Help needed on restart

[Hangar181]

Playing vanilla (have played VRO before) but can’t quite get satisfied with either. Vanilla is too easy - I can wipe out zenon in no time and VRO I find frustrating because the destroyers are naff (behemoth in particular) against corvettes. A single Xennon P bullied two of my behemoths (they had flak so should’ve been effective). Also don’t like VRO because it goes too far in “normalising” all ships . Wondering if there’s a mod (or selection of mods) that make xenon challenging but not ridiculously and if I do go down the VRO route any advice on what ships and combos work best etc.

Finally I use custom game start but is there any way to not do the Dal Busta / tosa soo story without maxing out on all research. I put there story state to at HQ but keep getting the same annoying storyline that starts with a mysterious ship turning up outside HQ and you have to scan it in 3 places etc.

[magitsu]

https://github.com/DeadAirRT/deadairevolution

Then possibly FOCW where you need to enable specific settings in the .ini file, for example more defensive Xen fleets, more Xen miners... you can tinker a lot since those changes just allow (instead of spawning) them to build more if enabled mid-campaign.
viewtopic.php?t=403357#p4761574

[Realspace]

In my REM mod I buffed all destroyers by increasing: hull, shields, number of shields and number of turrets. And bullets are very fast. Xenon ships received special attention, they have a lot of turrets. M have been buffed too but only against S, no way a single M can pose a threat to destroyers. I also added some XL destroyer.
The main point of the mod was adding inertia to the ships but then it evolved into an alternative to vro. Give a try.

[Hangar181]

Thanks both, will check out what you’ve suggested