General rebalance idea.

[Blodo]

As for fighter fights lasting up to 5-10 minutes depending on skills, that's exactly what I'm aiming for with original proposal - making them newbie friendly. The speed increase across the board will definitely make people who do not train more useful in a group fight. Combine that with more powerful then they're now, but also helluva more expensive to maintain capital ships

And don't get me wrong here - the basis of proposed rebalance is in making fighters newbie friendly, not in nerfing capital ships. Capital ships will actually become more combat efficient then they're now, to reflect their greatly increased maintenance costs. (like Govedo pointed out)

It is newbie friendly. There are a small handful of players that can use skill in the current balance to their own advantage, those players have their ups and downs in activity, but when they are active people just get this idea that it is somehow a problem that somebody else can kill them in a fighter and it takes work to be able to kill him back. Skill should be rewarded with kills, it's one of the last things that keeps players interested. The only issue with VHF fights right now is lag, bot trading and not enough trick shots.

That's also why I proposed a difference in death penalties in form of adjustments to "4 hour" rule in OP in addition to great difference in operating costs. Cheaper to operate and more fragile fighters will require way less time to "respawn". (2 hours vs 4 hours for Battleships and cruisers, or 3 hours for gunboats and transports. Numbers are just an example)

This is more of a rules question, not as much balance but I would agree with this particular change.

You can, basically, put someone like that in a capship, give him the "basic course", tell him to stick together and he.will.manage. Yes, he's still a noob, he still doesnt know many things, he will still do some stupid mistake if you won't babysit him in TeamSpeak.

The only reason for that is that you put your noobs in RM BS which is by far one of the most extreme ships on the server. Extreme in the fact that you can be lazy while flying it and still get results, you just tell your people to cruise up/rush enemy, close distance and fire all guns. This is not tactics or skill, this is just a simple absolute: close distance or die. But it's how the RM BS is balanced, and we can't really change that without screwing around with the model size - which I don't want to do. It takes a while to sink in for people that an RM BS without a cloak is not a cakewalk, that you need to actually fly that one in a very cautious way against other enemy caps, and if bombers are on the field you are basically relegated to support/damage sponging. But n00bs don't need to know that if they are in a large group of other caps that have a commander to lead them, that's why it is easy for them to fly RM BSes. But when they raid Texas alone, that's when it gets lulzy: they suicide on the Mississipi or get killed by a fleet of LSCs without doing any damage.

But then you say caps have a lower learning curve. Well... they really don't. Sure, the RM BS is at first sight easy to give to cannon fodder due to the way it is balanced, as is the Valor, the KNF BS, the Legate, and any other heavy BS. Now go apply the same tactic in a Lib Dread (which is arguably actually OP right now due to its arcs - and yet still fails unless you know how to fly a cap), a Bret BS, a Jormungand, etc. No, these are the caps that you need to fly smart from the very start, otherwise you fail badly. So I disagree with your statement about cap learning curves, learning to manage caps takes about as much time as learning fighters.

Best example: The.Joker who after his few weeks on the server had his BHG BC beaten by me in a Vidar in 1v1 without me losing bots... then over the next few months went to become one of the best gb/cruiser pilots on the entire server, so that I almost died to his Tridente while I was piloting a Bret dessie in another confrontation a few months later - and this was before turret steer. Cap skill is just as elusive as fighter skill, and demeaning cap pilots by saying it isn't is just kinda bad.

As for fighters learning curves specifically: flying fighters is not for the lazy. If it becomes like that though, it will be just boring because fighter fights will be predetermined by the amount of fighters turning up on the field, and that takes all fun away from the fight. Freelancer capfights are already pretty well dictated by how many caps can be fielded by each side due to the way capship game mechanics work, I really don't want to turn fighters balance into more of the same.

BUT - He doesnt need weeks of training in Connecticut to be able to do damage to enemy fighters equal to 20% of what PROs do. He doesn't need to keep visiting conn to maintain his skills. The difference between newbie and pro capital ships is way, waaaay lower then between newbie and pro fighter. The distance between those is just incomparable.

Not a good example. You go to connecticut, you find there the bored pvp whores of the server who spend their time there because they like the informal pvp setting. It's like wandering into a gladiator pit, of course everybody there will fly better than you, because the whole place is there for the purpose of constant pvp training/ego stroking/whatever. If newbies could just wander in and kill others by dumb luck because fighter pvp was dumbed down to the point where skill didn't really matter, it would no longer be fun for the pros, depopulate the place, and kill skill based fighting in FL. In other words artificially closing the gap between skill and no skill will mean people won't have anything to accomplish any more, which ruins the fun. This is something that basically shouldn't be allowed to happen.

Meanwhile newbies fight each others in fighters in NY quite a bit in pirates vs cops style fashion. Sure that some pvp whores could come in and skew that fight to hell, but when they don't the fight is just normal. In Rheinland the only reason you don't have fighters cruising around any more is because the RNC fly all the caps and the enemies are forced to take bombers with some cap support against them. So the end result is RNC just raid Liberty (because Hessians know how to counter them without fail due to tighter group), and depopulate Rheinland altogether Faction force composition and leadership in an area plays a much bigger role than people give it credit for. Induce your noobs to get battleships straight away and this is what they will do. Encourage them to get fighters, fly fighters yourself and show results... and they will learn fighters.

Why reduce/remove possibilities of teamwork (especially in capfights, where bot transfer is essential, and does not make things to last over 10 minutes) instead of making things go faster then they currently go? Making all ships deadlier through projectile speed increase (with corresponding tweaks in several cases, like with bombers, light vs heavy battleship balance, etc), with corresponding maintenance costs that reflect their combat efficiency (still, in non-linear way, I guess) is a good way to create environment where you can actually balance ships according to their class and role (and reduce/increase their deadliness based on their costs, Lore (Scylla is a great example of lore-friendly cruiser.) and other things)

Bot transfer is essentially an exploit. It makes groups into a single unit which you need to drain of all regens in order to place one kill - and then they all either die consecutively in short intervals, or someone runs to base to bring reloads and we start over. It makes gun kills in group fights a rare thing, and those people who know how to instakill other fighters are the ones who win the fights for their group. This is incredibly suboptimal IMO.

Projectile speed increase is not the way to go. As said above, it will dumb fights down. The only thing that fighters need is more high damage specialty weapon capability returned to them to make fights a bit more interesting (which I am working on). And removal of bot trading. Caps shouldn't trade bots either, then we can give repair ships a repair gun and balance the damn thing right, rather than the current cheese fest that it is whenever anyone fields a cruising repair ship with the 4k bots/bats that can always go to a nearest base for more reloads if he starts getting low. Seriously. I used this thing in Gamma raids, the amount of cheese you can accomplish with it is unreal.