I've been playing a Crystanite campaign in Nexerelin for a while now, so here's my feedback. First, i'll talk about some of technical issues, then about the balance.
There is no numbers on the hullmods. When i use something, i like knowing exactly what it does rather than a vague "mobility increase" or something like that.
The sprites need some clean-up. There are some rogue, flying pixels around the ships. Granted, it's originally my fault but hey!
Some of the weapons (discomfort/curse beams) and ship systems (traveler drive) are obnoxiously loud. A single ship using those is already uncomfortable to the ears, several doing it become painful.
Some ships are "badly" builts. The Pin for example doesn't need the 10 flux capacity/venting its variant gave it. With only 8 points in venting, the ship become "flux neutral" so it can easily get away with 5/6 points in venting to work. I didn't noted all the ships with this problem but i think there are quite a few, especially in the frigate category.
Not every ships have a system. Nor a description. A bit sad.
Some ships roles overlap with each others, some are clearly better while the other are pretty worthless. There is no point in taking a Traveler scout when a Pin with some hullmods can already outrun everything in the game. Too many ships doing nearly the same things, a lot of them should disappear.
There's probably quite a few more issues like those, i haven't found all of them. But now i'm going to talk about the biggest problem of the Crystanite, balance.
In the modding guideline thread (
http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=9052.0) we can clearly see that the Crystanites breach some of the important rules. The biggest problem in my opinion is the "extreme" stats. In this case, armor and hull.
The stats divert way too much from vanilla and as such it tends to break the game. Some other mods suffered from similar problems (BGE, P9...) and there's no real workaround for this.
In the case of the Crystanites, the gigantic amount of armor renders any kind of weapon other than high-explosive nigh-worthless. Armor reduce the damage taken up to 85% depending on how much armor the ship have. The only way to take down the crystal ships is just to bring the biggest amount of high-explosive damage in a single hit, like reapers or hellbores. As such, frigates and destroyers can die incredibly easily by a single torpedo or a few other kind of missiles. While Crystanites frigates and destroyers are nearly invincible in some situations, they become utterly helpless in some others.
That's why in my campaign i quickly ditched frigates and destroyers to get the bigger ships with more armor. And cruisers are way, way more survivable and efficient than the lighter classes. Never during my campaign, no matter how recklessly i played, i have lost a single cruiser, because at nearly 10.000 armor, they could shrug off several reapers hits.
It was even worse with capital ships. During late game, my Payback class had 18900 armor, i could teleport right in the middle of a Neutrino fleet with several Jackhammers, going for a coffee with my payback standing there (not even on autopilot) and when i was back, the Phases array cannons with their ridiculous DPS were still trying to scratch the paint of my ship.
So yeah, the stats are too extreme. Because they have very low hull hit points, the smaller ships quickly become obsolete. And because they have an awful lot of armor, the bigger ships were basically indestructible. And that's bad for balance, because not only playing god mode isn't fun but it also renders useless half the ships of the faction.
On top of that, balancing a shield-less faction is hard. Exigency and Templars did it but they had to use some exotic systems and arcane scripts to make them work. If on top of that, you add extreme stats, i can't see how it could possibly work.
So, what to do then? First thing would be to reduce the extreme stats. A Payback with 10.000 hull (from 2500) and 3000 armor (from 13500 with the buil-in hull mods) would feel much more reasonable and still retains the main idea of the faction. After all, 3000 armor is nearly twice as much as an Onslaught, that's huge! But not completely absurd. In the end, rounding the stats corners would remove the main problem with the faction.
And then, there's the shield-less problem. While it's not as game-breaking as the other one, it still a big obstacle to overcome to reach balance. I can think of several solutions.
The easiest and most boring one: adding shields (some crystanites ships already have one). But because they already have very high armor, those would need to be quite crappy to compensate. The bright side is that Crystanites wouldn't need to be immune to emp anymore, which is good because emp weapons are a big part of the game and they currently ignore it. This idea also work with phase cloaks if you want something a bit more exotic.
The hardest but most interesting one: a fancy system like Exigency or Templars as i said earlier. The biggest trouble will be to actually find what kind of defense system they'll have and to make a script for it. You can probably find some clues on the radioactive code dump thread. (
http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=6452.0)
Another solution, actually my original idea when i sprited the original ships. A wall of drone that would act a shield. Two problems appear with this idea though. Firstly, it'll take the place of the ship system, unless you manage to add it via some weird script, which is basically the solution 2. The other problem is the AI currently have a weird obsession over drones and will try to shot them down at all cost and will often ignore the main ship. I'm pretty confident that Alex will eventually fix this but in the meantime, that's how things are.
So yeah, there's quite a bit of work but in the end it's up to you to see whether or not it's worth doing it. Personally i'm convinced that it could lead the mod quality from "rough" to "good". But yeah, you'll have to rethink quite a few things.