Speaking of balance, the first patch is out.
Among other notable things, accuracy of bombs and rockets is nerfed, the imperial cannon is buffed, and damage that's [edit: equal to or] below the armor value has a chance of doing 0 damage. (Before, a gun would always do 1 'scratch damage' which meant gatlings and flamethrowers were quite dangerous regardless of armoring.)
Says the campaign AI is improved as well, which I'm looking forward to looking at.
Oooo...
Sounds good.
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I too thought bombs were OP but as I ramped up the difficulty I learned that making fragile little things that rely on RNG not exploding you is not a viable strategy.
So I switched to flamethrowers and boarding craft.
But then I learned that while immensely effective, they also regularly died on their missions, making it so I would have to build entirely new ones every single battle. This is not remotely viable when you're being accosted on all sides and have a limited amount of shipyards to build from.
So I resorted to the original strategy of making tanky cannons.
Not as brutally effective as the above two strategies, but way more versatile and survivable. Which is what matters in the campaign. I also have one or two specialist units in each formation. So boarders or flamethrowers or bombers or what have you.
That's what I found works the best on Imperial difficulty with 8x AI income.
Also landships. Lots of landships.