Light fighter balance

[Jonathan_Archer_nx01]

I only tested light fighters from all 4 houses:


Liberator - the best one. Excellent maneuverability, small hitbox. I owned Sabres with it, it works as it should.

Hussar - slightly worse but still good.

Wyrm - worse than liberator but still fine.

Phantom - totally underpowered piece of crap that flies like a brick.

Liberiator :

Did Liberty lose their technicals after the Patriot and Starflyer ?
Lower powerplant to respect the turn speed. In addition, the liberty weapons use a lot of power... so it makes this ship one of the weakest but faster than most of others.

That is plain wrong. Hornvipers are much less energy effecient than Vengeances despite having lower refire rate

I would hardly say bombers are 'ok' - they're currently the most overpowered class of ship in the game. A bomber can take out anything up to cruiser sized on it's own, and can take out most VHF's depending on what bomber you're flying.

I counldn't agree more with this statement. Some clans are just all bombers, they fly across Sirius, rape and own everything. But they're afraid of losing their power so they'll be whining here everytime they see a post like this.

Bombers have way too much armor. So much that a light fighter with standard equipment(2x something that bites, 2x shielbuster) will inflict little to no damage to them, NONE!


Just look what they were in Starlancer. Fighter cover gone? They're hit and explode into huge fireball. Ka-boom

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDKUhuTYR1I

[Muleo]

Heh the thing with bombers is that, a bomber fight is 'accelerated'.

What I mean by this is.
If a crappy fighter pilot encounters a good fighter pilot (if there are no mines/torps/mini involved) the fight lasts quite a long time. Because although the good fighter is better, he still has to take his time killing the noob.

Now if a crappy fighter pilot encounters a good bomber pilot, it usually results in a very quick insta death.
Hence the reason bombers are so good at killing less able pilots.

However, if a bomber comes across an experienced fighter pilot, the bomber is usually screwed. As long as the fighter pilot doesn't just joust 24/7 (which is what noobs do, and which is their downfall) he can simply avoid all supernova/torps and easily take out a bomber.

The bomber does not kill all other ships (soloing a cruiser is extremely, extremely rare), but if the other pilot is crap, and the bomber pilot is good, it ends up in a very very quick fight indeed, which is why so many people think the bomber is overpowered.

[Armageddon]

My serious point on LF's is that they are supposed to be extremely manouverable but lack weapons power to take down heavy ships, they are also supposed to be lightly armoured so i would suggest.

For all lose about 1000 armour
In return they get a faster turning speed that can fly rings around the enemy. (VHF, Bomber) but no so much that the can evade every shot. By having slightly less strafe for more turn rate it means they have to dodge bullets by stopping firing, which makes them inadequate at jousting. I believe that LF's should be more based around a dogfighting role, evading shots and doing the most damage getting behind the enemy.

The VHF has heavy firepower capable of taking on larger craft (Mini Razor), and is much more capable in a head on attack with an enemy. (i do not view this as unbalanced as if the VHF pilot knows what he is doing he can kill the LF using heavy weapons)

Slightly offtopic: It also occurs to me that the HF class are just weaker VHF's make them the inbetween role.

[Jinx]

the vanilla light fighters placed them where they ought to be. - its the MK2 light fighters that mess up the scale.

in the 1.0 singleplayer - it was a step upwards from a hawk to a falcon. - more armour, more firepower but slightly less manouverable. - from that to the eagle which was superior to both, but also 5 times as expensive.

long time ago, disco introduced the LF mk2. - the problem with those is that they have more armour and a higher weaponclass along with a better shield than heavy fighters. - ( a decission i cannot really grasp - but there we go )

in vanilla 1.0 - even the nomad light fighter, while being very agile only fired weapons doing around 300 damage at a slow projectile speed. - now we have them fire nomad lasers at well over 1000 damage. - and not only that fighter, but many others were improved, too.

its a bit of a spiral - fighters are being improved, untill other classes are improved to counter them... which causes the light fighters to be improved again - and so on. at some time, there are unique designs.... like the splistream hacker LF. - it has a weaponry like a heavy fighter or the nomad light fighter which has a weaponry like a VHF.

strangely enough... the VHFs were not improved at the same rate as the light fighters were. - the titan is mostly original ( when it was scaled to ships like the barracuda and light variant of the BHG ships )

i m not saying to improve the VHFs - but from what i see, the light fighters have gained much much more than ANY other shipclass. - imagine such a change to the very heavies. -

think of the titan - same agility ( maybe slightly less - but just as much as the patroit looses to the libertator ) - but 3 times the armour, 4 times the powercore and - for alll that matters, cause we only have lvl 10 weapons - add 4 more lvl10 weapons to double its weaponpower.

that is what light fighters gained to 1.0 LFs. -

imo - light fighter mk2 are all too strong, not cause the shipclass is too strong as such, but cause they were scaled up separately from the other ships. ingame, they are fine - and a LF mk1 is utter crap - but improving light fighter mk2 more? - i m not too fond of it... if anything, i d rather nerf the top ones down to the worse ones - get them in line with maybe the scimitar... all of them. buffing them up to nomad LF level will just cause problems.

we had an argument about dogfights taking too long ( mostly due to dodging ) - and funnily enough - a threat about how unfair it is to spam mines. - and how cheap missiles are. - but as an average pilot, i simply don t hit the current light fighters with a gun... and as a BHG, i m blessed with 750ms guns - i wonder how ... lets say the farmer alliance does with 600 ms guns at a 3.03 rate ( vulture ). - sure there are some pros out there that can hit anything - but the average pilot will more probably have a rather boring life - or spam mines / missiles.

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Shipdesigns made for DiscoveryGC

[Armageddon]

I agree with jinx on this one, i would prefer to see class 8/7 weapons on all mk II LF, but they regain that evading capability that has been lost while trying to balance them. LF's should be able to dodge most of the shots, but those that hit should really count.

Maybe a new line of CD weapons to balance that like a 1/2 power Mini Razor or similar specifically for police forces. Which also does a CD with half the effectiveness of a Train.

The main problem i see that there are too many maxed out fighters in the game now (there used to be 3), which has led to all LF's needing stronger weapons ect. Personally i think for proper balance a lot of nerfing may have to occur to a lot of ships to get back to vanilla style gameplay which we are trying to keep to.

A way that works on other mods is different engine speeds for different ship classes but that has been shot down already so...

[mjolnir]

If you want to talk about bombers go somewhere else, thank you.
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Armageddon I don't really get what you want. Only have a few "maxed out" fighters like in vanilla (Eagle, Titan, Sabre) well guess what everyone will fly those 3 then. ;)

Most LFs actually can dodge the fire as they want. Some using turning - Arwing, Tigershark, some using strafing - Wyrm. Some with both - Hussar, Liberator.



The one proposed thing was to give LFs faster reverse thrust speed - say 50. I disappeared somewhere in the process so I'll throw it at Igiss in the balance thread again.

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Igiss says: Martin, you give them a finger, they bite off your arm.

[Armageddon]

for example on another server i played the LF could go at 150 in reverse, but had weaker weapons (class 7/8) and very weaker shielding and armour. i think the best LF had 2000 armour 1/6th that of the top VHF. They were balanced because if both pilots were of equal skill the LF was nigh impossible to hit while the LF took ages to kill the VHF due to weaker weaponry. But if you went on a VHF and hopped straight into an LF you were buggered as an LF required a completely different flying style to a VHF. Just like here hopping from VHF to bomber.

a glancing blow from an HF would drop shields on an LF by 75% on a single hit. 4 hits on an LF you were done for but if you knew how to use one you outclassed the VHF by keeping on thier rear and pounding at them with your weapons.

[mjolnir]

for example on another server i played the LF could go at 150 in reverse, but had weaker weapons (class 7/8) and very weaker shielding and armour. i think the best LF had 2000 armour 1/6th that of the top VHF. They were balanced because if both pilots were of equal skill the LF was nigh impossible to hit while the LF took ages to kill the VHF due to weaker weaponry.

That's the problem, they should be agile, but it should still be possible to hit them. Quite hard to balance them in such a narrow area.
If it becomes truly impossible to hit them, like it's now with Arrow (even 1vs1) I would not call that for balanced.

But if you went on a VHF and hopped straight into an LF you were buggered as an LF required a completely different flying style to a VHF. Just like here hopping from VHF to bomber.

It's quite different here as well, but yes increased reverse would make it even more different.

a glancing blow from an HF would drop shields on an LF by 75% on a single hit. 4 hits on an LF you were done for but if you knew how to use one you outclassed the VHF by keeping on thier rear and pounding at them with your weapons.

Well I don't see much difference here. LFs have 5400 shield, so at most it takes 3 hits from a VHF to down it.

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Igiss says: Martin, you give them a finger, they bite off your arm.

[El Nino]

Tried the Scmitar, based on this thread for my GC, (perhaps the griffin would be more suitable, but i tried it and it sucks).

Very nice pice of kit, traders paid me 3M tax without a fight (that's three traders each 1M) Just by taking one look at me, they knew I mean buissines. So I had to fight some npcs. I like it's handling, it turns sharp but not to sharp so you couldn't aim. Strafe's well it feels right.

The other LF i've flown Griffin, fails in comparison. Perhaps High standards of the Eagle, make you expect more, but the ship itself feels more like a heavy fighter than a light fighter.

Oh yes, the patriot, great little craft. The Liberator though is overpowered, something need's to be nerfed on it.


Has anyone asked themselves why are the Heavy Fighters so poor? They should be the mainstray of everything, a balancing point between LF and VHF and instead they are just in a diffrent league all toggether.

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[Fletcher]

Oh yes, the patriot, great little craft. The Liberator though is overpowered, something need's to be nerfed on it.

The Liberator needs a powerplant nerf, I fly one, I slapped on 2 Magma Hammer III's and 2 Magma Hammer IV's. When firing I lose about 3-5% total power per shot, coupled with regeneration rate, it takes ages to lose all of its power.

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"Oh chuffing blimey, another day, another person being whiney!"
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