Some started starbases have empty X-slot (fungoid, as example), making starbase weak at start. Maybe add some "basic" module, that any similar starbases can put?

Lets say, laser with 250-260 damage, 10 day cooldown and 150 damage with over 50% other stats. At least for 5-15 years it could help defend early.

Empty XL is intentional for missile sets. It helps set them apart.

early starbases are way too powerful, making early conquest builds / gameplay basically impossible. even unupgraded outposts with 1 L slot takes out several corvettes per fight

Weird, i tend to have no issues. You must mean VERY early. Like first 20 years.

But you can just make more corvetts. 20 of them near 8k fleetpower.

Against AI those starbases works... poorly, because them have 50% discount on ships (on grand-admiral).

Also, i would recommend paying attention to the shipset you are attacking. This isnt vanilla. Starbases also have bonus. Plan accordingly.

Kinetic Artillery overused by bots, making shield and armor pointless. AI spam it very hard.

I noticed that my Ion Cannon from the Machine Shipset has problems having a proper, role bonus adequate loadout, becuase of power shortage. The Starbase Kinetic Artillery is too expensive to run 4 of them without using Advanced Reactor Boosters and some cheaper / weaker components alongside them, it can barely run 4 of them with the Quantanium Powercore and only without any other components.

However I can use better components like the Starbase Plasma Repeater which are far stronger and cost less power but that makes the role bonus at least by 50% useless aside from the tracking and hull boost.

Maybe it would be nice to give Ion Cannons a own role bonus? Right now all platforms including even starbases share the same role bonus.
Judging by the fact that the Starbase Kinetic Artillery is too power expenisve to run a optimal loadout and there are no explosive rocket/torpedo weapons available for it, makes the role bonus in this scenario kinda suboptimal for the Ion Cannon at least.

All that doesn't really matter too much to me, becuase I usually run a mix of the strongest and also role bonus fitting components but you know...

@Daarath its worth me looking into. I could drop their power needs a bit.

I have noticed that there are very few weapons that actually have damage bonus vs shields, most of those are missiles, and two others are archeotech, which seems to roll very infrequently. Might be worth having slightly less stuff with shield penetration and more stuff with increased damage vs shields? Unsure.

After doing some minor testing (mostly just looking at how strong titans from various shipsets are) I'm beginning to suspect that the Avian titan might be a bit overtuned? This is just from fleet power, though, so it might just be inflated, but looking at a few shipsets (humanoid, cybernetic, molluscoid) they all can create titans with about 40k fleet power, while the avian titan has around 60k (This is using all T3 large energy fighters). Though again this might just be the absurd number of fighter bays inflating fleet power in a way that performs poorly vs ships with pd, I haven't done combat testing.

Remove everything related to "jump-drive" below vanilla. These components override even jump drive itself, making impossible to move through gates, L-gates and wormholes, so strategy with colonization L-cluster is dead on arrival, because civilians ships cannot use anything or move To, In and Out.

I know why this is happening. I dont need to remove them. I just need to update them.

Can you make it so that Subspace drives from Eager Explorers update to warp drives

Strikecrafts - is a good, but problem is there so much similar of them, that nothing seem to be in time for most of them, even for FE's type. Maybe better to combine several tech's, because engineering now is most important (well, Machine age is meta), and waste time to research 12+ SC is painful. Nobody care about them, even bots, they dont use P-slots at all.

I mean... maybe some bomber-type in single and make it cost not x1.5 from base and etc would be nice. Engineering have too much new components.