You don't get as much science/industry in the beginning due to starting planer. Your ships are costlier. And they are sub-par to deal with aggressive factions' ships early game. You got to be really picky with what you spend your I/S on or it is easy to get shut down. Granted, that's part of the game, but you cannot afford to make so many mistakes early. 

Mid-game, once again, because battles are so skewed to offence (most battles barely last 1 phase) that you can get away with making glass cannon hunters, but then again, that forces you to  constantly scout and be on your toes to match up to your foes. It is less punishing, but puniching nonetheless compared to other factions. 

Using a fleet taxi to do away with engines, you could make it a bit more easy on you to ensure your ships atleast can go toe to toe without worry during some encounters.

PangolinAdvisor wrote:

True, you can have fast ships with engine modules but that forces you to sacrifice a different module, like weapon, defence or other support - something that a defender doesn't have to do, giving them an advantage. And some factions have an easier time finding a free support module than others.

The need for sacrifice really makes sense from a story/realism/tactics perspective though. Travel should cost something.

Sublustris wrote:

How about we buff fleet accelerators tripple times (+3/+6/+9 for hyperium/antimatter/quadrinix), allow them back on support ships, but just disable stacking, so that only one accelerator ship is required, with more ships serving as backup in case of destruction?

I'm deeply offended by 5 ms riftborn fleets with hyperium engine.

And buff base movement speed without any engine for ALL hulls a bit, +2 maybe? I'm getting in this ridiculous situations, like having eco/sci behemoth attacked, and I face stupid choice of either allow it to be destroyed, or retreat with agonising 1 movement speed, so it takes 20+ turns to move it back to original location. Not sure what's worse.

Sounds great, but the accelerators wouldn't need that much ms gain, it could be a bit lower like +2/+5/+7 for hyperium/antimatter/quadrinix and giving all ships +2 ms would bring some reasonable mobility. Or something more absurd like creating a new type of ship just to give fleet acceleration.

I just wish someone from the dev team could give us at least a simple response about this balance patch, I'm getting less interested in playing ES2 with this snail mobility.

Sublustris wrote:

And buff base movement speed without any engine for ALL hulls a bit, +2 maybe? I'm getting in this ridiculous situations, like having eco/sci behemoth attacked, and I face stupid choice of either allow it to be destroyed, or retreat with agonising 1 movement speed, so it takes 20+ turns to move it back to original location. Not sure what's worse.

I'm of the opinion that engine modules shouldn't be mandatory. Something like this would be really nice. More movement point upgrades in the tech tree (from tech or eras) would also be nice.