There's a bunch of ways which balance can be at least brought to reasonable state. It's depressing how long it takes to make such changes.
- Rather than keep under-fire shield regeneration almost identical for all ships, a curve should be implemented. As ship gets more and more shield capacity, the under-fire regeneration goes down from 100% to 0% at a specific amount of capacitors installed, at which point it simply does not regenerate in combat at all. The only way to partially migitate the given diminishing return is to install a larger ratio of more common Shield Rechargers instead. The cap parameter should obviously be adjustable in the server config. This would allow smaller ships to wither down the capitals even if any weapons are nerfed in perspective. Might require a slight adjustment for diminishing return of shield capacity to keep value of capacitors high.
Alternatively, increasing the amount of capacitors might create a minimum damage breach, which means that massive shield array wont even trigger on shots from a fighter. Both variants would make smaller spacecraft, as well as modular shield/armor plating, much more viable.
- Instead of adressing the HP values of armor, the damage taken should be affected instead, lacking any visible byte limits. Ships with progressively larger relative amount of armor installed would recieve less and less base damage, but only if the armor is actually being hit. That would allow smaller ships to run strikes against capital ship weak spots. Weapons with AoE effects attached would have to bypass the reduction on a per-block or per-stage basis. Whether damage reduction should be relative, absolute or both in reduced degree is another question.
- Cannon weapons should get a more reasonable fire rate cap at 100% cannon-cannon modules. The currently ridiculous fire-rate of these weapons makes them equal if not better than an AoE-enchanced weapons without any damage reduction or drawbacks, while small-sized CCs do so little damage per shot that it can become effectively useless when armor is fixed. Only Beam weapons are limited enough by their range to feature such fire-rate, and it doesn't spam projectiles or sounds either.
- Missiles is a hard weapon to balance. An obvious fix there is to make basic Missile weapon lock-on, while Missile-Pulse has to become dumb-fire. Standalone Missiles reload for too long to be viable as dumb-fire, while Nukes has too much in them, especially radius, to also keep them viable against moving targets.
- Large issue lies within on-range balance of all weapons. Making different combos of weapons change their stats mostly around projectile damage, reload and range. While changes to reload and damage counteract each-other entirely and power drain is based on resulting DPS and area of effect, range is not compensated by anything whatsoever. That means that all beam-slaved (Extended Range) weapons are by far superior to anything else, giving you a first shot in any given circumstances. That has to be counteracted with DPS reduction as range goes up, to make it reasonable to use short-ranged weapons, such as RF Missiles and beam weapons.
Those are simply the ones I think would work great.
