Sigh...
Lets all do four era versions of Tournament ships..
Actually what attracted me to this was flying those Gorn fighters. Then I found out they were one dimensional and crappy except for the first shot...which is a doozy. But thats not fun. Their dumb.
Get rid of Alien encounter...a sucker mission.
Trying to balance the cheese out of the game is a vast and careful undertaking. Probably would take a combination of approaches...
One would be a GOOD look at SFB patrol rules and see what can be scripted in or applied to a server.
Another would be to poll players for a few months and ask what their opinion is of the top 3 cheese in each race. The top 3 could be banned or limited to extreme rarity...3 a race. And upon their destruction they would not be allowed back in.
So you might have a rather interesting "gotta sink the bismark" scenario played out here and there. (No offense to Feds of course...lol).
Another approach would be to make rare or eliminate all those mid eraish fast cruisers that seem to have better power curves than their late eraish counterparts, or at least look at changing the frequency and time they come out.
That would net a list of 24 ships which could be juggled around and maybe just two eliminated.
Another would be to make an actual list of SFB conjectural ships and put them on the block.
Another way would be to make up limit rules like no Frigate droner more than 1 drones, no destroyer more than 2 drones, no light cruiser more than 3 etc etc etc....same with fighters. But when you start doing that of course the problem is killing balance in the Miraks, Klings and Hydrans.
It's hopeless really...Taldren tried like hell to fix it but they nearly broke the game trying to do it.