It's true, keeping one's distance is too easy. I use it to pick my fights, and I am happy that I can do that. If it were to change, I'd have to change my method of choosing my battlegrounds (which I'm not going to stop, if the fights are forced on me), which is fine by me.

A little nitpick: I would not cut reverse thrust, just maximum reverse velocity. As for increasing forward thrust, I'd be also okay with that. Cutting strafe thrust/velocity... no way. OR, okay, but it'd change VO combat fundamentally.

/me unzips his fly

Aye, something like this should definitely be added, and I can imagine how it would speed up fights and generally make them more interesting as no one person can commit entirely to going in reverse. My ideal VO duel would be a sort of joust where people change from thrusting backward to thrusting forward every < 3 seconds.

As for this being a massive buff to flares: of course it will be, but not entirely as it would also open up some more lucrative and fun weaknesses to fighter/flare combo users. It would also make it easier for the energy user to maintain a dead zone range to the flare user that is harder to escape for the defender: a lot more fun than the usual full reverse tactic.

For this reason, however, I would be for cutting the maximum velocity rather than the thrust.

An idea just occurred. Limit all ships to a certain reverse velocity across the board. Perhaps 60 m/s, and leave everything else the way it is. This would be a minute change so that the ships that should feel it most (CV being the most prominent example, which I fly for its cruise velocity of 75) will feel it most, and others, which are not so 'bad' in that respect will be left marginally unimpaired. It would also perhaps cut down on implementation time.

Edit: Inserted missing vowel.

i actually like this suggestion, and it wouldn't make flares any more deadly really, cause it would be LOADS easier to get inside their safety fuse. How hard would it be to make duplicate versions of the current ships like this (ie, Corvus Vulturius NERF, warthog mk2 NERF, etc) so we could test this out?

idk why people are worried about flares with this it seems to bigger problem would be high auto aim weapons like gattling turrets gauss plasma devs maybe mega posi things like that would probably bennifit more.

People can knife fight flares now. They don't because it is suicide. You guys are being seriously foolish about this.

Hahah, you only want to cut the reverse thrust because you're tired of newbs kicking your ass by backrolling. Familiarize yourself with tactics, and by that, I don't mean whine about it.

/fail +1 tumblemonster