So due to the changes made to engines, the classic super-speed ship build is no longer possible. This is actually kind of nice in some ways, because those of us who don't go in for making podracers instead of attack ships can actually kind of keep up.

However, this makes for some weirdness. Firstly, a lot of the time it feels like my ships are very slow, with no real way to speed them up. After a while that just gets annoying because everything takes so long to get anywhere. Secondly, the balancing on some of the engines seems a little off. The Vodyani quest engine "Sainted Speed" does provide a small bonus over the standard engine, and maybe you could even argue it stands up to the Hyperium engine, but it bugs me that where speed scaling was actually a pretty fun and major mechanic that the Vodyani's special engine provided some silly functionality with, "Sainted Speed" is really just a tacked on health boost now. I'm generally better off piling on Support engines to speed up the whole fleet, since fleets are only as fast as their slowest ship, and as such there is no reason to use both normal engines and Fleet engines because Support engines don't provide enough speed to overcome the normal engines.

I think if "Sainted Speed" had a larger speed bonus or served as an improved Fleet engine, I would be more inclined to use it. In addition, the bonus provided by Fleet engines on Support ships is too small to justify using them, since the ship that has the module is itself too slow to keep up with the fleet, and has to chew up an additional Support slot for its own engines, just to give the fleet a +1 movement speed bonus. I don't want to go back to the days of stacking speed bonuses and crossing the galaxy in one glorious leap, but it was at least nice that with full investment in speed, you could reach a point where your ships never had to use starship lanes because of how fast they were. Now there doesn't seem to be any speed to invest in in the first place because all the engines are the same speed, and all of the flat speed boosting Empire Improvements have been removed.

"Sainted Speed" has no resource cost, but also provides the same speed as a normal engine. From the name alone I expect it to provide at least a small speed boost.

That's part of my problem with the new system. Everything seems to be the same speed. There is no engine balancing because there is nothing to balance; As far as I can tell, the only engine type that's really game changing is the upgraded Fleet engine at the end of the Science tech tree, which gives +3 movement for the whole fleet and therefore can actually be useful, since it replaces the need for engines on every other ship in the fleet.

I actually rather dislike the Horatio ships limited capacity to do much of anything, even on Support ships, as well as the fact that the Riftborn's wormhole abilities aren't always validated because the last couple maps I've played turned out not to have wormholes after I dumped several turns into researching them.

My whole problem with the new system is that while I can accept Movement Speed is a powerful thing that needs to be balanced, as it stands it feels homogeneous. Even through research, I can't really modify speed until the late game with Wormholes and the upgraded Fleet engine, because the previous Fleet engine module for Support ships takes up space for a normal engine on the Support ship, so the fleet turns out slower anyways because the Support ship is itself dragging down the speed of the fleet; it's no different than if I had put a single, very weak engine on the Support ship.

I'll keep experimenting and see if I learn to like it, but as it stands the Fleet engine module at least seems like a poor option.