Right now many of the AI ships rely on creating a wall of fire you either need to shield for or dodge around. If you speed them up you would need to either increase the fire rate and lower individual shot damage to keep the same DPS, thus making even more visual spam. Or changing the entire fighting mechanics to actually have the ai be able to be a threat. This would have to be something along the lines of the all those ai ships actually aiming at your ship making it even more difficult to dodge. Not really sure how to deal with the issue.
Professor Paul, those are all very good ideas actually, at least by my book anyway. In particular the increased attack range is very important. But it needs to be a good bit higher than the player's max range at full weapon power, and that might be a bit difficult to fully balance. It IS possible to get half of the battlefield all firing at you at once. Though I suspect the effect will be MUCH less intense than anything I'm used to.
See, the nice thing I see here is that the latter concern sort of solves the former concern.
Yes the projectiles won't be on the battlefield quite as long as before, but at the same time the increase in weapons range and the new ideal position for the player to do damage mean that more guns on the battlefield have the player as a viable target.
That's part of the beauty of this. With the exception of the change in pursuit behavior, the other changes I've suggested have already been tested in some way, at least as much as they can be without implementing them all together.
Hard and Misery difficulty have already demonstrated that an increase in projectile speed does not break combat.
As for having more weapons within effective range at once, a lot of us already willingly do combat under those conditions. I do combat that way, Misery does combat that way, and if the videos are anything to go by even Chris does combat that way, and I'm sure some more people here do.
Arguably a lot of us are already doing combat under the conditions these changes would enforce, so we know it's not totally screwed up. The fact that those of us who do tend to enjoy the combat more reinforces that.
The only change in the set that hasn't been directly or indirectly tried already would be the change to pursuit behavior, because that's the only thing that hasn't already been done in the game before, but that's really up to Chris and Keith to decide the difficulty of.
Also I agree that the Gravity Lance should NOT get a range increase, those things are pure evil in a can.
Mantis:
http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=14284So there's the ticket if you want to comment and/or support that.