Discovery 5.1 Dev Diary #3 - More System Changes & Other Things

[Karst]

It's nice that Dev Diaries are being continued even though they are less necessary than before, because the dev team has been more transparent about upcoming changes, which is nice.
Definitely excited for the cruiser changes.

As for the cruise speed changes, there's an obvious problem, and I have brought this up before with Haste once I learned that this was the plan, with no satisfying answer, and that's that transports other than 5ks and Frigates are really left behind, even more so than they already have been. It's already the case that any transport other than Frigates, which have serious offensive and defensive combat capabilities, and 5ks, which....are 5ks, are niche choices. This change will only strengthen that divide.
This affects battletransports in particular. Being both worse at cruising while also having less combat capability than a Frigate, all for some cargo space that's still worse than a 5k, after they've already lost the heavy turrets that gave them a semi-unique advantage, will make them an even less popular choice than they currently are.

I'd hope that'll be addressed in the mythical transport rework that'll come eventually, but it's not so great now. Repeatedly taking stuff (like Heavies) away from transports with no replacements because "future transport rework" long before that rework actually happens isn't great.

Edit: To say nothing of small transports that aren't Frigates. I didn't mention them initially because they are already useless in the current version, having been made completely obsolete in the only role they had, piracy, by Frigates. But obviously they are even more of a forgotten class with the cruise changes.
I guess that'll also be addressed at some point, I should certainly hope so.

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