Well, the complaints on the forum were mostly on balance:
- make life easier for rookies
- nerf things that are clearly OP
So they did part of the second and perhaps a bit of the first one.
You not taking advantage of it doesn’t make it a wonderful design choice. Someone challenged me to find what was the maximum distance a soldier could travel in one turn (which was a fun exercise): 301 tiles (Too much speed makes defense difficult - #12 by pantolomin). Of course nobody does that, but don’t tell me it’s fair. With the nerf it will go down to 201 or something like that which is still very honorable (Armadillo moves 28 tiles for comparison).
Haven’t seen anybody, but I can understand why it is nerfed. 50% was huge.
Yes, this one was a shocker. Didn’t see it coming.