Well, to be fair, the Eagle has always been the bog standard cruiser. The reason it doesn't "feel strong" is probably more perception than reality but there has been some definite power creep with the new Cruisers and they kind of just passed the Eagle by. With the proposed changes, it's going to win flux wars a bit better and while it's not fast by any stretch, it can at least disengage better than some of its peers. As Greivous69 has said many times, it's probably one of the "safest" Cruisers out there by a comfortable margin, at least for cost.
I think Alex is right in envisioning the standard Eagle as the via media for Cruisers and I don't blame him. Something has to be sort of the plum line for Cruisers (and perhaps the rest of the game) and the Eagle just fits into that "good-not-great" spot. If anything, the the additional flux places it more fully into the Mid-Line M.O. of having generous flux stats for its generalist options.
It's a completely agreeable stance by Alex. Especially since Starsector is a single-player game, it makes sense for it to have its 'mooks'. But as you mentioned, new cruisers set a precedent by having a strong niche in addition to being released generally good. As you correctly picked up, my point was that this opens an avenue for faction variants to be rare, but tiered-up versions of their vanilla selves, designed to double down on their tactical niches. There's a great precedent for this with
faction variants, notably with Phalcon. This doesn't mean that all vanilla hulls need an upgraded faction variant, many already do feel premium by themselves and deserve to, e.g. Aurora, Champion.
I would like to shout out the other Suggestions thread I've recently joined in. There's perhaps not a clear space for 'bad' hulls besides the 'good' ones and the 'great' ones, which makes the 'good' ones feel... bad. The 'bad' tier has been somewhat filled by rogue variants of civilian ships and heavily damaged combat regulars, but fielding those by the player barely feels right in the early-game, never later. In the thread I'm talking about, Hiruma Kai suggested that 'good' and 'great' ships are perhaps too readily available to the player in the early-game through markets. Is there perhaps a space for 'good' ships (and obviously the 'great', too), like the discussed vanilla Eagle, to be harder to get?
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