[Vehicle] Should ESFs be 150 Nanites?

It would be nice if there was a kind of "extra-light ESF" that only had a nosegun and afterburners (no upgrades, no slots, no secondaries...) and was only 100 nanites.

sure you can get cheap ESFs, when they remove lolpods and PPA

Think of it this way. Imagine there are only two pilots on the continent (because the math stays really simple that way). No matter who is better at choosing a fight, those pilots can only duel once every 3.5 minutes. One of them is going to end up a fireball and be out 350 Nanites. If they trade wins, then they can fight every 3.5 min because they're trading pulls (similar to a Lib crew rotating pulls to make the Lib cheap enough to spam). If the fights are lopsided then one pilot has to bear the burden of buying more ESFs and you start moving towards a duel every 7 min.

So if you're winning a lot because you're choosing your fights well, then you get to fly more because you were the better pilot. And I don't begrudge having an upside to winning. But because of how expensive ESFs are it opens up that 7 minute lolpodding window while you wait for the other pilot to be able to afford another ESF.

Lowering the cost has a twofold advantage:

• The lower cost outright lowers the respawn 'timers'. Instead of 3.5 - 7 minutes, we're looking at 1.5 - 3 min.
• More ESFs in the air helps to even out the losses, skewing you towards the lower end of the limiting time. 1v1, you might be an all powerful Sky God. 10v12 though? You have a very good chance of getting focused down by 5 people in the first 10 seconds of the fight. Nobody gets to walk away from those fights dependably.

So right now you end up with 5+ minute gaps in air coverage because a slight skill difference can dramatically swing the balance of air power. Make the ESFs cheap enough that people don't really need to think about pulling them though, and you can drag that 'winning edge gap' down from 5 minutes to somewhere around 2.
And (again ), having more ESFs in the air reduces A2G farming. Libs can't operate in peace, Gals can't sit above bases, ESFs can't hover and lolpod all day. The only people who lose out are the Sky Gods who are going to be somewhat annoyed about the whole "focused down by 5 people" part of air wars.

Only because the cost is lopsided. It's absolutely beautiful while the other faction can afford to pull counter air though. What I want is to get that 10v10 ESFs battles to happen more often.

My only reservation about making the Valk cheap is that it's hard to press into AA duty. As the pilots love to gloat about, the only real counter to air is more air. Whatever we make an easily accessible vehicle should be good enough at AA duty to ensure we're keeping skies clear.

We can call it the "NS Collision Physics".

If this came with severe A2G nerfs for the platform, then sure. Otherwise we'll just end up with many planes on the path of least resistance (A2G) instead of a few planes on the path of least resistance.

make tomcat and coyote esfs cost 750

Hell NO.
AA is underpowered, and ESf have powerfull A2G weaponry.
We still don't have mouseyaw, leaving flying to a minority of people. A swarm of ESF absolutely dominates.

You also can't lower the cost of the valk:
the flash is the cheapest transport vehicle, second the harasser. (we could use a buggy with more seats..)
Aircraft must be more expensive because they are so tough, because most weaponry has a hard time hitting them, but also because they can travel completely unhindered by terrain, and deliver people on rooftops.

Imagine if there was a 100 nanite aircraft. It would completely outclass the flash for transport.

A big part of that is that they can pull twice as many ESFs per minute as the other factions, so the other two largely have to give up flying and pull AA. If all sides had cheaper ESFs, there might or might not be more A2G farming, but it wouldn't be the same thing as locking Indar at all.

I think you could work it with A2A nerfs actually. One of the possible flaws is how very skilled players (i.e. the Sky Gods) can overcome the limitations of not having an effective secondary and still fight A2A. I'm not sure it would actually be necessary, but maybe tuning the noseguns so that your wing slot is what's actually doing the heavy lifting in a fight?

Let's be fair. Skyguards and Bursters still work against ESFs. This would bring up the problem that the dedicated AA options are 3x the Nanite cost of the basic air vehicle though, so there might be other cost/effectiveness tweaks to consider.

With the current A2G levels, 150 nanite cost would be broken almost beyond compare.

Hell naw.

ESFs should be 750 resources, since ESFs > everything

On a more serious note, something to help beginners learn would be good, but cheaper ESFs will only allow sky-knights to keep pulling infinitely. I actually agree with a discount for ESFs without a secondary weapon. Maybe ESF with AB 300 resources, with any secondary weapon 350 or 400, but since sky-knights use only nosegun, this hurts the tomcat ESF pilots. No easy solution is there?

You could make the ESFs cheaper.

Sky Gods get to chain pull anyway, because they usually live more than 7 minutes. The issue is that the new pilots don't get to live that long, and need the cost brought down so that can continue to participate.

Cheaper A2G ESFs would be terrible, but as was suggested above, some sort of cheap A2A only ESF would be fine to me.

I'm definitely in favor of cheaper ESFs. It's just such a waste of time to pull them sometimes.

**** No.
ESF spam is beyond bearable even when one faction just locked DE_Dust / Indoh.

If there needs to be a "Practice" zone for newby pilots where ESF's are CHEAP.... (and I AGREE there should be)... it should be this new umm... Koltyeer whatever battle island they're working on. Then it would be restricted and wouldn't affect the overall Meta.

Haven`t played PS1 but this would prolly be the best thing ever!
Even better if it is designed as a noob craft and does not require thousands of certs to make useful or even has access to any upgrades as the rest of the aircrafts.
If a vehicle like this is introduced at low nanite cost, balanced properly as an air superiority fighter and the cert vertical progression is instead (almost) completely replaced with sidegrades it can solve the problem every new player has getting into the air game on its own.

GIANT +1

Sounds great. Include AI and A2G weapons as well

The current ESF's certainly shouldn't be 150 nanities with their capabilities, however, I think there should be a 150 nanite small a2a craft.

i agree with the general premise of making air more accessible so that more people can get more practical experience, but i'm afraid this approach would ruin air play for all other air units. you've even said it yourself, libs and gals and valks would not be able to stay up and that just punishes people who spend a huge amount of nanites for a flying coffin.

you might think that more ESFs means more friendly support. but if you think that, you probably don't fly. ESFs don't support other units unless they are a gank squad. even then, they are competing to steal kills because xp and killcredit drops off rapidly as more units join your formation. the only things you can really guarantee that friendly air will do are 1)steal your kills and 2)cause midair collisions.

in addition to these issues, other unexpected balance issues could arise. of course i can't predict them but i can immediately think of several redeploy-ish and suicide/collision tactic issues that could get annoying very quickly.

done.

Great.

Glad we could do business!