Raw offence is better than other things. Range matters if it lets you do more damage. Health matters if you live longer to do more damage.
So the choices often feel a little flat. If there's a rare, you pick it, because rares are strong. That's exciting, but not much of a choice. Then if there's a fire rate or damage mod you pick that, mostly. So it's a bit on rails?
More options in general will help. Uncommon mods that are just highrolls of basic mods would be a start, so you're at least sometimes asked to choose between damage and a lot of non-damage.
- Range Boost (range: +3%)
- Uncommon Range Boost (range: +6%)
- Rare Range Boost (range: +9%)
Also nice to include are mods that are less straightforward to compare. Where the answer to "how good is it?" is "it depends". Range and ship speed are the two raw stats that are already like this. One idea is triggered effects such as on-attack, on-damage, on-death, on-kill. Could cause stuns, buffs, debuffs, or just do damage. Now we have tactical implications, such as ships that want to die first, ships that need kills, etc.
- Cryogenic (whenever this ship damages an enemy, lower its fire rate to x0.5 for 2sec)
- Fireship (when this ship is destroyed, deal X damage to enemies within Y distance)
- Bloodlust (when this ship destroys an enemy ship, it gains x2 fire rate for 6 seconds)
- Backlash (when an enemy ship damages this ship, it is immobilized and can't fire for 0.5 seconds)
More mobility or control mods like teleport. Slow enemy units, teleport enemy units. Or global mutators
- teleport the closest enemy away
- teleport the farthest enemy forward
- enemy speed x0.75 while this ship is present
- your fleet starts 25% farther away from the enemy