I have gone through the trouble of making an account to say how I feel because I'm REALLY NOT enjoying the game in its current form anymore. Other than the words I'm gonna say, my frustrations and emotions should also be a good indicator of feedback for what the state of the game currently is for some people.
I feel like you're screaming "PLAY THIS WAY" and I hate that. The fact that people wanted smaller ships to be more useful didn't have to mean that it's now the ONLY viable thing to do, just that it's A viable thing to do. Why even put Paragon in the game if we can't even use it?
Oh and, if I wanted to max out industry skills and some of the others, screw me right? I can get a huge logistical advantage, at the cost of never being able to win any fight ever, even with vastly superior fleets. people talk about how "oh but you should still be able to kill pirates easily", no that's not my experience at all, they have way more DP, more ships, more officers, fighters, missiles, they overwhelm me every single time. "just capture the points" yeah because we have to be forced to do that now just to have a decent shot at getting a fair fight.
Why the *** should a bigger, better fleet not win from a pathetic weaker one? It feels incredibly awful to spend lots of time on a ship, testing out tons of weapons and hullmods, eventually come up with something that can win most 1v1 situations and be good in many tactical situations, just to be faced with a million high level officers that have combat skills that gives them a massive damage boost to me while I can barely defend myself because all the flux I take on my shields. The enemy doesn't do anything smart, it just goes "ohohoh me have more ships on field, me now stomp you" which is exactly the *** you didn't want us to do, and for what? Just reverse it all because of what you personally think is fun.
Had a blast playing this game in the past, hope it gets back on its feet soon because us players probably won't be able to fix *** to our liking forever as you add in more and more hard-coded *** that forces us to play a certain way. Shouldn't be a sandbox game then.
Capital ships... are also still useful in late game battles. Having a capital or two or three even is a MAJOR boost to fleet power compared to all cruisers.
No it's not, if you deploy 3 capitals you're already down 120 of the pathetic 160 points we're forcefully allocated. The way it's working now, it would be NO different from just it being "you get 160, they get 240", that's the rule, enjoy. Compared to the kazillion ships the enemy can deploy regardless of how big their fleet actually is, it's better to have 2 cruisers than a capital.
Then talking about "oh but lol you can capture objectives on the map" is just SHOWING that you need to cheese the new system. You HAVE the play a certain way. "nooo you're doing something I personally don't like so I will force everyone to play like how I want to"
So yes, I'm fairly disgruntled at the state of the game right now, to see something which was fun and relaxing in the past become such a clown circus of frustrating min-maxing