't really abuse it, but it is entirely possible to kill opposing ships right at the start by spamming it at the other side of the map where you expect the enemy fleet to be. The Neutrino are so OP because of the combination of numerous factors all coming together, and the auto-resolve sees that their stats are just too high in many many places. Personally, I think the auto-resolve is correctly assigning them wins. I think they are slower to repair though because of their lower crew count, which means they get worn down faster than most factions by repeated battles. Just my personal impression, I could be very wrong.
Antediluvians really are not a good balance mark, because it is so easy to specialize ships to kill them. However, the AI doesn't do this, so they can legit win if they are fighting default loadouts. The Antis actually should be winning some of their ai vs ai matchs because they do have some incredible stats.