I also have some slightly critical feedback about the current version of Nex specifically; it's about that old bugbear, rebellions.
In a few of my recent runs, I've gotten invested in trying to make a rebellion
succeed. These were both on fairly large planets (Sivie from Diable and Fuyutsuki from HMI, for the record) and while it started as just selling stuff for profit, I got interested in seeing a rebellion actually win and what it took for that. The Sivie one I just delivered a ton of supplies of all three kinds, and it never really managed to win and ended in a stalemate after the occupiers sent fleet after fleet to counter my efforts. With Fuyu I decided to see just how many fleets I needed to intercept in order to help the rebellion win, once it was at -5 and better supplied than the government.
Ultimately, I had to intercept
six pacification fleets before the rebellion actually won. And five of them looked like this:
https://imgur.com/a/HRyJTshBasically 400-or-so CR fleets with 7-8 cap ships apiece. In the end, it was a larger force than
invaded the planet in the first place. It would have been far easier to just invade the planet and give it back to HMI.
That... kind of doesn't feel satisfying, especially if you are "third partying" a rebellion and get at all invested in it. It seems basically impossible for a rebellion to succeed without fleet interception (short, I guess, of selling so many goods to the rebel market that it becomes heavily unprofitable to do so) and these fleets are ridiculous and losing them doesn't really seem to slow down a faction's industry otherwise. It does break immersion a little bit, I think, that a faction would go this far just for one planet that wasn't their own originally.
It's good that rebellions now have more gas in the tank and aren't trivial for an invader to get rid of, but they still feel like they can't really succeed without massive direct intervention on the player's part, and I'm not sure how I feel about that; currently, it's intervention to such a degree that just invading is easier and less resource-heavy.
Frustratingly, I don't think I can really offer
solutions, either, just the feedback that the current system feels... off.
As always, I love and appreciate the mod, but this definitely left me feeling a bit dissatisfied.