freelancer is 1st person shooter in space - it is not a space sim.
it is closer to games like "forsaken" or "descent 3" - than to games like "freespace 2" or "x-wing vs. tie-fighter"
in freelancer, you don t quite have the feeling of a ship - you waggle around left and right, up and down - dodging is equipvalent to those ppl jumping non stop in 1st person shooters.
in my opinion ( and i had suggested that more than a year ago )
in general: E-kill should reset to transit speed.
Light fighters should be:
- similar to now, same strafing, lower transit speed, higher thrust speed, MUCH higher thrust drain ( basicly specific LF thrusters )
- the thruster should have no effect on the energy core ( like now )
HF to VHF / SHF should be:
- much slower strafing ( sluggish - like 10 times slower than now )
- 120 transit speed, same thruster as we have them now
Bombers should be:
- no strafing ( or maybe like 30 times worse than now - just for the autodocking )
- 100 transit speed
- 250 thrust speed - same drain as now - while the bomber is faster than 100 ( transit ) - similar to cruise drain - the powercore drains just as much as the core regenerates ( meaning, while you thrust - you don t regenerate power ) also like LF - VERY short thrust only ( like 10 seconds continuous )
- double the armour
- nerf the turning agility
the idea behind that was:
LF are superagile - they have the most powerful thrust burst - but also the shortest one
VHF are pretty good in all respects - but outturned by LF
bombers are sluggish and heavy - but they can make charge runs - hurling their torpedos with high speed at their targets - due to their slow turning and no strafing, they drop to fighters - they don t need the dodging vs. caps much, cause they fire novas from far far away - if they re good at it ( nova speed + 250 = very large range )
agility in freelancer is the extreme turning - and the rediculous strafing around.
That actually sounds good.
A complete rewriting of current situation, however, will take a lot of time, but this seems to be worth it.
As for now, faster guns for fighters, turning all bombers into likes of fafnir/barghest in size and agility context, nerfing/removing armors, bots and bats seem to be easiest.
Speaking of blocking bot/bat trade, that's a nice idea if it could be applied to specific ships only, so that repair ships could still work.
I've kinda suggested this some time ago: remove bots/bats from battleships and cruisers completely, or at least just bots, but leave them for carriers. That way, carriers would actually support a fleet. Coupled with less bots/bats on snubs, that would really be noticable. But yes, it leaves repair ship out in the open, for it's supposed to repair big bad ships. Which are, actually, not really supposed to be repaired outside of shipyards, which can be helped with removal of bots. Oh well. Maybe leave only bats for non-carrier caps, then? That way repair ships could still help with their shields, but hull damage would stay. Realistic and prevents all this non-fun things. Hull should be buffed appropriately, of course.
But when you think of it, it's not exactly related to the problem we're talking about. Oh well.