Charge lances weren't changed, the turret nerf and defoliator changes were mentioned.
Unless I am missing something charge lances range went from 37 to 30 and its long range accuracy dropped by 5%. Generally speaking all turrets damage/penetration were decreased by up 50% and the cost to rearm them was also increased by at least 50% and I saw nothing mentioning this when 1.1 was available. The only thin I saw wrt turrets was "placing turrets now show their min and max range" and a range change for the mini turret a few patches later.
The normal way to defeat that is to go out and fight it directly using any of a wide variety of tactics that are available. If you want to stay home and do it from the base, the mortars provide that option; it's an option with huge upsides (zero risk, zero skill required) which are matched by its downsides (large economic cost).
No that is the way you want us to play, you are railroading the game into one way of playing either players like it or not. You brought the mortars one step closer to being a false choice, if you persist in that path you will eradicate the only non-tedious way to deal with problem causers. Its like the traps and most turrets they are so bloody devastating from an economic POV that no one in their right mind will use them.
For example already in 1.0 you could remove the uranium slug turret from the game (at merciless difficulty ) that no one competent at the game would bitch about it because they could not use them anyway. With the huge turret nerf the only one that can still be used at merciless is the mini-turret, I am looking forward to the next change that will effectively remove them from the game.
Merciless should be about stronger and smarter raids instead of effectively removing parts of the game and making it as tedious and annoying as possible.
Basically this was a strategy that was very OP before, thus wiping away the rest of the game's strategic depth by providing the same dull solution to problems over and over. Now it's not as OP (I hope), which means those other strategies are optimal in many cases.
I never used mortars to destroy ships before, I only started using them when 1.1 came out due to ships health reduction that made mortars an economically viable option. I used a brutally effective method (that still works today) but it is also brutally tedious to put in practice. I loved low health ships because mortars became an option therefore making the game less tedious for me.
We're still in that transitional phase where people are doing the same old strategy as before and being shocked that the results aren't the same, but as people adjust to the new situation I hope we'll see richer metagame of different strategies appear besides "mortar it to death every time".
Like I said before I never used mortars against ships before so that really does not apply to me.
If the game is too difficult overall, a good option is simply to lower the difficulty level to whatever level you enjoy, which may not the level that is specifically and explicitly designed to be unfairly difficult and brutal.
My comments are not related with difficulty, they are made from a strategy POV. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who figured out how to survive naked brutality on a map that can reach -76 Celsius. I want extreme challenge but not at the expense of strategic depth that on top of it also makes it more tedious.