Wish list for Star Wolves 4 or expansion/dlc for 3

[Goumindong]

A X^3 style game world would be nice (as in, a real working space economy). But i think that the primary motivation in Star Wolves is making the combat good.

And there are significant problems in that regard which ought to be fixed.

Lets break these down into weapons and maneuverability/piloting.

Maneuverability and piloting are clearly king in combat. Well, that is, until they break and your pilots get so maneuverable that they simply stop an turn in spot(where they are then murdered).

In General what this means is that people who have good piloting skills dominate people who do not until such a time as the ships they have get too maneuverable and are prone to simply being terrible.

Not the least because of this, but also because other specializations need to have oomph (we will talk about missiles later). Piloting ought to be a separate function than maneuverability(in order to rectify this I am in the process of modifying all the maneuverability values for every fighter in the game for SW 3).

I.E. piloting determines what you do with a ship, maneuverability determines how well you can do it.

To be more explicit, as a pilot gets better, he should get better at doing specific tasks such as "getting and staying behind an enemy pilot" or "keeping enemy pilots from staying behind them" or "keeping enemies off the rear ends of wing mates"

As it is, it seems pilots simply fly around randomly and take pot shots when they can, no different piloting techniques are used when you have lasers or your opponent has lasers etc. This may not be the way that things really are, but unless specific target orders are given that is certainly the way things seem. One member of the wing will catch a bogey on their tail and the other members of the wing will happily sit there trying in vain to shoot someone else while their friend gets shot up. And that friend, even though he can simply get out of the line of fire by speeding up to their max speed won't do it and will keep trying to turn into the enemy.

Either each member of the wing needs to be able to be given much more complicated orders (while still being able to maintain wing functionality), or the piloting ability needs to get a lot smarter about how pilots fly and not simply make them more maneuverable (or give them bonuses to hitting or not hitting)

The second issue that needs to be resolved is missiles.

Missiles have a large problem in that they are either ridiculous useless (enemies shoot them down easily for non-specialized pilots) and when they hit they do about as much damage as a single volley from high quality weapons (for instance a cleaner with 2 helios combat lasers does 400 damage for two hits, 440 for a laser specialist, almost as much as a torpedo).

Or, with the right "clickies" they're massive ridiculous killing machines which murder entire wings without doing much. ALRMs with the missile damage boost clicky pretty much kills any wing in the game before it can do anything. Considering you get 2-5 clickies per map and well...

Missiles either need to be treated more like regular guns (I.E. their marginal cost of use needs to be zero) or removed as specialty and given status as long range pre-engagement killers that you use when you think the resources are worth it.

They can be both but it would require a large departure from the current system. I.E. consider a system where missiles "regenerated" inside a fighter. So that you reasonably had a full load of missiles for each engagement, but only for that engagement. Use them wisely. While at the same time, your mothership could, a limited number of times per map, launch area torpedoes that did massive damage.


---

Solving these two problems are, imo, the most important aspects of making a better Star Wolves.