Ox-class Tug:
Improves fleetwide burn by 1, cumulative with other tugs, not limited by its own burn level
High sensor profile
Base burn is 8
Uses 10 fuel per light-year and 10 supplies per month (but only 5 supplies to deploy)
Costs 40% CR to deploy (which brings down the cost to regain full CR, especially when recovered)
If I'm understanding this change correctly, it's to provide an option to make capital/cruiser fleets faster, with a hefty fuel cost. But I think this unfairly punishes destroyer heavy fleets that try to remain fuel efficient.
For example, consider the following fleet composition:
- 1x cruiser flagship of choice
- 4x sunder/hammerhead/drovers w/ officers
- 3-5x beam wolves
- 2-3x buffalos
-
1x Ox- optional: a few shepherds
A fleet like this can take on any bounty, survey, or salvage well into the late-game, chiefly due to the player-controlled cruiser acting as the heavy-puncher in combat. In terms of cargo it's not as efficient as the larger freighters, but the trade off is that you can maintain a 9-burn max fleet speed with a single tug to offset the cruiser.
With the new Ox, this is no longer economical as 2x tugs (+20 fuel/ly!) are needed to bring the fleet up to 9-burn, at which point you might as well have a couple of of cruiser-class freighters and tankers. This can have the lopsided result of large fleets with cruiser/capitals zipping around faster than small/medium fleets, as large fleet has the cargo space to shrug off the added logistical burden of 2-3 tugs. IMO it basically makes destroyer-heavy expedition fleets obsolete.
One option is to leave the Ox as is, and introduce a destroyer (or maybe even cruiser) tugship that has the new fleet-wide behavior and even higher costs. Has something like this been considered?