Like the title said. Some of the reviews say there are controversial balance changes to the HD version. What are they?

Whole pirate faction, I think.
SR2 didn't have it initially.
If there were no SR2 release before A war apart it could've looked like an evolution of SR1 plot, but for addon...
Many new missions are on the hard side, which gimp recovery time after hard battles.

Would you say HD or Reboot is the better version?

I read a post on Steam forum that suggest decrease the difficulty on the pirate side just to make sure they don't become an issue and if you like clean 100, 150 or 200% difficulty steps then pick something else to increase to balance out the pirate difficulty.

HD is an upgraded Reboot version with fixes.

Personally, I haven't played original (pre-reboot) to the point where I would need overhaul this big to enjoy the game.

Well besides the people that HAVEN'T played both.

I would like to know the answer to the OPs question as well.

Anyone play both?

I played Reboot a few years ago to almost-completion, and started a new game with AWA a couple days ago. Both on normal difficulty.

Reboot: felt weak in the beginning, but grew in strength and became instrumental in defeating the Dominators, about what I'd want from the difficulty curve, though to a point, the Doms were just not evolving as fast as the Coalition. Which is also good: the universe in this game should be self-sustaining, not just waiting for you as a savior.

AWA: Still in the early game, feel weak. My goal here is instead of being a combat guy, is to be a rich trader and finance the war, but that seems to be unlikely given that most rewards come with combat. However, this early in the game, the Coalition planets are falling all over the place to both pirates and Doms, and I'm not sure why.

It doesn't feel balanced for pirates to be more powerful than Coalition military. I feel like this could be more forgivable if the pirates were a crazy religious sect instead of just guys who steal. How do pirates end up ruling a planet? It makes more sense for them to be some sort of fast moving Manifest Destiny cult, perhaps even in response to the Dominator threat and the ineptitude of the Rangers and Coalition. More interesting story, too. Nothing stopping one from pretending that's the case, though.

Keep in mind, this is early in the game, I'm playing it a certain way, and a number of random factors affect the game. But from what I'm seeing, pirates are imbalanced. I have no recommendations, though, because what if the Doms are also boosted to compete with the pirates, and in dialing down the pirates, you end up with overpowering Doms?

They have an explanation for this, you would find it during the game, but I wouldn't spoil the plot. Devs buffed energy weapon (damage, range), this shifted overall balance - coalition for a while has only frag cannons, basically.

Game has hidden mechanic - size of coalition ships depends on player's ship, so during the start while player has small ship, civils and even military have small hulls - die fast.
Buy bigger hull, bigger ships would respawn.

This is very illuminating! Is it documented anywhere in the game, or is this knowledge gleaned from 1C's forum? That last one is very odd and gamey, I'm a little disappointed.

I just recently decided to actually play HD instead of just buying it because Space Rangers is my favourite series but gosh ... after 16 hours of streaming(30 years in-game) I just hate the changes in HD AWA.

While both Reboot and HD starts well, the added pirates just make things worse. By year 3304, Coallition had only 30% of the galaxy, Dominators had half of it and pirates had the rest 20%. Even though pirates dont seem to have a lot, it turns into pain late game(check images).

I played on 100% and started the game as usual, do missions, get rich, get gear and start fighting. Sadly at some point pirates and dominators captured the middle part of the galaxy map so I was locked in a place in which I can only travel between 5 systems so doing missions got even harder.

The worse part is that apart from Keller, the other 2 dominator's mothership doesnt seem to move AT ALL. So the only way to beat Blazer and Terron was to fight them in their solar system of choice or upload the programs. As far as I remember in Reboot all 3 motherships was often making black holes to capture system in "remote" places.

Anyway I manage to defeat all 3 dominators and surprise surprise... I had to liberate 3 systems that was still under their control( explain this ..) . Every system had ~ 15 ships and 1 flagship ... from them only 3-5 ships was with old tech.. everything else was 30-35% shield and 5-9 hull armor so unless you get a military squad and your own ranger squad you stand little to no chance to free it.

When comes to pirates.. well... http://i.imgur.com/8xkECNS.jpg . Pirates are just broken. And seems the only way to defeat is from the inside which means you have to forfeit your millitary rank and all the reputation you got through out the galaxy.

Frankly I just quited the game after I got the 3 motherships since the game turned into mindless grind.

Oh, wow. what a pirate army.
Only Keller has bubble tech to create black holes, Blaser jumps between systems, but amount of his attacks I can count on one hand, he protects his systems. Terron never leaves *spoiler*, because he fused with it.

Wild guess- HD balanced over more aggressive dominators (150%+).
You know, "developer difficulty"

Fun fact, after I defeat Blazer, I freeded half of the system so ended up with Keller jumping from system to system, Terron staying in 1 spot with only 4 systems captured.

I manage to beat 1st Space Rangers on 200%(well it was very hard I think but same idea) and SR 2 : Reboot on 200% but no way in hell to bother to beat HD AWA on 200% when it has so many broken elements late game.

A couple of things that may help:

1) Difficulty for Dominators

In case you missed this, note that in HD there are no options (unless using "advanced options") to set dominator difficulty.

What the game does (i.e. if advanced setting for dominators is left at the default levels of "auto") is to adjust the dominator difficulty depending on the other settings.

I'm not sure exactly what/how it does this, but I suspect if you ratchet up difficulty for any other element, then dominators also get increased aggression, tech and reproduction.

Setting these manually in advanced configuration to whatever you want helps.

2) Self-correcting Universe

However, I think that because of the "extra faction", the dynamics of the game changed. I don't think the pirates are too tough or anything, but now that there are three main factions trading territory, the Universe isn't as "self-correcting" as it used to be in pre-HD. At least not unless tweaking settings in advanced adjustments as described above.

The big problem is that the Coalition seems to find it ridiculously difficult to hold on to recently captured systems this time around - even late game. Either the coalition production is slower, or they're wasting too many resources with the pirates. Pre-HD, you hardly ever had to bother defending systems in the late game, but now if you don't you're playing whack-a-mole - or you need to invest in building ships at business centres.

3) Final tweaks that may help:

In addition to setting dominators & pirates to the same percentage (or a set percentage that's not "auto"), it's worth doing the same for "pirate aggression", which is also set to auto by default - set this to the same as what you set overall pirate difficulty to.

4) Final final tweak:

Finally, I've found that increasing the number of rangers in advanced config makes a HUGE difference. Even just 10 is definitely noticeable.

Normally, there's only one ranger per coalition-controlled system - so with pirates controlling 30% of non-dom space, there aren't enough to bolster the (crappy) coalition armed forces.

If you add more rangers, then this is less of a problem. Note that you might want to play around with this a bit, as having too many rangers has its own problems. I've found 5-10 works well for me with pirates at 100% and doms at 150%, but haven't tested extensively how this plays out in late game (I suspect it won't be that noticeable later as there will be more systems controlled, therefore more rangers anyway).