Nuclear mine balance

[Haste]

You'll find that furiously spamming 90 CDs at someone will discourage them from using mines as often. In addition, it'll disallow them doing just about any maneuvering other than boxing as it'll cut them out of slides in an instant and give you an opportunity to do free gun damage.

I don't think nukes can ever be a problem while we have ridiculous mosquito ammo counts tbh.

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[Saronsen]

Instantly killing Light Fighters and preventing them from ever existing in snubfights sure is a problem.

And considering Forward nuking exists, where in the dropper pops their own nuke with their own CD, spamming CDs is not exactly viable.

You're a little out of the loop Haste.

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[Haste]

Instantly killing Light Fighters and preventing them from ever existing in snubfights sure is a problem.

And considering Forward nuking exists, where in the dropper pops their own nuke with their own CD, spamming CDs is not exactly viable.

You're a little out of the loop Haste.

"Forward nuking" isn't new. The term might be. Spamming CDs at people makes dropping nukes very tricky. Doing it while your own shields are down, theirs are not and they're running straight at you with a mine ready is obviously not a very good plan, however.

I'm not as out of the loop as you might think.

The point I was making is that 90 CDs make for much more atrocious snub gameplay than 50 nukes ever could. They're something of a consequence of CM buffs following the numerous buffs to all types of missiles, however, which is unfortunate as it makes changing things very difficult. Letting people just turn CMs on auto and cruise out of every encounter isn't great.

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[Reeves]

Nukes can't be "fixed" without causing at least 3 other problems. Leave things the way they are. A timer is probably the most reasonable idea instead of trying to nerf it in response to people using them effectively. Other than that, I don't see an actual problem with nukes themselves.

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[Oggdo Bogdo]

If you really want to fix LFs, you need to do something about their shield. There's no point in doing anything about any sort of ordinance because any form of guaranteed damage on the hull will kill it rather effortlessly, regardless of whether it's 1-shot, 2-shot or 3-shot. And yes, forward nukes are guaranteed damage. Besides, missiles do a much better job at killing LFs when they're running.

HFs are not for duelling, the nuclear mine is precisely what gives VHF the advantage against HFs. Otherwise, everyone will just fly HFs since they scale much better in group fights, and if VHFs lose the duelling edge against them, HFs will just take over the VHF role of being an all-rounder.

The real problem with nukes is that they make for some absurd combos on SHFs that instakill ships up to VHFs (and then some) with pretty much 0 skill, and that they let bombers trade down and beat just about any snub in a duel with forward nuke. Killing VHFs with emp + snac bombers using nukes is actually pretty easy.

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[Its Raisu]

Flying LF's and HF's means you have the uncondicional advantage of using speed + good guns and most of the times decent powercore. Only skill actually needed in flying them around is to evade mines. If you nerf mines to the point you can't instakill them with 1 mine you'll just create (another) unbalanced setup that everyone will use so VHF's the masterclass will probably get yeeted by the time. I'm just using common sense here, no calculus and other stuff.
Pro tip: You can insta LF's with a snac!

This would do better in its own thread specifically for LFs, but since iv said my opinion on nukes and that remains unchanged at the moment, here goes...

I kind of feel like "the unconditional advantage of using speed" is missed when flying an LF considering that their ability to move is identical to HFs and VHFs and they only have a real "advantage" in their ability to turn.

Just as an example using one of the slowest snubs (without going into bombers) and a :

• Collector has a max angular speed of 62.6 -- 180 degree turn in 2.88 seconds.
  
• Surveyor has a speed of 79.45, Liberator 84.03 -- 2.27 and 2.14 seconds respectively.
  
  These times are actually a bit faster than what is really experienced due to acceleration time to reach that max angular speed.
  Surveyor and Collector reach their maxes somewhat around the same time. Liberator takes a little bit longer.
  

This is roughly a difference of... about 3/5ths of a second for a 180 degree turn, less for shorter turns. Add to that the: More Hull (even before Armor), Heavier FIrepower if the shots land, Stronger shield, not even considering mines here yet and its quite an uphill battle to be honest... even if you are trying to avoid jousting.

You just about have to constantly CD your target to really make use of that turning advantage since you lack a real speed advantage.

[Baphomet]

I thank you for all of your imput dear FL community

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[Backo]

Nerf Nuclear Mine range to 20-25. Screamers got solved by nerfing their range without touching damage, I don't see a reason why the same couldn't work for nuclear mines.

EDIT to elaborate:
-Nerfing damage would just make people have to forward nuke more as it will just take more nukes to drain all hull, but punish actually accurate nuking or nukes without use of CD, which in my humble opinion are currently balanced OK, considering making someone eat your nuke without a CD usually doesn't work that easy unless you ram yourself into them.
-Nerfing cooldown between nuclear mines would just make the nukes be more sparse but still exist so instead of a forward nuke every turn you would see them every 2, 4, whatever the timer requires turns.
-The only possible downside to nerfing the nuke range is that it would be harder to self-nuke someone spamming nukes as he runs away from you, but that also means it would be harder to deny blue messages in a groupfight as it wouldn't be as easy to just nonstop spam nuclear mines as you run away on your last 20% hp, so I don't know if that's bad at all.
-Nerfing the number of nuclear mines probably won't stop forward nukes from being effective. If anything I usually use less than 10 nuclear mines per fight and quite often have only 20-30 on board so that I can stock up to 50 after a fight and pay with them for my repairs. Meaning people who are good with the mines would still be just as efficient at using the forward nuke tactic and abusing the 64m 17K damage.
-Decreased range would also make nuke trapping and forward nuking light fighters or heavy fighters much harder as they would need to be much closer to the mine in order to take the deadly damage.

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[Foxglove]

Spam removed.

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[Fancy.Deepwater]

Nukes were alright few years ago. You only got full damage with direct hit, and it gradually dropped to 0 at the edge of the explosion effect zone.
I don't know when, how or why, but this vanilla feature was removed for mine hull damage (still in place for shield damage).
Now mines deal only max damage.