I remember hopping in on starsector about a year or two ago, and enjoying the kind of scope and scale and wealth of diversions there were. Ship customization allowed for several viable builds, the endgame was fighting radiants and no loadout I could make guaranteed a victory if they were multiple joined fleets, colonies could, in time and with great investment, become larger and more economically powerful than established core worlds.
That was fun.
I come back to the game later and find that sparse content has been added, less than a handful of ships, but more than that the player has been neutered in their options. I read patch notes and see a long list of "you can no longer do this," "you can no longer do that," and an endless list right above the bugfixes that is nothing added to the game and dozens of viable or interesting builds taken out.
This is not fun.
This is largely a sandbox game. The player is free to do as they please and find their own amusement, with some "story missions" but ultimately a galaxy to explore, to conquer, to interact with others in. And all we're getting is a long list of patch notes indicating that the direction the game is going is like that for a PvP game, a foolish, positively foolish and unwise obsession with trying to balance a galactic sandbox game. Why? There is no multiplayer. There is nothing forcing the player to utilize minmax builds, or at least there wasn't, until development saw to it that rather than let players advance and overcome the idea of "difficulty" necessary for this game was exclusively "give the AI every numerical advantage possible and limit viability for endgame encounters to phase ship piloting abuse."
And now by writing that I fear that I've somehow motivated Alex to nerf phase ships to useless boring sameness the way armor tanking was neutered to nothingness, automated ships was neutered to nothingness, several dozen skills require an impossible or not just suboptimal but pointless fleet composition, while D-mod ships become the only meta or viable way of tackling endgame. Frigates get endless love, carriers are a waste of OP. There's lots of problems and none of the real ones are getting tackled, more or less it seems anything that is good is just getting beaten into the ground until no skill or hull mod selection makes any sense or looks interesting. That civilian grade hull skill? That'd be nice if I could field more than two kites without tipping it downward, considering that nearly anything already civilian grade is trash for combat to begin with and needs that full bonus. There's no reason it should be limited at all, from a lore or gameplay "balance" reason. Players shouldn't ever be railroaded or chided in a sandbox game for their choices, there should be options not restrictions.
Stop, dude. Stop. If you have problems with skills or hull mods that are powerful like it's somehow making content trivial, while players who are not abusing them are struggling because you have designed encounters meant to create frustration from a numerical angle rather than challenge the player in any way, maybe the whole skill tree should be brought to that level rather than just making every hull mod into a pointless marginal adjustment, and maybe the endgame needs to be toned back. There is so many options in this game but not a single time have I seen changes and gone "that makes that interesting," it's been a continual disappointment and aggravating cycle of "there goes another fun strategy in this single player game," while endgame encounters continue to be a crapshoot if you play "fairly."
Incentivize skill picks, do not penalize players for them. Incentivize hull mods, do not penalize players for them. There is no reason single player games like this should be so ruthlessly destroyed for the sake of imaginary "balance" while I can't think of a single set of notes outside the D-mod ship hull changes that brought anything new or interesting, just skewed and pidgeonholed players into one style with clear superiority, by way of making everything else crap one gimmick after another, irony seemingly lost in development.