Yeah, there's not enough ship "grades". It would be nice to have different classes of capital ships.

...but let's not get sucked into a spiraling arms race of "bigger bigger BIGGER". If battleships are so powerful that they invalidate smaller capships then what's the freaking point of having the others? Everything should have pros/cons. I could live with godly armed battleships if they had a top speed of 50 and a maneuverability rating of like 5 or something, though.

We need more roles as well, missiles need to be improved so that heavy bombers are actually a menace. 4-slot missile ships come close, but their payload (again) needs to be improved. If they didn't suck so much then we could have wings of bombers which pose a REAL threat. Right now I just slap on a cyclone in a system slot and pretty much ignore those Bidents and Hrimthurs flying around unless they get close to the mothership. That shouldn't be the case. We should be peeing our pants when we see a flight of bombers.

Speaking of which, it's kinda odd missile defence occupies a system slot. We should be using turret-slotted flak guns. That would make things more interesting because you'd have to factor in the firing arcs etc. Plus it'd give incentive to use different motherships (assuming they're made available properly and not simply via story script...).

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What's the problem with plasmas, they don't hit often enough? Laser defense doesn't stop them unlike particle guns (and of course lasers), so other than kinetics plasmas are pretty much our only other option. The refire rate may be slow but that's the point, if they're as fast as pulse lasers then you might as well not use anything else.

The whole point of variety is to NOT have a "top tier" of equipment which everyone always uses, because this means everything else is weaker. That totally destroys the reason for having lots of items to choose from. Good gear design would provide for things which are strong in different aspects, so you'd have to USE your brain instead of simply saying "oh I'll just buy weapon X and armor Y, and my ship will be godly". No.

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The rest is the usual good stuff we all want: random mission generator, longer mission scripts, etc. Good, I hope they hear us