How about more weapons that use odd combinations of resources to achieve decent amounts of firepower?
Say for example, an automated beam turret that costs more, uses a lot more power but uses a quarter the crew, and for the other extreme, we could add Volksva-err… Artillery guns that use relatively low amounts of power but require more crew and costs more (you know… for… ammo, and maintenance, and stuff).
Rail/Coil Cannons could be introduced as a relative middle ground since they do use a fair bit amount of power to drive their projectiles, but obviously not enough to power an entire planet’s worth of toasters for 7 seconds…
However, this would make things a bit bland since you could just fill in half a ship with your favourite weapons and then fill in the blanks with whatever eats up resources you still have plenty of, so to balance it out you could limit what each race gets.
Just checking to see how people would react to the ideas.
I know. Writing down an idea you dreamed of in your nap 10 minutes after waking up is usually a bad idea.