So far I've only played five games of FAW, three of which I gave up on a while back since it was just too hard, but I had better luck in the last two games I've tried, one of which is still in progress and seems like a victory
Things I really like:
- Being able to change density is pretty cool. More density seems like it might promote a longer game, which is always a good option. I'm glad this was carried over from MUM
- Many of the old vanilla structures still exist in some form, and new ones add something interesting without making the sandbox getting cluttered with too many redundancies. FAW seems to strike the right balance there-- it feels familiar enough to not be intimidating yet gives enough for a player to muse over with excitement.
- Game flow - The first 75ish turns tend to be a bit slow paced which I like, but the bigger ship population support really allows things to explode once empires get set-up and populated. In my last game I was over 100 ships around turn 95 and still I barely had to scrap at all-- this is definitely a plus for if you like larger scale battles.
The Federation fleet seems to be powerhouse, even with on maps with few minor races they seem to do very well with fast research and economy (no surprise there, that's the Federation advantage across most mods). Not sure if it's just the rng in my games, but the UFP tended outperform the other bot empires so far.
Klingon ships too seem very strong and hard to hit, again not surprised since Klingons are the warrior race focused on being battle-ready, so it makes since their ships are a bit tougher for their tech level.
Some lesser balance concerns:
The Romulans and Cardassians on the other hand seem to be lacking a tiny bit in firepower and/or ship defenses, which is okay if their Intelligence arm made up for it. Though, on hard or even normal difficulty it sometimes seems impossible to damage anyone via sabotage, at least in singleplayer. Mulitplayer intel may be a different animal entirely and I've yet to see it yet.
In my latest game with +42% sabotage (Obsidian Order + Covert Sensor Array) and roughly ~25000 intel I could not score even one success versus the Klingons. This persisted for another 20 turns, and that even after I wiped out Betazed, Qo'nos and a bunch of other systems-- having a bot empire in such a weakened state I would've thought 25000 would've enough for a minor success at least.
Not sure if I'm just doing intel wrong or if it's not something I should try to at all in this particular case.
I'm aware the with a difficulty bias that makes intel a lot harder. I'm not sure if that the case here, but in Vanilla that definitely the big culprit for intel being a junk stat sometimes.