When will the ship variants come?
TL;DRVariants won't appear in Crusader or Arena Commander until all base models are completed, since building base models first yields reference knowledge that makes variants more efficient.
The current philosophy is to build all of the base models first and then take the knowledge that we glean from building all the base models and apply that to putting together the variants. So do not expect to see the variants in Crusader or Arena Commander until you see all the base models completed.
Yeah, there's also a big reason for that, because, like you guys got to see over the holiday livestream with the MISC ships, the more base models that we do get built for any single manufacturer, the better reference guides that we have, the better and more efficiently we can get all of this stuff built up. Whereas just trying to cram it all in at once, especially if there aren't that many ships of that size, if there aren't that many ships from that manufacturer, it is absolutely putting the cart before the horse and we just lose time on that.
Which is one reason why you're seeing so much work on the Aegis ships, because we have this totally finished toolkit, we have all the reference work. It's very easy for the folks doing those ships to pull it together and get things like the Vanguard and the Sabre.
They've gotten really good at that whole profile of ships.