After playing a few game, this feels like one step forward, two steps back.
Tridention is almost useless now.
The strength of persist is due to Knights having high movement and high damage. They can rush and pick off weak units in succession.
Tridention lost Escape and got Persist instead. With their low damage is effectively means at best Tridention is an archer with 1.5x damage, because you can follow up a kill with another shot. Meanwhile Tridention has become extremely vulnerable because it now remains in the open and is extremely weak.
The Puffer is cool, but it suffers from all ships effectively being knights against it, and thus being extremely vulnerable compared to Catapults. Bombers do not have this issue due to having 2 Def. Attrition of puffers is extreme.
Aquarion units in general are extremely vulnerable, and without sea defense they're all one-shot-kill, except for the Jelly which barely scratches attackers (3 damage, really?...