Why is the community population declining?

[Blodo]

Have you ever had the pleasure of taking on a gunboat and a pirate transport in a renzu liner simultaneously? If you had, you'd know that liners are nowhere near as combat-capable as cruisers. Suggesting that these fill the void left by a lack of cruisers is simply false.

Well, gunboat + ptrans is just simply overpowering any transport, there's no denying that. But a transport shouldn't be as strong as to be able to take on both of those and have equal chances, this would mean that pirates are reduced to bringing fleets into any area they want to pirate successfully. We don't really want to encourage that type of behaviour.

Transports in the past were balanced mainly against pirating bombers, so a transport with a good loadout can actually reasonably take on a bomber pirate and win or drive him off if he has a good enough armour installed. Against the bigger things... cloaks work for now - until their escape value gets nerfed.

How would exactly would "spending cargo to harden transports" work though? We already have armours for hp boost at the cost of cargo. So now... we make a set of really strong transport turrets that take a lot of cargo space?

Solution: Make the game more friendly for newbies and indies via FLHook.

Any particular suggestions? Faction leaders being arseholes is not anything new really, especially when indies are concerned. Usually this kind of behaviour is undeserved, and I can see how it can deter many newbies. Then there is the other side of the coin... you don't want to give indies too big of a boost, since indie factions already enjoy the kind of lack of responsibility that lets them trample over faction diplomacy at will. At the moment it seems the best way for an indie to take on an official faction is by simply making an indie faction and getting people to join, which paradoxically can do more and is expected to be less by the community.

Ideally I'd have something to promote symbiosis in some way, but I'm at a loss for what that thing would be.