Are ships too tough?

[Blodo]

I remember when we had a completely opposite discussion during 4.84 where people complained about getting instakilled too easily. Remember, that was the age of missiles/mines on fighters instakilling other people with one hit, the age of bombers with SN that could hit anything on your screen with a fast hand and a good eye, and the age of gunboat missiles which would instakill fighters or at least blow off all their equipment in one hit. Now after the instakill ability was removed, several years later we have people screaming to bring back faster fights like in 4.84... but I guess that is predictable.

Below is my position on this as member of the balancing team:

As far as balancing goes there is nothing wrong with the bot/bat count of fighters at the moment. So I doubt it will be changed.

But lets go along with this thread. The main issues people are experiencing with fighters right now is server lag or the tactics that people employ (one person being targetted by a group = that person will dodge fire without firing back = shield runner :@@@@@ and i complain on forums). Neither can be influenced by the dev team. If the bot count was halved, the side effect of said halving would be that the mini razor and mines would become even stronger than now due to faster bot drainage. While hitting with guns wouldn't really improve anyway (most razor/mine hits are luck or lag and only some skill). What WOULD help is increasing the dps of fighter level 8 and 9 guns (and possibly missiles as well) instead so that they drain targets faster.

However there is another problem, mainly that none of these "across the board" fixes are easy to successfully implement and balance. I am not talking about the ini editing itself, but the main problem that is on our minds right now is that people mix and match ships and guns to such an extent that it is nigh impossible to balance guns properly. Changing bots/bats number would fall into that category. And we still have the gunboats with new gunboat turning and the turret split to test exhaustively. So until that problem is solved I doubt there will be any changes to fighters other than small fine tuning.