There are a lot of balance issues involved. For starters, simply halving the bats/bots will cripple low level ships, especially in singleplayer where NPC's have deadly sharp aim and accidentally brushing some debris will halve your hull almost instantly. Also, if you remove or reduce universal armour, Vanilla ships become one-hit-killable with explosives again while custom ships do not. I agree fighters should die quicker but I don't agree the solution is to weaken them as they are already pretty well balanced against capships in my opinion.
Something I said quite a while ago: fast projectile weapons are needed. To compensate insane maneuverability of fighters and lag factor. Not much damage so they'll be pretty useless against something bigger.
A bit off-topic may be, but I would like to see more variety in weapons as regards their effectiveness against various type of ships. EMP torps, fast projectile anti-fighter weapons, things like that... That'll also bring some fun in trying various weapon sets and result in interesting combinations. This can possibly solve problems with balance, but should be done careful at as they can also screw it up big time.
My longest fighter battle was in tau-23. Took me 2 full hours to take down 2 cylon raiders. TOO LONG.
Capships got it quite right - their recharges are enough for a single shield refill and max 2 hull refills. n fighters, it's more in both cases (not to mention if someone is handing fresh bots :angry:
Not getting rid of refills, not getting rid of universal armor... gee, that's tough.
Quick fight = large damage to a weak target.
Improve fihter guns more? nah... it would mean capships being owned yet again.
Loos klike that whatever gets done, it'll cause a chain reaction.
But maybe... Maybe as Treewyrm said - making ALL fighter guns get an insane, nearly instant-hit projectile speed. Won't make a differencewith capships (Which SHOULD have slower projectile speeds) and it'll accelerate fighter combat - fewer shots missed = more damage done.
My solution: just cut batts/bots for fighters down by fifty percent. Also, a cut in the Gunboat batts/botts would be necessary to compensate, but it means we can leave the rest of the Capital Ships as-is, and reduce the gunboat-whoring (they are still overpowered, three or four shouldn't be able to kill a Battleship). It would make fighter endurance against Capitals slightly lower, but a good pilot should be able to dodge the shot anyway...:dry:
Quote:Quick comment - we thought that Panzer was the Leader, Swift. -Agmen
I would suggest a damage improvement in basic energy weapons. As Yngen pointed out in the first post, fighter hull is much higher in Discovery than it is in vanilla. If hull is improved by a factor of 2.6 shouldn't basic weapon damage also be increased some amount to balance? First off let me define a "basic energy weapon", this excludes: shield killers (they're all powerful enough already), specialist weapons (antimatter cannon, inferno, mini razor) and obviously explosives (missiles, torps, mines etc.) This leaves all the regular energy weapons say from level 8 up, as that's what the majority of highest level fighters use.
Take for instance my personal favourite vanilla weapon, the Kraken Type 2.
In vanilla, it does 586 hull and 293 shield damage.
In Discovery, this is nerfed to 556 hull and 278 shield damage. Why? If the original gun was too powerful for capships, shouldn't capships have been made stronger, not fighters weaker? Nerfing fighters any amount more will solve nothing. It will only increase capship use.
' Wrote:Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe Yngen advocated a change in shield batteries, just nanobots.
Yngen?
Yes you are correct.
However I think there's a game limitation that says nanobots and batteries must be the same value. We need a modder to confirm or deny that.
I would prefer sheild bats to remain the same because it makes for better physics. Shields are energy fields that are powered by the fighters reactor core. I like the fact that sheilds can be boosted multiple times because it reflects power management in a fighter (anyone ever play the original X-Wing games where you could transfer weapons energy to your sheilds and vice versa?) However my nostalgia for that long lost game shouldn't cloud my judgement, if necessary I would be willing to accept half the sheild batteries if it reduces the nanobots at the same time as a compromise.
I still think its the nanobots that make fighter duels so heinous. If you are in the average VHF and you only have 23 nanos you can still survive the average gunboat, cruiser or Battleship to a reasonable extent. New, average, low skilled pilots should be taught/trained by doing time in a well established faction. There are plenty of factions out there that are more than willing to teach you everything they know about fighter combat. The only requisite is patience, practice and a reasonably fast internet connection.
I also don't want to eliminate evasive maneuvers with uber-fast fighter guns. It would take away some of the fighter's identity in being a finesse ship. 700 or 750 m/s is PLENTY fast for any gun to deal good accuracy out with the current speed of ships. If you make guns faster then the fighters have to fly faster and strafe harder (big balance mess all over again.)
agree.....fighting with fighters is so LONG, painful, and BORING...that's not call a dogfight (killing a Battleship is much quicker than killing a fighter..WTF? i can see all those movies battleships are always the last ship that stand on the battlefields...)
' Wrote:I also don't want to eliminate evasive maneuvers with uber-fast fighter guns. It would take away some of the fighter's identity in being a finesse ship. 700 or 750 m/s is PLENTY fast for any gun to deal good accuracy out with the current speed of ships. If you make guns faster then the fighters have to fly faster and strafe harder (big balance mess all over again.)
It's not to eliminate evasive maneuvers, it's to compensate lag factor, improper hitbox, etc. You are still pretty much as maneuverable as you were as the change doesn't affect ship stats. I used to irritate players around flying on a nomad fighter, but I admit - it's just stupid. Just randomly twitching mouse aim and mashing strafe and thruster buttons, watching tons of ships chasing a small fighter and they could do absolutely nothing. A duel lasting three hours and a half straight isn't really about piloting skills, it's more of endurance than anything. I fell asleep (BULLDOGNK remembers that) recording TBH vs RM battle near the end. Takes way too bloody long in my opinion. Not really because of the bats/bots but more like because only so few few shots actually hit the target making the rest just fancy fireworks and no more, "shoot-the-laggy-pixel-dot" kind of battles. IMHO.
And what's that problem with exaggerating everything? Where did I say "instantaneous" weapons? Where did I say "uber-fast"? Nowhere. I only said "fast projectile weapos", that's all. Don't exaggerate it to proportions of your nightmares, these things can be tested and made optimal and reasonable with careful approach. Add new line of weapons, test them, and no need to review all fighters/bombers in game for bats/bots balance.
hehe...Thats one thing that works to the advantage of outcast, we have the most powerful hull buster, even surpassing most codiesd for damage/second. I recall a game in my past, Tachyon, which your shield was a lot more powerful than on FL. I think I heard somewhere that shield batteries have about half the power recharge than In vanilla? IDK, Ill go resaerch Tachyon and see if I can come up with anything....
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