Hm my prices were very close to VRO prices and Shuulo said they were well balanced. But that was before the Titan was added to the mod and I dont know if he has changed the prices since then.
Mybe I should have a second look at the prices of VRO. In general I totally agree with you that the big ships shall be hard to earn.

It is not only you Le Leon, I would like to see the major mod-packs to all work together, more-or-less. X4 desperately needs the balance-pass that VRO-oriented mods provide, and a greater ship variety in all classes than what vanilla currently provides. I encourage anyone involved in the process of modding with VRO in mind to get together with other ship-creators and pool resources/knowledge, and anyone reading this to do whatever they can to assist. Merged mod packs save lives, so long as it's not a simple patchwork of this-and-that fix, but something cohesive (such as extra ships and nothing else, or extra command scripts and nothing else etc)

So long as a mod of this type is balanced across all ai factions, or does not adversely affect ai faction-logic, it has a wide use-case among the widest variety of players.

Biggest issue I see with ship mods is two-fold. One, many of the mods release ships that are OP, which is nice if other factions use them, AND if they are relatively balanced across all versions, so as to not upset any rock-paper-scissors gameplay loops to the point of breaking immersion beyond the threshold of fun. The other issue I see is that by adding said OP ship, the existential threat that the Xenon are supposed to be, is almost always neglected, and it shows, but ONLY after 20-30 hours of seeing sectors slowly change+Cheat Menu+SETA in order to monitor sector/faction balance changes in real-ish time.

With this being said, if you want to create and release a VRO-balanced mod, you also need to keep in mind the affect that the new ships will have on the Xenon, and therefore can't be too much stronger than the Xenon-equivalent, and ideally should simply ADD a Xenon(and/or rival faction) equivalent.

Adding new Xenon ships is a mega-plus, as no one seems to do this, and it shows. I know we generally can't fly them, but we can still see them, and that adds to immersion, but as I said, new/ported Xenon ships seem non-existent due to X4 being a small community as compared to Bethesda, my home-turf ='(

Whatever you do for one faction, such as "add a destroyer class ship", please ensure that something is added for the other major factions as well, so as to not unintentionally lop-side one faction in favor of the others.
-For example, I have seen many ship mods, mostly older/outdated ones add this or that ship to the Argon shipyard, and if I have them all installed, then the Argon have an advantage over everyone else due to a greater variety of ships available. It's #fine if there is no other option, I understand that there are time constraints. Last thing I have to suggest/mention, the more we can all communicate, and grow the feedback->modders->merged mods supply-chain, the better off we will be. Modding-culture is what keeps janky-vanilla sandbox-games such as Skyrim alive.

Originally posted by Dreamweaver:

It is not only you Le Leon

To be fair here, Bertrand raised the prices a lot. That's what i suggested.

And except for the 2 motherships, i think the other ships are more or less well rounded. And they got character with their special differences and disadvantages.
Bertrand used the existing Egosoft destroyers and VRO's Titan to place the load of ships, he provide between these to 2 lines.

To other things:
Egosoft needs month for a single ship to create from the scratch. But these guys are getting paid. So to work and create a new ship with blender for a person who has a job takes forever, if he don't just recycle body parts of other ships. While most factions ships are some kind of squares, Xenon's battleship is rounded. So no easy recycling.

On the other hand is the balancing between Xenon/ commonwealth in sector and OOS completely different. Then the ship mod have a version for non VRO, too. What makes balancing more time consuming to handle two different setting. Every change in VRO could break the existing VRO patch balance.

Working together is a dream, but will not happen. But that i explained somewhere else.

Whatever you do for one faction, such as "add a destroyer class ship", please ensure that something is added for the other major factions as well, so as to not unintentionally lop-side one faction in favor of the others.

Saw this browsing Egosoft forums, thanks for thinking ahead and keeping Xenon alive-ish.

"So just because Xenon dont get extra ships does not mean that they havent been adjusted to compensate this. So please dont spread wrong facts."

Whatever you do for one faction, such as "add a destroyer class ship", please ensure that something is added for the other major factions as well, so as to not unintentionally lop-side one faction in favor of the others.

"So just because Xenon dont get extra ships does not mean that they havent been adjusted to compensate this. So please dont spread wrong facts."


^
Saw this browsing Egosoft forums, thanks for thinking ahead and keeping Xenon alive-ish.