I really like your mod, you did a great job making large ship battles finally realistic and simply awesome
However, you might want to take a look at the xenon capital ship balance, they are too strong in my opinion. My current game with your newest VRO version is around 30 hours in now, and the xenon have obliterated half the universe and the economy starts to break down. The split are nearly wiped out, and the teladi are half way there.
I only hold Hatikvah's choice 1 through excessive cheating. I placed two really heavy armed defense stations at the gate, but the annihilators seem to be weaker again and don't do that much anymore against Xenons. I switched to wraith cruise missiles which do a better job, but they are heavily bound to economy and you risk your defense station being toothless.... If I wouldn't have the stations made invulnerable, they wouldn't have survived the second wave
Without cheating, argon sectors would also be long obliberated by now. The last 10 hours I think I removed around 50 xenon capitals with my defense bases, without my intervention they would have killed argon / teladi by now for sure.
If I had to guess, I would say that reducing hull and shields of xenon capitals by 25 % at least could give the universe a bigger fighting chance. But it's just a guess, because I also use a steam mods that adds about +10 new sectors, and since a lot are on the left side of the map and the xenon have taken over, that's certainly a factor that the xenon have become so strong (even though this mod doesn't add new shipyards, but the xenon economy became a bit stronger with +15 new solar plants they built so far).
Nevertheless, keep it up, you improved this great game a lot by now !!
(edit) a little nitpick I have , is that fighter weapons feel quite more weak now. I haven't tried all weapons yet, but a 6-Gun Pulsar with EBC shouldn't take that long to take down a xenon P or miner (or other M-Class Ships), against fighters it's ok, but still feels weak compared to my potential firepower).