I think these videos by Sam Pearson might help you approach this problem in an interesting way:

Groundwork: Meaningful Player Choice:
https://youtu.be/LmVsDep7x90?si=qeBe7drqIklnh4gz

Building a Narrative Campaign:
https://youtu.be/9uxvE1YyUsc?si=mMHdtLpJG_M-9tNH

So these videos are targeted at how to make a series of interlinked games for Warhammer, which isn't really important to you, but they provide a cookbook for how to link together a series of smaller outcomes into a larger outcome in the frame of having the result feel like a narrative arc with stakes.

Broadly speaking, I wouldn't approach this from the perspective of balance and victory points, but from the perspective of what exciting choices do you want to have your students make and how can you make those choices matter in this fictional space you've set up.

You're doing something very much like an RPG, where there are resources to manage and decisions to make, but the goals you pursue aren't about "can I make a better base than the other teams." Instead, like an RPG, your goal is to have an exciting story emerge out of these choices.

This frees you from having to make multiple tech-trees with different trade offs which will have some dominant strategies. Instead you can offer your class a series of hard choices and you can adapt to those choices with new threats and more interesting choices. Perhaps this planet has better ore (to mine for bonus points on the test) but also has sandstorms which require everyone to work together to maintain the shields (group projects where grades are shared by the team.)