well, the novalith thing is something we can certainly easilly test.
As far as balance goes... kostra's should be the weakest superweapon, simply due to the fact that they have zero prereqs.
Your not going to see fleets of 100% hoshikos... (like we do with lrms) I mean, come on. such a fleet would have almost no weapon firepower. A 100% hoho fleet would have less firepower than a 100% capital ship fleet.... and more expensive. (12.5 hohos (50 fleet supply) would cost 4375cr,375m,625c
If you have a reasonable quantiy of hoshikos... well, if you remember that counters chart that was posted by the devs, they are supposed to be able to counter heavy cruisers. Before, they never really quite fufilled this role... now it might be possible. It would take 6.67 supply worth of hohos to permently keep down any single ship, (based on default antimatter regen). So, it would take 1.67 times the number of enemy heavy cruisers to keep them all down, with no antimatter regen extra for repairs.... which, while takes less fleet supply, is once again, very expensive.
Hell, if you really wanted to overwelm a hoho/lrm fleet, tec or advent scouts would provive far too many targets, and drain the hoho's am reserves incredibly quickly. (vas scouts just kinda suck at fighting)
Hoho's dont effect carrier cruisers (as far as dps), caps, or starbases... an enemy of hoho's and kodiaks is a PERFECT excuse to bring out the bomber spam.... and hoho and lrms... well, carriers filled with fighters already beat equal fleet supplies of lrms, so... piece of cake till the flack frigs come out.
hoho's and guardas? light frigs! not only do they get niiice damage bonuses vs heavy armor, they also have hoho neutralizing abilities.
Unlike subjugators, hoho's dont affect abilites, or phase jumping or carrier cruisers, In addition, suppression uses less antimater, lasts longer, has twice the range... yall complain about hohos now...? wait till you get your wish and get domina's with needtoface turned off. HA.
Seriously... do i need to learn how to play advent and show you what the domina can do? put some dominas next to a antimatter restoring structure, and notice how they are just as, or more effective at disabling heavies and carriers as hohos.
The only thing hoho's got is the lack of chanelling required, and hence the ablility to waste all thier antimatter at once. If you gave the Domina's repair ability decent AI targetting parameters (take a look at it...'disableimmune',
aiUseTime "OnlyInCombat"
aiUseTargetCondition "Any"
Which... is why they use it quite stupidly, combined with the long cool down means that if they do use it stupidly, you cant fix it for quite a bit.... If you adjust this, i believe you will find that suddenly, they are quite good. (disable immune even restores more hull points/antimatter than repair droids... and has more range.
You got that? the only problem with domina's is their autocasting... give them decent autocasting (which, prolly requires some coding on the dev's part... something like " aiUseTargetCondition "IsWeaponDisabled"" or, something that wont require coding: aiUseTargetCondition "HullDamageExceedsAmount"... what would be best would be something like:
"IsWeaponDisabledOrHullDamageExceedsAmount"
If you use a domina on say... one of your many capital ships with channeling abilities... you dont have to worry about ionbolt, disruptive strikes, magnatize, so on and so forth...
Have you all even TRIED using the domina in multiplayer since the patch?