I agree that the human stations are lacking. The jump one is useless and the second one is generally useless. In a few rare cases you can start building the harvester station when a battle starts and it will suck up enough scrap and RPs to make it worthwhile. But this is pretty rare since it costs 1200 more scrap than the basic station with the same stats mostly.
I kind of like the limited marines. You have to consider that a successful takeover by a Cloudsave or whatever can kill a 10,000 cost enemy ship AND give YOU a 10k ship also. This is a pretty big swing and not one that you should reasonably expect to do over and over again with the same ship, right?
If you want to replentish, sell the ship and remake it. You will lose about 8k in the process but still come out pretty far ahead. You can also use the MarineCloner which is new, but it takes forever to do anything (10 min for 60 dudes), and it will slow down your fleet and probably get killed. But it's an option.
I agreed at first that repair should not cost RPs. However, you ARE repairing remotely and doing so pretty quickly, so I can kind of see their point. I think limiting repairs to friendly nodes could work, or just reducing the cost...which they DID just recently by 20%.
Yes the unlockable ships are terrible unfortunately. I had suggested that Vision unlock a BSE Sauron huge vision big station, and speed unlock a large 40 speed, 4 gun, 8 PD turbo ship. You need something that makes sense lategame which is the only time you would get them. I'd change the Visio to Unlockable as it could be really fun to play with early game. Ditto with the current fast ship.
Weapon ranges are tricky. There used to be more variety but they were nerfed. Simply put, this game cannot allow huge varience in ranges. The long range weapon would always win. With even a weak 1k range gun, one could plink away at stations indefinitely and kill them with zero risk. Massed firepower from a fleet of 6-10 medium ships even would wipe out enemies as they approach.
Every weapon in the game currently with shorter range SUCKS. No experienced player anywhere I would bet ever rushes Vulcans, Flak Cannons, or pumps Projectile Cannons. Even missiles range has been nerfed such that it is not a great option.
Unlike Harbinger, the game can be won or lost by a single decisive victory. It is not a series of hundreds of battles like an RPG. Early on, the Unknown had a orange ball gun that did big damage at like 1k range. It would literally blow away your early ships before they could even see what was shooting at them! It had to get nerfed because of its immense power.
