It seems that way, but on further inspection I noticed the Flak Battery and Flak Artillery are now medium slot weapons, and like before they're amped-up point defense. Swarm missiles are also medium slot weapons now, and their evasion stat is
200% so they're practically impossible to intercept with point defense, making them useful for the first time. Kinetic Batteries and Kinetic Artillery are still large slot weapons, so they can be mounted on destroyers, cruisers, and battleships just like before, and their power requirements were halved to reflect the fact that they're 1) kinetic and 2) not Extra Large weapons. The Extra Large variants are the Mega and Giga Cannons, which along with the Lance and Arc Emitter variants all require 100/120 power and have other restrictions (limited firing arc in front of the ship, only one mount possible per ship, battleships only). I thought we'd be seeing new weapons with the addition of Extra Large slots, but they just repurposed half of the Large-only weapons from before and gated them to battleships. It's uninspired at least, I was hoping for some serious game-changing, high-risk high-reward superweapons. I tend to forego the XL weapons in favor of two L weapons in the same place when I have kinetics, but with lasers it might be better to go with a lance. I wonder if they'll add an XL missile, or if I just haven't seen it. Some kind of scaled-up swarm missile wouldn't be bad, especially if it could fire at multiple targets at once (like arc emitters were supposed to).
So, with all that said, the only real change in flexibility is for torpedoes assuming you have access to flak. Torpedoes can only be mounted on corvettes and cruisers, but because they have a special slot now that means you can put Proton/Neutron Torpedoes on Corvettes (
) and cruisers aren't just pint-sized battleships. I'd say cruisers went from easily ignored stepping stones to the most adaptable ship type available. They also tend to sit in front of battleships but behind corvettes and destroyers, and they can mount point defense without sacrificing much offensive power making them a decent screen for your heavy hitting battleships if your corvette swarm dies. They're a jack-of-all-trades ship that's big enough to be relevant throughout the game, and because they're the biggest ship that gets torpedoes they can do things now that battleships can't.
