The best games ARE based on precise military simulations.
The emphasis there should have been on
based. You can base a game on actual military reality, or simulation. But that is a world away from actually going down to the minutest level as part of the game. Sure each level of abstraction loses some detail, but that doesn't mean a bad game, it often means a better game. Horses for courses obviously, some like the detail, some don't. But for FC you implicitly have a number of players who do not want that detail, counter pushing and book keeping, otherwise they would presumably be playing SFB. Clearly, though, even within FC there is a range of opinion over how much to lose/abstract and how much to keep.
What would fighter launched seekers do normally (using the FC playtest rules - range 8 launches etc)?
1) Hit barring counter measures.
What are the counter measures:
2) Shoot the seekers.
3) Shoot the controller (no controller for plasma).
4) Run away
5) Out manouver them ([edit] by which I meant accelerate directly past them).
What do the direct fire rules currently do (including various tweaks that have been mooted in the threads)
1) They hit barring counter measures
2) You can shoot them
3) You can shoot the controller
4) Run away.
Ok you can't outmanouver them, but you get 4 out of 5 aspects. The outmanouver aspect is the one that is arguably the least useful to worry about as that could be very situation dependent anyway and seldom applies to plasma. The other aspects do have some subtle differences as well, but they are covered to a reasonable degree. Direct fire drones are
based on normal seekers, it is abstracting out the 'movement to impact' but retains most of the key points. That seems a good compromise for the reduction in counters etc. SFB players have lost a lot more via other things that weren't ported or in the way they were ported - spoofing seekers seems to be a far more militarily realistic concept, but we happily lost wild weasals.
That's not to say that I'd not like some extra improvements in fighter based drones, but my idea of improving and other peoples idea of improving may not be the same
Whilst they are called direct fire drones they are not direct fire weapons, they do not fire in the direct fire step, they do not impact instantly, they can be stopped even after firing, all the normal anti-seeker systems still kick in during defensive fire. You are not left with one type of weapon, you still have direct fire and seekers, it is just that the seekers have been handled in a different way to before, but they are still very different to phasers and photons.
It also changes the way you look at drone armed fighters, before the drones were the thing you concerned about, especialy in SFB where the fighters probably launched from across the map. With direct fire seekers it is the fighters you worry about. In SFB your manouvering was based on a wave of drones coming at you, now it is based on a wave of fighters coming at you. There is more emphasis on stopping them launching, that is more in line with modern naval warfare - you want to stop enemy airpower getting in range, not dealing with mass missiles afterwards. If we are looking at military simulation that is the nearest parallel I can think of with carriers and fighters.
As for an attack product, sure, it's a possiblity, BUT....
I woudn't really like an attack product. I was just pondering why you might not consider that instead of a booster when it seems more attack like in terms of what it needs to be complete. I'd personaly prefer to see a proper BoM box set with all the main BoM concepts included in order to help differentiate it as seperate to FC. I don't see that happening though, so attack + booster products would seem the next best fit.
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