Ships added by this mod are balanced based on their class in the Anaxes War College System, and also how powerful a specific ship is meant to be from whatever lore is avaliable. If Fractalsponge has made a model of a ship I often reference it as far as turret loadout/positioning is concerned, and follow that as long as it makes sense for balancing purposes. This means balance in both the sense of how powerful a ship is, and conversely how expensive it is - almost all of these Battlecruisers and Dreadnaughts are blueprint purchase only and are VERY expensive to buy and then build yourself. The Eclipse can't be bought or built at all - there is only one and you must steal it from the Galactic Empire. This is already a concept present in SWI, ships are balanced around how expensive/scarce they are - the most powerful currently (Home One and Lucrehulk Battlecruiser classed ships) can only be built by the player after buying an expensive blueprint. This mod adds ship representation for a class not currently implemented at all in SWI - Dreadnaughts (ships anywhere over 5km).

In terms of in-game power, a Dreadnaught is several times as strong in terms of hull/shields and damage output as any of the implemented Battlecruiser classed ships (Home One/Lucrehulk) and this will vary from the smaller Dreadnaughts (Annihilator/Strident) up to the Eclipse. Just like a Destroyer-classed ship in SWI is several times stronger than a frigate or cruiser.

In order to take down one of these ships in fleet combat, you have to think the way you would in SWI currently but expand it to a higher level for these new classes - would you expect to be able to take down an ISD-II (Destroyer classed XL ship) with a lone corvette, frigate, or cruiser? Of course not, the ISD-II would easily take out any of those ships alone without barely a scratch on shields - you'd need many of those attacking together to stand a chance or another Destroyer. Of course, ships also vary in strength greatly within a single class, the ISD-II can beat many other ships in the Destroyer class easily. It's the same with a Dreadnaught, you'd need a fleet of many Destroyers or Battlecruisers and whatever other fleet composition you want to run in order to stand a chance, or a weaker Dreadnaught with some support.

I did many test battles with various fleet compositions in order to balance the ships. I use a ship's "Ship Strength" when creating fleet compositions. Ship Strength comes from the SWI sw_shipstrength_set.xml, it is a strength value assigned to each ship which helps the AI understand how powerful ships are and allows them to better allocate ships on the map to fight a given group of enemy ships. Here are some samples from different classes to get an idea of the spread, these values aren't 100% accurate all of the time for every scenario but they give a general idea of how strong a ship is:

XXL: Lucrehulk 260, Home One 240
XL: ISD-II 150, Keldabe 140, MC 80L/Venator/Providence/Harrower 110, Procursator 90, Munificent 65
L: Victory II 42, Dreadnaught 38, Nebulon-B 22
M: Hammerhead 12, Defender 8, Gozanti 7
S: Tie Fury 5, Razorcrest 4, Tie Echelon 3, Tie Fighter 1

As you can see, the spread can be wide for a given ship size as they encompass multiple ship classes that vary in power, role, and cost. So, for testing a fleet battle I would use these ship strengths to build a composition that fits 2000 or 3000 power etc. and pit two fleets of the same total ship strength against one another. I'd repeat them many times to observe the results and variances that can occur. I did tests with an Imperial fleet containing for example an Annihilator, Titan, several ISDs vs an equal strength NRL fleet composed of Home Ones, various MC80s etc, as well as other tests where both sides had compositions built around their respective Dreadnaught. This helped me achieved a balance where these battles were extremely close, where depending on how the fight played out either side would win and the winner had very few ships left.

After seeing the above, here are the ship strengths for the DABC ships:

XXL (Dreadnaughts): Eclipse 2000, Annihilator 1250, Strident 1000
XXL (Battlecruisers): Titan 500, Procurator 400, Allegiance 300, Secutor 240
XL (Destroyer): Kandosii 150

Ship Strength was also used when designing new Jobs for the factions. Jobs are the fleet compositions that the factions build, each job has a minimum quota that they will always fill and a maximum quota that they won't exceed. I mapped out all current L/XL SWI jobs (excluded all single S/M ship police patrols etc. as their power is too low to be of consequence on the grand scale) for each faction into a spreadsheet which references every ships Ship Strength. This allows me to see how strong individual jobs are, and how much of a factions total strength any given job represents. With this, I was able to get a baseline total ship strength for each faction - both the minimum quota strength and the maximum quota strength.

When adding new jobs for factions led by the new ships implemented by DABC, I kept the same power balance between each faction - meaning the min/max quota strength differences between each faction is the same as in SWI. So while all factions have new jobs which make them stronger, it does not make any faction more or less stronger than another faction compared to vanilla SWI. So, you should not all of a sudden see the Empire rolling over the NRL anymore than you would in SWI normally.

All of the implemented jobs led by new Dreadnaughts or Battlecruisers function normally where the faction will replenish lost ships in order to meet their quotas, with the exception of the Eclipse - if it is destroyed another will not be built. Dreadnaught jobs have small quotas, so the factions will only build a few - for example the GE will build 1 Annihilator patrol with a maximum of 2. Also, all of the new jobs will be fully used by the faction for whatever purpose they think best so invasions defense etc., again with the exception of the Eclipse - it will only patrol around GE territory and will not participate in invasions.