Xveers wrote:The two drive technologies (warp drive and wormhole) HAVE been removed in total from the game. Their old functionality is not in place anymore. What is in the game now are natural wormholes (strictly fixed A-B links), gateways (artificial links that connect any active gateway to all other gateways. L-Gates are on their own network), and Jump Drives (which were in the game from the start, but have changed from a high-speed long-range warp drive to a special "Hop" drive that takes you directly from A to B, but gives your fleet a temporary malus once they've jumped for 100 days).
Oh I didn't mean that the later versions were identical.
Jump drives are the replacement for wormhole drives. And I thought Psi Drives (which I've never used) were like warp drives, but it looks like I'm actually wrong about that. And with the latest DLC, I think you can build gates.
As for why they got removed, it was the same reason most games only have one FTL system. They just couldn't balance it defensively with all three drive systems, simply because Warp and Wormhole drives allowed someone to just cut right past any crustal defenses and strike right at their home station.
Their reasoning that it's impossible to balance the drives is spurious: SOTS has not one, not two, not three... but five different drives. Ok ok, two of them were variations on the warp drives (which was a type of its own), but they actually put a lot of thought into balancing the drives with strengths and weaknesses and it worked brilliantly.
I think that the original drive implementations were one of the (fortunately) few things that they didn't really think through completely.
The truth is that they didn't really think out the implications of drive ranges versus empire size. And the wormhole drive was just broken as hell because it really had no limitations as long as there was a wormhole generator within jump range. I get that they didn't want to really balance the types and provide actual limitations, as well as not wanting interdiction systems for all three (well two, really), but that's how it's done. They just didn't do it.
And under the earlier rules you were restricted as to the type and strength of your defensive stations AND your orbital yards were their own weak little shipyard pinata. There was no reason NOT to go for a Jacksonian strike right to the homeworld and then mop things up at leisure. And after the first few times it happens, it's just not fun.
Exactly.
That said, I think the current implementation is just fine. Through 50% of the game it's a lot like Starfire but without warp points.