Game's coming out well. Defbots are still ridiculously overpowered and unbalaced. I'd really like to suggest that you bring back some kind of turreted bot (old station defense turrets) or add stationary weapons to stations, and downgrade the defbots to something reasonable. "Flak cannons" in freespace were a good implementation, nice long range, and made your fighter extremely hard to control, and did a pretty good amount of damage to your ship. Defbots are still operating with infinite energy, and a faster firing higher-damage weapon than we can get. IMHO that's fine for Furies, as they're alien, but defense fighters for human factions should not be able to purchase things we cannot.

I miss the old turrets too. If the defbots were seriously toned down, so they'd at least be killable without spamming rockets or mines, I think adding turrets in addition to them would be better. It should be more of a overwhelming quantity thing than an uber weapon/speed advantage thing. Juggling between multiple defense bots and dodging tracers/flak fire would definitely be a lot more fun than just boosting around in circles and hoping the bots will issue on to something.

Thirdified. I thought that the strong bots were a kludge until better A.I. came along. It's here, isn't it?

Oh, and the turrets really were awesome.

Yeah, but adding turrets would decrease the noticability of the poor AI.

the turrets were fun, and if you ask me, they made attacking the flags a way cooler experience. Now that flags are out, they're slightly useless, but still cool. gave it a more "i'm going in!!" feeling

I agree with everything said so far... Being chased at full turbo speed with a bunch of defbots firing away with uber-tachs and still gaining is slightly infuriating... Unless they have weird alien technology of course ;-)

Turrets guarding certain worm holes and stations would work quite well. It would make future mission more interesting and diverse. Encourage a bit of team work. Maybe even give us a use for the avalon torpedo again.

Have you ever tried hitting a turret with an avalon?

Its not easy.

Splash damage? I wasn't around for the turrets on bases, but IIRC they did take damage when they were on the frigate.

I don't even mind the uber-weapons and uber-energy so much, but the uber-engine just plain sucks. Defbots are designed to chase people away. If a heavy/fastcharge valk cannot run from them, its pointless.

Defbot stats:

210m/s max speed
InfiniCharge(TM) Battery
2x4200 dmg/shot tachyon blasters
Vulture (mkV?)

Oww.

Seriously??? OUCH !!!

Dave: I got pretty good at it right before they took them out.

The def bots don't have infinite energy. They run out just like we do. Though only when double taching. Their damage is totally over the top though. The AI controlling the fighting still really isn't very good, but I doubt it's going to get any better (other than the path finding).

I think they should still be a bit faster than us since otherwise they'd never catch us... but maybe sending out different defense bots based on the level of threat a character is so that there isn't a crazy one shot kill speed demon thrashing a newb bus that got the guts to check out an enemy system.

And just for the record a hvy/fc valk (or vult, cent and probably a hog) can easily out run them (not forever in a straight line but if you turn a bit every five min or so it's not a problem).

I'd rather have a huge array of defense turrets guarding the main sectors or stations, with maybe a few standard vults/cents coming out as a strike team if you hang about for more than a minute or so...

Eldrad, we can only outrun them because the AI is slow to turn. But they still catch up. And so far as I've found, their batteries recharge faster than their engines use battery. So they can fire a volley of tachyons while turboing, stop firing (while still turboing) to recharge, and fire again. If they had the equivalents of our heavy engines and fast-charge batteries, that would be somewhat more fair.

-->Warning, Eo's Welcome has scrambled 2 Vulture class interceptors, estimated intercept time 0:12<--

I think those tachs are still turretguns off the frig.

Anyway, if firing a constant stream of whatever they shoot, they run out of battery power pretty fast, going down to an uneven and slower stream of just one of the weapon thing.

Oh, and station turrets and frig turrets are entirely different things.

Just been killed twice by the frikkin defbots, and they just plain suck. First time I tried to do a runner through a sector... they caught me easily and killed me in 2 secs once i turned. Second time, I went back tried to take out their "tracker", and got wasted almost instantly.

So... wtf is the point of the "tracker" when there is like 0.0001% chance of killing it? Why do the defbot weapons inflict such a ridiculous amount of damage? Why do they have better engines, considering they outnumber you, have far more powerful weapons, and can also jump straight after you???

actually the trackers and the defbots are killable, you just have to be in a valk to do it. (alex rowe regularly kills the strike forces in serco space)

I on the other hand get wasted in my skycommand prom before i even get turned around.
(that could have something to do with the prom having the turning ability of a brick thats in the middle of a wall)