Capital Ship changes

Small post here, I'm a semi regular player, mostly with AIs and with friends. But me and my friends all strongly dislike the new "crippled state" for capital ships. In our playing, it made all combat way, wayy too slow. It made capital ships feel vastly more powerful than really any basic ships, and deeply disrupted the entire balance and flow of the game. 

We are  not super high skilled in the game, I'd say we're like medium level players. We are not at all versed in the community or the overall meta, we just play by ourselves. So I could accept there are deeper systems at play here, and I haven't kept up with the communities posts about it. Just wanted to voice my own personal thoughts. 

I really like the new differentiation between Armour and Shields as separate health points. And I like the durability system too. And if part of the purpose of the new health systems was to make capital ships die less quickly, then I think those changes alone are plenty sufficient. The crippled state mechanic just feels really awkward to play with. It makes it very difficult to ever know what ships to target, because attacking capital ships feels basically pointless. They soak up so much damage, and then they get to just fly away for a minute, regen, and come back. And the overall flow of combat feels pretty terrible. 

The same with starbases. They just take so damn long to actually kill, that it makes every single planet siege feel so slow. It creates this weird feeling as a player where i feel disincentivized to actually attack those targets in a battle, but if I don't target them at all, then the enemy will almost certainly win. So it feels like my only option is to only ever fight when I have a massive advantage so I can completely blow through the doubled health bars of capital ships and starbases. 

Before this update, I loved how the pacing of Sins 2 combat was compared to sins 1. I was honestly worried it would become Too fast, but before this update, I felt like it was excellent. It felt faster than sins 1, but not rushed. Now, it feels the complete opposite end of the spectrum, and it takes absolutely forever to end a fight. I've basically stopped playing until the next update, where this system is hopefully either removed or reworked. 

I've also noticed that the AI behavior seemed to get way dumber after this update. I'm not sure what was changed about their behavior, the update only said "many AI improvements," but in our games we have observed the AI repeatedly sending large chunks of their fleet to random planets and then just sitting there, doing nothing, for nearly the entire game. And they will only move when their capital planet is being actively bombed, and even then they are so slow to respond. 

I suspect that the AI is having some kind of backlog of orders, where they get a series of missions that they have to complete in a specific order, and those missions do not at all adapt to the game scenario. Especially because this issue gets worse and worse as the game goes on, so the AI get's more and more backlogged in objectives. So at a point they become completely unresponsive to the actual game, and rarely ever move their ships, or even attack. 

I am not a programmer at all, that is entirely a subjective guess, based on their behavior. 

I'm sure the AI is not the primary focus of the game currently, I just wanted to point it out. It's another large factor that made the game experience worse for us after this update. 

Overall I still love the game, but I do want the crippled mechanic to either be vastly undertoned, to make combat speed back up, or for it to be removed entirely. It has had an exclusively negative impact on our gameplay experience so far. Which is a shame, because I think just the changes to the Armour and Durability would actually have an overall positive on the game. I think those do a great job of making larger ships feel stronger and more resilient. 

And personally I am really looking forward to some major AI improvements, whenever that is possible. I would assume things like that would come after the full Advent release (which I am SUPER excited for). 

These are just my personal thoughts as a medium-level player, and my experience playing with AIs and my friends. We all love the game, and I personally have been so impressed with all of the work so far into Sins 2. This specific update, for me, was just a bit of a miss,  or maybe an overcorrection. Hope this was helpful to anyone