The point of limited ammo of classic rocket launchers is so you still have to use other weapons. Are you saying the minuscule costs of TJ have the same effect in respect to other movement/sensor abilities? oO
No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm simply pointing out that unlike the other avoidance/escape options it does incur
a cost.
I can talk about the actual costs, though. If anything, the way to fix the skill is to make it cost way more to use. Or perhaps give it a dual functionality. One click to initiate a charge-up timer to jump for a small supply cost, second click to bypass that timer and jump immediately for a substantial cost in supplies/fuel and/or damage to ships. That would preserve its usefulness for both convenience and emergencies. It's still a get-out-of-jail card, just no longer a free one.
It's an interesting point btw, about "skip mechanic" buttons existing in some games. Seems to me like a crutch - if you have one mechanic in the game that's initially fun, but won't stay interesting for the entire duration of the game, it makes sense to enable skipping it after its potential has been exhausted. That's not really comparable to a skip function you can have from very early on, though.
Just how early a "skip mechanic" should be available is a matter of opinion too, though, and even the same game designer can go back and forth on that. Dark Souls 2 and 3 just let you quick travel right from the start. On the other hand, Dark Souls 1 is unique in the series in that it lets you pick a Master Key during character creation, which lets you unlock some important doors and completely bypass a huge chunk of the game.
Sure, you could argue that Transverse Jump is accessible too early. Maybe. I'm not sure I would agree. Yeah, sure, you
could rush it, but then you'd be compromising your fleet by not having other important skills. And is it really such a bad thing to have it accessible early? If you enjoy playing cat and mouse with other fleets on the map, more power to you. Some of us just want to get to the next fight, though.
they DGAF about supplies, CR or losses
That's an extremely important point that IMO deserves stressing. A lot of the design work that's being done seems to treat the overworld map as a multiplayer game, like some hyper-complex version of agar.io where every bubble is being controlled by a live player and everyone has to have equal chances. But that's not the case, there's only one player, and as you said the AI doesn't give a toss about supplies, CR, or losses. This throws the whole thing out of whack.
The job of a multiplayer game is to entertain everybody equally, so there can't be any "I win" buttons. Every skill or ability has to be counter-able in some way, you can't let one person keep winning all the time simply because they have a skill/item/whatever. The average player has to lose 50% of the time.
The job of a singleplayer game is very different, it is to entertain one person. It's very tempting to think that putting the player on equal footing with the AI is the way to do that, that it'll make the game challenging and fair and so on. But that's not how it works. If the player loses his fleet, it's a huge setback. If the AI loses a fleet, it doesn't care, it just spawns a new one. The willingness of the AI to throw its unlimited resources at the player is a massive advantage, so the player has to be 'overpowered' to compensate. Giving the player the same skills and same power level as the AI doesn't create equality, quite the opposite. But this imbalance is also what makes the game fun. Multiplayer games are about fighting more or less equal opponents, each fight tense and close, while singleplayer games are power fantasies based around mowing down hordes of AI mobs. The player should be challenged by the enemies, yes, but ultimately he or she should almost always win.
Attempting to balance a singleplayer game as if it were a multiplayer one is completely misguided. Not only will the AI always have some kind of 'cheat' that will just sour the experience (i.e. unlimited supplies, fleets, etc.), it will never put up as good a fight as a real opponent anyway, so what's the point? If I wanted an equal fight, I'd play a multiplayer game. I play a singleplayer game to curb-stomp hordes of enemies, and SS moves farther and farther away from that in every update.