Stations in general need some improvements. The ability to customize them is a must for this type of game.
Here. This lets you upgrade the main types of station to your flavor. You still need to remove and replace them for post-construction upgrades just like defense stations, though.
Stations are really generally useless at the moment yea, but the game's combat seems to be heavily biased towards numbers rather then quality. You can easily take down a single ship/station using a fleet of corvettes of the same or ever lower firepower.
Also, you should be able to set priority targets during combat or something. At the moment, the AI will often focus fire single ships in your fleet, while your own fleet likes to spread he damage across several targets, meaning you'll likely never win engagements against a fleet of similar numbers/firepower.
Ignoring that Corvettes are broken (well if you break them)... They are sort of meant to be effective chaff and I'd even go as far as to say the more "armored" version of what is available.
Battleships as silly as this sounds are meant to have support to be really effective. Being, in essence, more fragile then Corvettes.
The problem is that Corvettes are flat out more efficient on pretty much every metric. They're more effective at a given fleet weight, cost less and require less infrastructure to produce, and even casual upgrading still skyrockets their evasion to make them more resilient than cap ships slathered in shields and armor.
This is the ship rebalance mod I'm using right now. Here's what it does:
Small weapons: -25% damage
Large weapons: +40% damage, +50% cost
Corvettes: -15% evasion, removed S1M1 module
Destroyers: Removed L1 module
Cruisers and Battleships: Slightly increased build time, increased HP.
Strike Craft: Drastically increased range.
This is pretty much perfect. There were several issues with vanilla combat:
1. Evasion-stacking was too effective, to the point where it overshadowed everything else defensively, and Corvettes were the worst abusers-nobody playing the meta used anything heavier in MP. Ergo, evasion nerf to Corvettes.
2. Ten 1-damage weapons were equivalent in every way to one 10-damage weapon, except that they had higher net DPS because of their increased accuracy and could be fielded on cheaper platforms. The damage shifts mean that picking things to death isn't optimal, and you have an actual reason to mount Large weapons instead of 4S>2M>1L being the order of the day.
3. Strike craft were broken. Carriers don't brawl any more. Duh.
4. There was no actual durability advantage to building cap ships, they had the same HP as the equivalent fleet weight in light craft. Hence, HP buff. Build time and L weapon cost/time nerfs to keep things stable.
Fuckin' love it.
Here's some other good shit:
More Technologies: Makes Fallen Empire war demands usable by all empires. A bunch of new, relatively balanced, techs. Caste system for internal racial management. Extreme planet terraforming and colonization. New policies. Includes the ability to research the other FTL methods. Ho-leee shit. A+.
Remove stranded stations. Didn't get the chance to stomp enemy wormhole and defense stations in your territory before they surrendered? Don't want to start another war just to blow them up? Get this.
Extended Traits: Wondering why vanilla felt like it was missing a bunch of racial traits? Turns out that they were hiding in the workshop.
UI Mod 1080p: REQUIRED REQUIRED REQUIRED