Cloud Imperium Games has released a new developer diary video for Star Citizen. The new video focuses on ship customization.
With the new customization options the development studio hopes to provide more varied combat. For the varients the developers have picked different loadouts to promote different gameplay.
The default loadouts that comes with every ship are average loadouts that are good at everything equally. The varients allow players to customize these loadouts by changing statistics, such as ballistics versus energy weapon statistics or missile rack statistics.
With the varients players are able to play the game with the ships. However, they are not massive changes as they don't change the handling of the ship. As such the ships are the exact same to fly compared to the default ones.
In future updates the game developer hopes to tweak the color system by making guilds able to change the color of their entire fleet with several color hex codes as to allow players to represent their guild.