Part of the reason navy converges to some monotone mean of gameplay is the refusal to play around with costs imo. Like why is everyone so adamant on destros costing identical mass when this doesn’t exist in any other sphere of the game besides ints and asfs? Same with cruisers? Same with t2 subs?
It’s just insanely depressing when the angle for balance goes towards the mean rather than finding a unique equilibrium for everyone by looking at variables beyond hp and dps and range. Ffs like nobody even touches any SPEED of destros they’re all the SAME.
Like if every faction was MANDATED to have 1 t2 tank, 1 amphib tank, and 1 flak and each costs 200 mass, then there isn’t really much variety you can do under these restrictions either. The units must be within some margin of say 5% effectiveness against its similar units.
UEF in particular boils my denim with this shit because gpg devs spoonfed a need to have a unique navy style at t2 stage but instead the meta is to make absolutely minimal quantities of coopers and hope u can just run into a similar mass frig into later destro spam player. It sucks. Cooper is treated as an inconvenience in UEF roster and everything would be made so much easier for the game if it didn’t exist and UEF could just not spend 33% of a destro to get their torps floating around on 50 hp. That’s ruining faction dynamics to make the game balanced, but it just is terrible balancing.