So I went and did some revamping and upgrades for some of my ships to balance out my fleets a little better.  I upgraded one class with several thrusters, intending for those ships to close with the enemy first and evade enemy fire, while my heavy hitters started pounding away.  However much to my horror, when I took my newly upgraded fleet into battle for the first time, my fast little ships that I planned on being evasive got slaughtered instantly before any of my other ships even got into range to start shooting.  I replayed the battle and slowed it down to start investigating what went wrong, and I discovered that the "Evasion %" rating for my ships with several thrusters was exactly the same as the evasion % for every other ship in my fleet (even my lumbering giant ships).  I know that once upon a time, using the thruster ships to evade enemy fire worked very well, because I used that tactic a lot when making my fleets.  I understand if the devs thought this was too powerful and nerfed it since the AI opponents are too stupid to use this tactic.  But was this an intentional nerf, or just an accidental bug?  If intentional that's fine, I will just cross thrusters off my list of useful ship components to use when designing ships.

Also, it would be nice if we could see all relevant ship combat information in the design screen.  You know, so when we are designing a ship we understand what we are designing actually does.  For example the "Evasion %" I referred to earlier:  the ONLY time you can see that stat is in the combat viewer, by selecting or highlighting individual ships.  Thus when you are designing a ship you have no idea what it's evasion % is going to be until you exit the designer and throw it into combat; that is a lot of wasted time when your design does not do what you thought it would do (such as putting thrusters on a ship thinking it would improve it's evasion chances).  Another thing in the designer that makes me sad is the ship role selector.  Once upon a time you could hover over the role selected in the designer and it would give you a description of that role; like escort role protects capital ships as first priority and support as second, attacks assault as first priority and interceptors as second, etc.  Now when you hover over the role description in design mode, it doesn't tell you crap.  You have to save the ship and exit the designer before you can see the tooltip that tells you what the selected role does.  Once again this is wasted time if the ship you just designed doesn't do what you actually wanted to make.

That's all for now.  Have a nice day !