Shivan technology is well above Terran and Vasudan. Despite somehow FS1 and FS2 campaigns cannot show this advantage well. For example four Terran fighters take down one Cain or Lilith, who were escorted by at least twenty fighters. Somehow every strike succeeds, when the Lucifer is not in the area. In dogfight, Shivans are easier to kill than Terrans or Vasudans. and in every mission, Shivans launch at least twenty or thirty fighters and they are wiped out by eight Terran fighters.
Is this called power?
I know exactly where you are coming from here; many of the Shivans are definitely easier to kill in general. The thing about the Shivans is that they have much more emphasis on anti-capital weapons but much less on anti-fighter weapons than the GTVA. For example, the Cain, Rakshasa and Lilith all have only one anti-fighter SAAA beam, as opposed to a minimum of two on the GTVA cruisers. They have the FighterKiller and Shivan Cluster launchers, but the FighterKiller is not all that effective and the Cluster is considerably weaker than the Piranha. The destroyers have the same problem; only two SAAAs for each of them, and not nearly as much flak as the Allied destroyers.
Although the Shivan ships are for the most part on par with their Terran or Vasudan counterparts, it is their weapons that really bring them down; they are just significantly weakened versions of the GTVA weapons. As for the beams, the SAAA fires twice as fast as the AAAf but only does a third of the damage per shot, and the SRed is quite pathetic even by GTVA standards. The only place where they really beat the GTVA hands-down is the larger anti-capital beams, namely the LRed and BFRed.
Since one player-controlled ship is so much more effective then the AIs, the enemy needs overwhelming numbers to put up a fight. You're in an Erinyes - reckon you could take on six Shivan fighters? Course you do, anyday of the week. Therefore, the enemy would need odds of at least six to one to be an even match, but then the player has wingmen as well...
Yes, I have had to deal with this issue quite often by designing missions, and the only way to present a reasonable challenge is to put in massive (and sometimes even unrealistic) numbers of enemy fighters, even if they have the same fighters and armaments as the player. They are actually quite good at long range, but in close-up dogfights, it seems that if you keep facing them, they just run circles around your ship and make no attempt to attack you.
What would actually be kinda kool is if a camp went and played with the tables a bit, making all the shivan ships stronger, sheilds stronger and weapons stronger.
I did exactly that in the PI mods (which originally started off as a set of game-balance mods) but it was not really necessary there as there may not even be any shivans in the campaign.
