YMMV / Gratuitous Space Battles

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: When designing fighters for each race, players will usually use their fastest fighter hull and ignore the others entirely. Also, given that a lot of fighter modules are pretty poorly balanced since fighter hulls just don't have the power to sustain them and/or because they're too damn heavy, only about half the fighter modules (the basic laser, rockets, and sometimes target painters along with their lower-tier engines and powerplants) actually see use.
• Fanfic Fuel: There's just enough backstory for the various races to get a story going (even if it is just a Standard Sci-Fi Setting), and enough blanks left to fill in that players can easily craft headcanons for everything.
• Game-Breaker: Ask most veteran players what the best faction in the game is, and they'll probably point you to the Tribe. Their racial gimmick gives them doubled hull integrity at the cost of halved shields and armor... which is a downside that might as well not be there at all, considering that a Tribe cruiser without any defensive investment aside from maybe a repair module can still facetank more damage than anything else that isn't built as a heavily-armored damage sponge. This in turn means they can choose to just not use armor or shields, making their ships comparatively cheap without really sacrificing anything, which then means they can comfortably outgun the other factions by having more ships and tougher ships. What really makes them too strong for their own good, though, is the Utopia cruiser, the closest thing the game has to a Master of All. Not only is it one of the smallest cruiser hulls in the game (and therefore one of the hardest to hit) on top of its innate durability, but it also boasts eight hardpoints, which when combined with the savings on shields and armor means that Utopias can be armed to the teeth and still be cheaper and tougher than equivalent ships from other factions.
• Low-Tier Letdown: The Empire is almost unanimously considered the worst race in the game. Despite the huge, imposing size of their ships (one of their frigates is bigger than some cruisers), they tend to be surprisingly lacking in hardpoints for their cost and size, making them fairly poorly-armed compared to their equivalents from other factions while lacking the capacity to make efficient use of their excess modules. Said size also very much works against them, making them big, slow targets for everything under the sun and making anything bigger than a fighter extremely vulnerable to strafing by enemy laser fighters, and their racial bonus to shields does very little to remedy these problems; their fighters being some of the worst in the game (with no real benefits aside from being dirt-cheap) doesn't help either. The little time they had in the spotlight was when their unique Shield Support Beam module was able to make a ship virtually immortal under focus fire from enemy capital ships, but this was deemed too broken and the Support Beam was nerfed into the ground, and in their current state the race has very little to make them stand out.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • While the effectiveness of most weapons gets complex in practice, fighter torpedoes are one of those that are nigh-universally recognized as being completely Cool, but Inefficient. Sure, they allow fighters to punch through cruiser shields and armor... if your fighters can even get in range to use them, since they're so ridiculously heavy that any fighter carrying them will inevitably be slowed to a crawl. Given that fighters live and die on mobility alone, this means that torpedo bombers will inevitably get swatted down long before they get to do any meaningful damage.
  • The Order's radiation cannon and missiles. While weapons that inflict damage over time after contact sounds fine on paper (and being nuclear weapons is a plus), they're let down by the fact that they have to make contact with hull to actually irradiate targets. Any sort of shields or armor neuters them due to their pathetic impact damage, making them horribly inefficient against anything other than the Tribe.
  • The Alliance Lightning Beam. With an absolutely pitiful range - only three-fourths the range of the Cruiser Laser, a weapon that's already only usable at what can reasonably be considered point-blank range - and equally poor damage output, trying to make use of these will get your ships get shot to pieces long before they manage to actually do anything.
  • Frigate missiles (barring the anti-fighter missiles) are good against enemy frigates and that's about it. They don't have the penetration to deal with cruisers, nor the tracking to take out enemy fighters. As a result, they're only ever useful in custom challenges that only allow frigates and nothing else.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: On the one hand, you don't need much of a plot for huge explosions and multicolored death beams and storms of pew-pew against ridiculously pretty nebulae and planetary vistas. On the other hand, there's just enough background exposition about the various factions and personality in their win/lose quotes to make the setting interesting enough that an actual story might be pretty cool.