Are ESF's Fighters or Helicopters?

This game isn't for you, please leave

You know, I'm going to ask...if yout hink it should require multiple ESFs working in unison to be a threat against ground targets. Why should it not be the same thing for infantry to take out ESFs? AFter all it is free to spawn as infantry....you can get as many rockets and ammo as you want for free. There is typically at least 2 or more AA turrets that cover every inch of sky in the game on some continents.

Then of course you have tanks...which require none of those things to be effective. Plus if they are being pulled down to such a level then the balance to that would be giving them even more speed and or reducing their cost to pull. Hey I'm open to ideas but you would have to find a balanced away of doing things. Maxs/Ground vehicles/Aircraft are all more powerful than infantry in a fight for the simple reason....they cost something to acquire and more time to get places.

The problem with PS2 is that the devs, in their infinite wisdom, decided to put so many control points out side where tanks and infantry can spam at them. To add to that there isn't any other objective for the vehicles other than farm infantry. Once the vehicle on vehicle fight is over, they have to do something. And then they simply didn't finish the resource system that governs how you acquire vehicles.

Another real problem is that every continent is a 3 way fight. In PS1 3 way fights didn't happen all that often. Really it was generally a problem on the continent of Cyssor and that was generally only at low pop times when people would go looking for fights. MOST fights were between one empire or another NC/TR, TR/VS, VS/NC. So you actually had a better chance of flanking or pushing down another side of the lattice because one flank of your empire didn't have a whole another zerg belonging to another empire on it. couple that with the fact there was 11 continents and you see maybe two to three 'zergy' fights with lots of smaller skirmishes around for those people who enjoyed it. The game handled all these things with far more finess and skill then this game.

But perhaps I'm getting off topic...either way...asking for such a harsh change to ESF in a game where two guys with repair guns can out repair the damage one ESF can do to a tank sitting still not fighting back with out also changing a whole bunch more of the game is just a disaster. It would require a ground up change...and this game doesn't have that much blood left in it to go through such a thing if you ask me.

its "light helicopter", while Liberator heavy armored "helicopter" and it depends on your loadout - you can go with AA and fuel tanks so you become Fighter, or you can go AI with PODS so you becomes INFANTRY FARMER.

They are just machines that fly move through the air thanks to Tinkerbell's magical powder

Looks like the Air nights are not happy about someone calling out how problematic ESF's are interms of design & how that messes with the main roles(A2A fighter with surgical strike A2G abilities).

I do. I play Skyguard and deter the flying Harrasers.

Actually they are far weaker than both, at least if you compare with the more primitive planet called earth
Not even here do we fighters that will fly as slow as about 220km/h, even helis are faster.

Just add him to ignore list like i did - his posts will never show up for you then.

Air KNIGHT? Hrmmmm....well here ya go. Classic example of someone simply projecting their belief on me with no evidence. I've spent over two years in this game doing just about everything. I have one Auraxed only ONE weapon on the scythe...and I only did that about two months ago. I'm about 50 kills off on another and I've been there for the better part of a month. I'm no skyknight. Fact is...unless you just got in an ESF yesterday...you can prolly shoot me down if you get in behind me at any point I'm in the sky. I only take to the sky when I think I will afford my team a positive change. (enemy air has control...I will attempt to help wrestle it back for my empire. Enemy tanks have eliminated our empire's tanks....let me get my hornets and give them something to think about other then farming my infantry.) That is how i think...that is how I play. I play for the guys around me and I feel like a successful player when something I do helps the rest of my team win. That is how I extract pleasure from this game.

I'm not displeased with the idea of changing the way they work. But it's not as easy as you make it seem. Remember....G2A rockets are designed to deal with ESF's as they work NOW. Skyguards, AA maxs are as well. Even the A2A weapons are designed that way. Hell even the level design and the speed of the ESF. I mean ESF's now travel in the mid hundred KPH area and above when they afterburn. So if you are going to make it so they can't hover (which I don't really mind, it would take getting used to but it would be manageable and likely fun) their speed is going to have to get looked at and tweaked. Being they don't hover around areas any more g2a Missles and flak may need more damage as there is going to be far less time seeing their target then they do now. Their effectiveness would be even less!

Ultimately even if I felt this would be a positive change, the amount of work that would be required means we would be retooling the whole game. And would it even bring about an effective enough or positive change to the game? To be honest, I would rather they solve the issue with me spawning 400 meters in the sky and falling to my death when I change spawn locations before they change ESFs. Or improve their netcode.

Scr1n me and you don't see eye to eye on things here. This is true....but the post I quoted has pretty much summed up one of the reasons I don't really put much stock in your words. You simply attempted to render any point I've made invalid by throwing a label on me well being completely ignorant about how I actually play this game. I was simply attempting to engage you in a conversation...and you are trying to start an argument.

I love it how using a phase "sky night" or "air night" gets a rise like this. Its somewhat scary aswell.


Also, I directed that air night comment to the first comment I quoted, not towards you. I accidentally posted before I wrote your response.


Which was going to be about how Base design combined with vehicle primary roles not being flushed out enough causes issues.

If this is true I apologize. I've worked 36 straight hours and the post was four hours old. So I simply responded. But yea...I always called them Air nerds... But a sky knight to me is a guy who just spends all his time in the air and thinks he is a far better player than everyone.

It's just not my play style. I take offense to it and I'm honest about that.

Its just frustrating how the airgame is screwed up due to ESF's.

If I remember correct acronym "ESF" was brought by players, not by devs.

Just in case if you want to cling to words.

Not sure who said it first, but the Devs definitely refer to the ESFs as "Empire Specific Fighters". For instance, RadarX here:

That post was from November 19, 2012, pretty much the day before the game was officially released.

Maybe players came up with the term during alpha or beta testing... but at any rate the Devs have agreed that "ESF" means "Empire Specific Fighter".

Is the esf a fighter or chopper?
Are Liberators Gunships or Bombers?
Galaxies, are they transports or Borg Cubes?
Are MBTs armored units or AA snipers?
Flashes, transport or invisible shotgun murder-bots?

It doesn't even matter. This is a sci-fi game. Science fiction implying that they don't have to implement vehicles (or anything for that matter) following any modern archetype. Their imagination, design, and our individual utilization of said vehicles are the only limitations to be had.

Ya'll ****** ain't no fun sometimes.

I think the problem is that when you have one vehicle that can do too many things, you run into a few major problems:

1) That vehicle starts to take over the role of other vehicles. For example, take the Liberator, which was supposed to be an A2G attack vehicle. Yet the Dalton does surprisingly well against other aircraft (11.2-12.3 aircraft kills per hour) compared to the A2A ESFs cannons (rotary gets 6.19-7.11 AKPH) or dedicated AA vehicles (the Skyguard only claims 5.44 to 5.91 AKPH). This is because Liberator pilots have found ways to exploit the weird turning ability of the Liberator as well as the Dalton cannon's decent A2A characteristics.

2) That vehicle starts to become extremely powerful. Take the Sunderer for instance. It has one role of an infantry spawning point, and for whatever reason the Devs have decided that such spawning points need to be incredibly well-armored and have a ton of HP. Sure, fine. Whatever. But at the same time the Sunderer is used for a gun truck. I mean that's okay too. Add some extra firepower to mechanized infantry so they can beat other infantry squads. But throw those two roles together, and you have the disastrous and comical situation where Sunderers are driving backwards right into MBTs.

3) The vehicle can be used on its own without the need for teamwork. Vehicles ought to be very weak and vulnerable to things that are meant to counter them, thus relying on a different vehicle to cover for that weakness. When you have a vehicle that can excel at fighting all other vehicles, you destroy the need for combined arms teamwork.

This is why vehicles absolutely need to have limited roles. Preferably only be good against one class of targets but terrible at all others. This fixes many of the problems listed above.

ESF - Empire Specific Farmer

since we already have jump jets IRL I cant see this being to much of a leap in a such an advanced future.

Im starting to get into flying just now, and im a BR70 something. And only about 10 hours fly time and to me they feel like harrasers but an air variant, they skirt like a hyena looking for a weak spot but if they attack the wrong target or get to close they get crushed in an instant.

And I hear a lot of complaints about "they just hit the after burner and fly away" thing is when you use an after burner you lose a lot of firepower since you have no secondary weapon, so then pilots have to choose AA or AI and if they choose AI then they are at the mercy of air, and if they choose an AA weapon then killing ground targets becomes very difficult.. two sides to the coin

And if they run both primary and secondary weapons then they lose the ability to evade and with a couple of observant players with half a brain the esf will be taken down in seconds

This is how a new pure A2A fighter should be (not that there ever will be one, of course), moving into hover/landing mode should basically turn off weapons. It would fix a lot of things and create some really nice new A2A dynamics.

OR we could stop the bs with weapons reloading mid-air, give the ESFs the 8 Hornets or 24 pod rockets you can see on their wings to fire in one go before they need to rearm, and change the nosegun to one single magazine - maybe with a heat-mechanic.
No more farming, because there is simply not enough ammo for it.

But anyway, strafing runs don't work at the moment, except on vehicles.
I was trying strafing runs against scarred mesa recently.
The enemy rendered for me when I was THIRTY METRES in front of them. Of course I was already in red HP and died almost that very second thanks to at least 4 INVISIBLE burster MAXes, shooting INVISIBLE burster shots.

Also of the ESAI noseguns only the LPPA could do a strafing run, both Banshee and Airhammer have neither the splashdamage nor the accuracy to do that.
And why would you do a dangerous strafing run with the LPPA when you can just wait at 200m distance and then shoot an endless stream of plasma orbs from relative safety?
Which incidentally deal about as much splash damage as an anchored HE prowler.
[6,66 * 250 in 4m] for the LPPA vs [2* 650 in 5m] for the P120- HE. Those are shots in 2 seconds btw, one anchored
shoot & reload cycle.