Has anyone made a substantial rewrite of the shiplist to balance the X-ships? I still can't get GameSpy to work through my router, but I can play on the Dynaverse. Once a campaign goes into the advanced era, the game's balance is destroyed.
Some years ago, I had a great deal of fun modding my shiplist to try and even out the X-ships. Not being able to play on-line, I could do single player, so I modded my game, and the types of X-ships grew and grew. I don't think my XCB's were powerful enough to bust an XSB by themselves, but XDN's definitely could with care. It was fun playing the game with all new ships, even if they were my own mods. It's much more fun when somebody else does it, but then when you do it yourself, it exactly matches your requirements.
I basically made all cruisers comparable to the Federation XCA, and gave various weapons to races that did not use them in the stock list. It really became fun when I weakened destroyers and added light cruisers. I came to the limits of the game when I added X-dreadnaughts.
I started with Firesoul's OP+. I needed models, and Firesoul didn't use a lot of the stock models so I could resize them to fit various roles. It worked well on my computer, but was hideously complicated. I experimented with many models and found I could not add them to the ship size file. I had to discard many models I found due to size alone.
I turned my game into a mess, but hey, it's my game. I don't play as much as I used to, but I miss that shiplist. If anyone were interested I would be willing to remake it, but it would be so much easier if I could download something somebody else put in a nice, convenient package.