Should I call it Discovery Restrictlancer now? Coz everything is so nerfed and restricted that It is becoming more and more tiresome to play.
I'm a Cap Main, and my opinion will kinda reflect that. Please Allow me to rant about everything that bothered me this patch.

:::Yet Another damn Cruiser Update NERF:::
-Cruisers were too OP before, I thought they had been nerfed enough in the previous update with the strafe punishing power core and guns speeds reduced. Now it’s even worse for the following reasons.

-Cruiser Engines are made up of paper.
-They will go BOOM even if people sneeze at it. This is worsened by whatever changes have been made to snubs. Sometimes the gun placement of Agincourt would allow it to hit components even when fighting face to face.

Power Core change
-The recharging shield mechanic that consumes power core is interesting. The line “switch all reserve power to weapon systems” makes much more sense now. I had good hopes when I heard of this, But in the current built I hate this mechanic for two main reasons.
1. how much impact it has and the absolute need to learn it.
I would have preferred it If learning the mechanic would give you an advantage, but it’s not mandatory and it is actually possible to fight without learning it. Wasn’t this how it was initially intended to be? I don’t remember.
But No, That’s not the case in the current built.
In the current version, without disabling the shield recharge (and being shot at) Cruiser Pulse Cannons can’t even Kill the shield of other cruisers in a one on one. So You absolutely have to learn this mechanic no matter how cumbersome it is. It sucks and forces player to a specific playstyle.
2. Why are only cruiser power cores affected by this?
Why don’t Battlecruisers and Battleships or any other ship require to “Switch Power to Weapons” to have better energy recharge?
--I think this mechanic should be much less punishing if not used and everyone should suffer this, if it exists, not just cruisers.

Cruiser Head and Tail Guns Thing.
I absolutely hate this restrictive feature that came with this update. The division of this Cruiser heavy and Cruiser Defense category leaves you with very little options on what you want to mount.

For Heavy hardpoints:-
-Missiles are quite unpredictable on cruisers in my experience. Many a times they will fail to lock on to target when I fly cruisers. This didn’t happen so often before.
-Light Mortar has very slight difference of 150m in range but much worse efficiency and very limited arc.
-the only good option is Tachyon Lance. No wonder why everyone goes for Code-Guns..

-Bretonians get special heavy gun which is basically old shards. It’s good. But I wish it was something new and more unique instead of a white painted shard.
-Cerberus Cruiser gun finally feels great. And atleast makes Donau a bit unique.

For Defense Guns:-
-Impacts have much higher efficiency to shield and hull compared to Shards and Storms, with similar projectile speed and Range. So it’s the best out of the three non-code options.
-It is even better than Mauler since it sucks at shield damage for some reason, so you have to use Mauler + Ion Blaster for best results which restricts them to heavier cruisers.
Even with that Mauler would give you just 50 more projectile speed for slightly worse anti hull efficiency. You’re better off mounting 2 Impacts lol. 2 Impacts will give you decent enough shield stripping power and best hull damage efficiency.

-So basically just forget everything and mount 2 tachyons and 2 impacts and you’re good. Maybe 1 tachyon and 1 missile if you really want to missilelancer. No need for variations. No diverse loadouts. This is all you need.
-I miss the old times with simpler mechanics before the very first major cruiser update. Was it so bad? Was this much radical changes needed?

:::The goddamn Rear facing Guns. ::::
I don’t understand this obsession with tail guns that devs have. First the Battlecruisers, now the Cruisers. Are you gonna do the same with Battleships when they get a component update? I can already see a lot of Battleship arcs NERFed to favor “sideways combat”.
Yeah, the cruiser defense guns can be and are supposed to be used for “sideways” combat, which is being favored now as compared to the previous chase and kite combat.

But it’s just that I fail to understand WHY would a space civilization design a class of ships to have their most efficient guns situated only to fire in the rear 180ish degrees. Why would it not have the guns rotate full 360 degrees.

Even when you look at the guns on their hardpoints and see how much open space they have. It feels there is no real reason why they would not rotate full 360 degrees. Who came up with this.

What’s even more funny that some cruisers like Dragon Cruiser and Liberty Siege Cruiser do have Forward Guns designed to work well against large capital ships. Earlier the Cumbersome Aiming which did put you at risk of eating mortars was highly rewarding if done correctly as these guns had high dps and efficiency. But now the rear guns are still much more efficient than these forward guns and you can dodge with full freedom while shooting. So I just end up using the rear guns against large targets which makes me wonder what’s the point of having Large Intimidating Forward guns

Why do Gunboats still have Forward Guns tho? Are they going to get converted to Rear guns in the future?
Is there going to be a variation of Liberty Siege Cruiser with rear facing main gun with much more efficiency?

:::Removal of Iconic Features and making each cap of same class feel more or less the same. :::
-This affects most of the caps, like all light battleships kinda feel the same except Core BS. You can have the same loadouts on all Battlecruisers, Light Cruisers, Heavy Cruisers and what not. I miss the times when the guns were situational and I had different set ups of the same ship to play different playstyles. Nowadays Ships of same class feel more or less the same.

-The Coalition “Hurricane” class Battlecruiser had it’s Iconic Forward gun removed. WHY. I just can’t look at the Coalition Battlecruiser the same way as I used to.
I first saw the Coalition Battlecruiser in the opening Intro cutscene of Vanilla Freelancer. To have that ship playable in Discovery Freelancer felt like a dream come true. And now after all these years you feel necessary to remove its Iconic Forward Guns? Why are you so keen to remove fun and iconic elements of the game.
You could have easily kept the forward guns and given two less heavies. And these forward guns would be destructible as the front power component thing blows up. Doesn’t seem like it would affect balance that much.
Oh wait. The Nomad Battlecruiser does have a forward-facing Battlecruiser Special gun that is destructible. So Nomad Battlecruiser can get special design but the Iconic Coalition Battlecruiser cannot? That’s not Fair.
Without the forward guns, the Hurricane doesn’t feel like Hurricane. May be you should just rename it to ‘Monsoon’ or ‘Rain’ or may be just ‘Wind’ or something.
-Every human Battlecruiser feels the same to fly basically. Not much difference.
Why can’t there be some variation.
Iconic ships such as This one should have it’s iconic features.

-I would even say that Triumphs should have a functional downward facing cannon like mentioned in the description.

:::Restrictive Battleship gameplay:::
-Yeah. Most of the Battleships have their all arcs restricted. This plus the Ship mass thing which makes it super tedious to maneuver, be it heavy or light. And ofcourse most of the turret rotation speed is slower than the sloths of that animated Zoo movie. All of which make me feel as if someone up there doesn't want people to play caps.
-And any fleet deciding to kite puts it at a major disadvantage. There is a push towards specific side to side combat for all caps. This sucks because, even if enemy has slightly more ships than you, you're gonna have a very hard time.

-Valor FWG was very very intimidating in the past. Getting too close and in front of a Valor would put you at a serious disadvantage. But now it is just a Heavy mortar with a bit more damage. I didn’t fly the Hessian Battleship as much before this patch, but I guess it’s more or less the same situation.
You can ignore these big mighty Forward Guns altogether and you won’t be missing anything much during battles.
I think using the FWGs should be more Rewarding considering the Cumbersome Aiming you have to do for it.

-I hear Battleships are going to have thursters and engine components in the next patch. Not sure how that’s going to turn out but it makes me wonder why can’t battleships mount Cruise Disruptors when they can literally mount everything else? Such Big flying fortresses with most heavy power core and hull hardpoints capable to mount the largest of guns, with cargo space enough to store heaviest of ammunition and somehow cannot equip a tiny little cruiser disruptor?


:::Whatever that was done to snubs:::
-I’m not sure what is going on. But ability to mount SNACs on light fighters is obnoxious. Snubs shield regeneration is quite fast and their guns deal significant damage to caps now. Even if you manage to hit them, you won’t kill them fast enough most of the time. They’ll just retreat and grow their shields back very quickly and bother your or go restock.
-Somehow fate of all fleet battles is decided by who has the better or more snubs.
-So basically, you buy big Capital ships that you dream of with all the tedious money grind, spend more money on guns, docking bays, cloaks and what not. Only to have swarms of shield-running snubs chew your engines off surprisingly effectively in every damn fleet battle. It sucks. It barely seems possible to do anything against even a small number of snubs. Shouldn’t snubs be afraid of getting near caps?
-Even light fighters are a threat now for caps which makes me laugh at my misery when fighting against them.
-Many of you might not agree with me but It’s my personal opinion that I preferred how things were before in terms of Snubs vs Caps.

:::Everything is so damn Expensive:::
-All guns, ammunition, regens and commodities are quite expensive now. POB supplies are much more expensive than it used to. Is it really necessary.

-I hate the fact that Jump drive batteries still cost 200,000 (20 million old money) and cloaks still cost 50,000 (5 million old money) Despite all the the restrictive JD and cloak nerfs.
-Moreover, the plugin that saved this ammo in your ship when you got destroyed is also disabled. So if you might potentially lose about 250,000 to 300,000 on a fully supplied capital ships which might compel you to just combat dock. Is it really necessary to punish players who fly capital ships?

-The last time I asked this question, someone answered by saying, It’s so that people would do trade/fly transports which would result in more pirates which would result in more lawfuls and so on.
But that doesn’t seem the end result considering how much the server population has fallen. People would just use the JDs to bare minimum or won’t bother to have ammo at all. No one wants to grind transportlancer just so they can afford losing 250,000+ everytime their Cap dies. You can try as much as you want, but if you’re gonna try to make people play to your specified way, more and more people gonna stop playing the game altogather.

-I suggest either bringing back that plugin that saved your ammunition when you died OR reduce the overall price of ammunition, atleast the JD and Cloak ammunition.

:::Omicron Theta Storyline.:::
-Whatever storyline made the Freeport 9 in Omicron Theta become Corsair base, I hate it.
-For whatever reason Outcasts decided to abandon the battle after a victory to focus on Sigmas, It makes zero sense to me. Okay the sigma thing was important for Outcasts, but I think The Maltese Navy would have first capitalized their victory, ceased Corsair resources and then left to sigmas or whatever. Everytime I see ‘Corsair base’ written in front of “Freeport 9” I am reminded that all the big event and the awesome battles and victory over the Freeport 9 was ultimately pointless. It has left a bad taste and I barely participate in events anymore.

:::Summary:::
-The game has become very restrictive. It forces player to play in a very specific playstyle. It takes the fun out of the gameplay. Until the devs realize this we’re gonna have more and more people leaving.
I’m sticking around barely becoz of the nostalgia factor I have with this game and becoz of the friends I made here. Sooner or later I’m gonna get tired of all of these radical changes every patch and just play Halo or something with my friends idk.

-In my opinion the development focus should be more on how to make all ships more fun instead of restrictive, over-complicated and cumbersome.
I want to be able to play this game becoz it is fun and not becoz I can’t get over my nostalgia or have a crippling fascination to torture myself.

-Thank you for listening. My apologies If I was offensive in anyway.

Think is, Devs are not caring about opinions, they keep saying "is for balance puporses" ... next patch is gonna be only need 1 bomber or even worse, 1 fighter to kill a capital ship
I belive we return back into WW II Era, where your capship is the Bismark and the bombers/fighters were those outdated and obsolete Swordfish MK II aircrafts,

They break Solaris and Solaris Gattling (there is no difference now)

They break any ship and make them have less guns (and without even analyze it) why a damn Goverment and Military would make his ship have so low amount of guns, some of them like valor having only 2 secondaries below ...
or chose wrong arcs or so, ridiculous at most ... It's been a headache such changes, plus the replacement of heavies and primaries, the ultimate weapon the impressed foward gun, reduced range and damage (and changed slot number) such rewarding shot was amazing when you did something ...

They break on missiles, Missiles even do wrong damage, not do any damage or just ... they just went to not even tracking

They break on Flaks (Damn, if you don't aim well in a specific range of a ordnance your flak just fail to work, old flaks where better because they fuse on proximity with a 90% of chance of evading, while bigger and heavier ordnance can resist the flaks power, now not, only on max range a small deviation, you need be timely perfect if not your flak will do anything ...

I am gonna tell what will happen, they will put components, and when a ship enter battle, even NPCs will aim that component and you will die defenseless (it don't take too much to actually do that)

The game isn't restrictive, just barely playable, by dumbies of admins and devs (with respect but it is true) that even wanna take care of the fun, cap battles were fun and having bombers make it more interesting, now in a battleship vs battleship i have passed slightly more than 30 damn minutes trying to kill a battleship because hey! we got out of energy xD
we ended firing our secondaries and that is all ... after that time, well, i just decide stop shooting and letting me get killed, i got BORED
Before i will end that thing in some 5 or 10 minutes ...

As a Cap player on majority of SDF Ships (Macross, Excalibur, Midoriko and Nanosinx) trust me, it is undesirable ... (and i got a cap player due my damn ping on game, since i can't be good enough on snubs and sometimes do something on bombers but still i belive those are boring too, then send a cap to show raw power will make them run)

I say nice addition the "Mass" thing and reaction, but other i say is really too messy for bad ideas to bring it

Ah, and let's not talk about recharge, where recharges are so damn slow for something really stupid, who belive a nice idea bring what you want? 50 fighters capacitors to recharge a battleship core?

Battleship cores should be the peak of evolution, we passed from 240,000 through 385,000 u/s with a core of 7,000,000 to 9,000,000 into something like a 2M Core and recharges of a 1/5th of the amount of before...

But while that changes could be acceptable, they instead increase power usage or keep the power usage of any capital gun ... and reduced damage, increased a bit the refire ...

90% of caps cannot hold fire 2 basic primaries, ships like Mako can't hold fire 1 primary turret, 1 turret, it is SO BORING even wait till i get some energy to just use a heavy and shoot at him ...

And yes, dunno which idea would be having a SLOOOOOWW AS SNAIL Turning turret on Battlecrusiers as the idea is keep enemy on your back xD

Nah, for it even a transport has more recharge than a capital ship actually

---

I agree, it has not been a good update season for cap players. I main Battleships/dreadnoughts but more and more I find myself not really logging them as outside fleet combat or PVE. there is nothing I can do. We have been tossed around on the scaling these last two updates. Before 5.0 caps could dish out a beating to smaller if one did not fly smart. Now playing a cap is more of a feeling and RP thing then truly fun. I think this is why most people don't log their bigger ships unless a event/fight is going on. Beacuse the likely hood that you are going to run into someone who can easily outmaneuver you its almost a certainty. Hell any snub with a cruse disrupter can stop me dead in my tracks. There is nothing you can do about it as even cap cloaking has but made irrelevant. There is no worse feeling in a video game then feeling useless, and without any same class of ship around... I do feel useless.

So I spend my freelancer days playing transports, sitting on my phone waiting for my ship to make it to point B so I can hit the next button.

If Caps get nerfed again or the smaller ship get more tools to easily take me out I may just quite playing altogether, and just log for friends, events, and for RPing on the forms. The only way I can think to made the Devs change is treat them like I would a big company. Stop playing the game and hope as player actively falls so they start changing things.

Hi, another capital player here to whine

I actually really like how cruisers amd BCs can feel, but god damn the engines are so fragile. If you do so much as glare at a cruiser engine it explodes. Also, the only decent forward weapons being the Tachyon and its side-grades does also suck. I use a hybrid mortar purely for the purpose of rebellion. All the rear-facing guns feel kind of boring and similar to me. Maulers and Ions have potential quirks, but they all feel kind of the same. You have;

- Impact
- Impact but fast
- Impact with spread
- Impact with less shield damage
- The Cruiser Ion, "Im not like other girls..."

I think cruisers right now have the potential to be a lot of fun, they just need some more tuning. Making Mortars, Torps, Solaris, and the Battlerazor better will be a great step, and adding a new back weapon or 2 for some flavor wouldnt be a miss either (I personally like the idea of Solaris Gatlings being able to be mounted in both defensive and heavy slots), and finally engines need to have more then stormtrooper armor on them.

My Opinion: Modern Cruisers need some work, but I think they have a ton of potential. I saw Honour Wolf's video, and the weapon changes made me VERY happy. Im happy go see us some new fun and weird toys to play around with and hope there is more to come.




Snubs. They exsist. Despite my mediocre effort, I still suck with them. As such, I will keep this brief. Snubs seem to kind of kill everything right now. Vandal GBs can put a dent into them, until the Vandal GBs feature on the next episode of "Will it blend?" as 300 snubs decide to start blastin'. Overall, I just think capital ships ought to get a tiny bit more counter play to them, as opposed to just falling over and dying when 2 VHFs focus them.

And I understand Levennas argument that snubs arent balanced even now because they cant take on the bigger ships 1 on 1. A bomber will almost always lose a 1v1 to any combat ship bigger then it. But the issue is counterplay imo. If you get 2 or 3 snubs on you as a Cruiser or BC, even with allied caps, you are fucked. Its joever. As a snub you can just kind of, run away from non-snub threats.

My opinion: Snubs are fun right now, I will admit, its a good time. Still, evidently its frustrating to be able to do absolutely nothing as 2 snubs utterly obliterate you flying a capital ship. I also think bombers could use a tiny bit more personality. I just think that Capital vs. Snub gameplay should be a bit more interesting then "if you dont have good snubs you just kind of lose automatically"




Its late for me and I am tired of typing. And I am getting more and more incoherent in my thoughts.

TL;DR is, I like things right now, I think they just need some tuning and spice before they can be really good and satisfying.

I agree with most

Cruiser engines feel super weak its like Cruiser survivability same as Gunboats

Cruiser Heavy and Defence turrets are a bit meh feature, Because of it Cruisers feel like Battlecruisers but faster, more fragile
Tbh, cruisers should go back to Primary/Heavy slot only then turn defence turrets to Heavy weapon
it can be easily adjusted, let players choose what kind of loadout they want to have or what kind of playstyle they want

one thing @Haste doing badly is forcing ships to play one playstyle
Defence turrets are too restricting atm

Bring back 2-4 Heavy slot cruisers and remove defence turrets then rebalance gun stats

In my opinion Gunboats are just in bad position, group of snubs dominate the field easily while actual ships that supposed to protect the fleet cant even defend themselves

Currently Gunboats rely on instakilling snubs with Vandals+Mine combo, Razors also somewhat work but only if its dueling a snub or 2 snubs

Gunboats shouldve been main escort ships for fleet, best area denials against fighter/bombers, their primary guns are absolute dog shit
GB Primaries should get about 1300ms proj speed with 600 Range

Also i agree that removal of forward guns from Coalition BC is super bad idea, Things like these exist for one reason, Variety
BCs feel same

Battleships affects the outcome of fleet fight a lot especially one side has more battleships
If one side starting to chase other fleet, they will be under big pressure and disadvantage
It mostly about whoever is Heavier = Wins
Light ships should have more speed and maneuvers than Heavies because Heavy ships usually have better firepower, better powercore, similar maneuvers with Light, more hitpoints better area of denial power
Like what? How do you think Light ship gonna win this?
Light ships have to rely on keeping distance but its impossible when they got similar speed/maneuvers as Heavy

For snubs
I feel like they are fine except they scale better than any other ship which results in massive snub wall of death, Sure flaks some what work but it delays the inevitable

GBs cant scale like snubs, because of it GBs need better weaponary so they can finally defend the fleet

:I'll update if i wrote something wrong, its indeed challenging with Phone

most of the points raised here already are/will be addressed on the next update. cruiser engines, gun variety is all improved.

---

I agree with all. It made me give up playing caps altogether when I was playing, and even now when I'm coming back slowly. As said before, nothing to add. I wish to play caps again properly. [well, not that I've been even good at PVP in general but still]

(don't worry, I'm planning to correctly come back on the forums tomorrow, just wanted to say that I agree again and that I gave up on playing caps altogether except for only RP)

---

As someone who is a recent addition to the developer team, I appreciate the honest feedback and at least providing some positives before the negatives. I wanted to make a reply here, as a player first and developer second. With this in mind, please know that I am not speaking on behalf of the development team, or anyone in it, and these are my opinions alone.

I started this game in fighters, and would like to think I have become one of the better snub players on the server in the ~15 months I've been a part of this community. I have enjoyed 5.1 much more so than 5.0, for a variety of reasons. I enjoy the idea that fighters can actually DO something to capital ships in a fleet fight scenario. In 5.0, a single solaris cruiser (see Antonio's videos) or a single competent Battlecruiser player (see Haste during the DTR sieges) made interacting with capital ships as a snub player borderline impossible, outside of stacking 5+ (or more) "Ace" players on bombers with hellfire rocket pods. This would cause a massive disconnect on a fleet level between snub players and capital players, and basically split the fight into two separate battles in a lot of cases.

One of the main goals of patch 5.1 was to increase parity between fighter/bombers and capital ships, hence the changes that were made. I think, to a large degree, that has been a success. I am not much of a capital ship player, I will admit, and that makes me subject to my own biases. But, the balance team knew that this focus on interclass balance was not going to be perfect on the first try, and we hope that in the upcoming patch cycles, we can bring balance even more in line than it is currently.

Since 5.1 has released, the balance team and playtesters have done a large amount of work on improving the interclass balance, especially on the side of cruisers, which got hit the hardest in terms of power level, on top of adding new mechanics to learn. I would like to think that in the upcoming patch, some of the larger issues that you have raised here have been addressed, not just by the balance team (admittedly, the majority of them being snub-focused players) but by our playtesters, many of which are capital ship players themselves. I am not going to go into what specific changes have been made to balance in this post, as that will be coming down the line.

I have played gunboats, cruisers, and battlecruisers on the current patch, and have some videos of them on my YouTube, so I am not speaking entirely from ignorance. And yes, the new mechanics are more challenging to learn and are going to take time to get right from a development perspective. In my opinion, adding depth to ship classes is a good thing, provided that they are still reasonable to learn and understand. I think that the new cruiser mechanics have added some more complexity and character to the class itself, without them being a massive barrier to entry. You're welcome to disagree with me there, as I know some people don't agree with that take.

Keep in mind, also, that the players who are "snub mains" typically have better mechanics than their capital ship player counterparts, given the high skill floor that fighters require to achieve proficiency with them (no offense cap players). It is natural, and also inevitable, that those players would quickly dominate in a world where capital ships are actually both approachable and killable by fighters, which has simply not existed the same way in previous patches. I think the idea of "snub stacks being OP", which is rhetoric that has been prevalent since 5.1's release, is misleading in the sense that those snub players have to, in some form or fashion, be able to pilot and coordinate in snubs effectively in order to dominate in fleet fights. For those of you who think this way, I encourage you to fly a fighter on live and see if it's a OP as you think it is. I would go out on a limb and say you MIGHT back down on that front, ever so slightly. The balance and playtest team have taken steps to improve this inter-class balance and we hope, that with time, we can get Discovery to a point where you can fly any combat ship class you want and feel effective, and that a large group of one ship class isn't overpowering compared to the other classes. We want mixed compositions to feel the best, and I think we are really close to getting there, if not there already.

I hope this didn't come off as some sort of "elitist" snub player rant. Again, I'm replying to this with my "player hat" on and these opinions are mine and mine alone. As a member of the development team, we are positive for the upcoming patch and can only hope that the community can remain positive too. There's also a lot of exciting features coming in the next patch, so stay tuned. If anyone has questions, concerns, or wants to voice their opinion on the state of balance or the game at large, they're free to DM me on Discord, and I would be happy to have a conversation. As always, we appreciate your feedback and we only hope to improve the game for all involved.