Why Stress, Tractors. and Ion just don't matter

Two words: Large Ships

As several excellent point analysis players have found, it appears that large ships get a discount for being large.  The thought is that they are difficult to fly around the map, its easy to hit an obstacle, and they're easier to get in arc due to size.  All true

However... they are gaining far more than they lose.

As they are right now, large ships posses more of the most desirable qualities (see this post ).  And they are very resistant to the most dominant control elements in the game: tractors don't barrel roll them, ions need to double up, and stress is often ignored by either token passing, token generation, focus banking, or rerolls given by other mechanics.  This takes all three of the most powerful ways to negate a good ship and makes them either less effective or ineffective against the most effective ships.

It seems instead of a points discount that large ships should be getting a points penalty.  Then we get into their options.  So many of the large ships have a massive list of upgrade slots.  Look at Ghost, Jumpmasters, YTs, Shuttles, etc... they really can put almost any upgrade on and the interaction between carefully chosen upgrades gives exponential points efficiency to these "fat" builds.

There used to be solid counters against these (other than other "fat" ships), but many of these are fading away.  Swarms don't have the durability to weather an alpha, especially against 2 or 3 large based ships.  PWTs and TLTs are negating the ability of arc dodgers to make the big ships pay for size and bulk.  And finally, the big ships are more point efficient and forgiving of mistakes.  You can roll poorly or bump and lose actions and not lose the ship with the big guys.  There's also another clever way to make large ships even more lethal: debris.  Debris, while not great to fly over or land on, is much more forgiving to big ships and if built right, its much more manageable effects can either be lessened or ignored by large ships.

Stress, ion, and tractors are a great way to neuter a lethal ace or a crazy good ship... unless its large... and with the strong amount of very deadly turreted large ships out there, its very hard to get past those matches in competitive play... especially since large ships are given a point incentive.

That being said, small ships with ridiculous amounts of red dice are making a comeback, and since large ships are typically less able to dodge (though not always, hi brobots), maybe there is a little balance coming back to the top table meta