SD’s Cruiser Tweak
OK so. Cruisers always seemed a bit crappy to me. The problem is they are presented as "jack of all trades" sort of ship, when there is no demand for that in Stellaris. You just make a ship that is good at what you need it to be good at and that’s rarely going to be the Cruiser. If you need big guns, you get a Battleship. If you need high tracking, you get a Destroyer. If you need high Evasion/Speed, you use Corvettes. Rarely one says "I need a ship that doesn’t have good evasion, can’t mount large guns, and has only so-so tracking."
So, I’ve made a tweak. This seems more relevant for 2.0, where I find the distances involved tend to become a huge problem later on. So I’ve made the Cruisers fast, and upped their evasion a bit. Cruisers are just a little bit slower than Corvettes now. You put a pair of advanced afterburners on them and they are just about as fast as Corvettes with a single adv afterburner and have an evasion just high enough it’ll occasionally save it from some damage.
I find this works especially nicely with my favourite ship mod, "Realistic Ships" which I think makes Cruisers even more silly. Well now they gain a niche as a interceptor you can pair with Corvette fleets.
Now the problem 🙂 It doesn’t seem you can just replace one ship type, you need to replace them ALL. You can *ADD* ship types, but not *CHANGE* ship types. So .. I’ve just had to replace the entire 00_ship_types.txt file. Bleh. Well, this means that this won’t be incompatible with mods that tweak the base ship types. But, mods that ADD ship types this should still work fine with. I’m using it with Realistic Ships as I’ve said above and it seems to work fine.
So basically, base speed is 150 (from 120), acceleration is 0.32 (from 0.2) and evasion is 0.20 (from 0.10).
