I think the flight model is better than it was. It could be made even better though, and it needs to be tuned.
I was here from the start btw, still kinda remember the old days.
The oldest model was way more broken then the current one. The ships were flying like planes, but with seemingly random huge drifts/lots of sliding out of nowhere. Dual stick flying backwards was King in AC. It felt unfair and broken to plebs like me with only one stick.
They increased the slide factor again and again then adjusted thrusters to compensate on fighters to make things more "realistic" but it felt wrong, as using scm mad you stop and turn in place after a few maneuvers. It wasn't very good to pit it mildly.
Then it all went from more sliding to the "slow ages" with almost no sliding as you couldn't accelerate over scm speeds and scm was like walking pace. I found that to be more fun in Ac against ai, it felt old-school and I coikd work with that, but it was kinda lame in PU.
What we have now is a better mix of both worlds (planes flying vs "real" space flight), but it's far from ok. One huge "fix" I think is that finally you can't outturn a gladius in a beerfarer. Up until this flight model, you could basically ignore how fast or slow, and how large your ship was, as you could always just turn point and shoot. Finally that's not the case and you can't whip a 180 in a cap ship under 1/10th of a second like in the old days, and that's good. What's not good is that there is still too much drift and we are back to jousting instead of flying. It may be realistic, but the controls feel disconnected and it's more tedious than fun. It's better the it was, but it needs some tuning to differentiate more between dedicated fighter ships and others.
For those who want the old ways of fighter plane combat like in wing commander, I'm sorry to say you are shit out of luck. I would have liked that too, but I can see why they wanted to make something newer to fit the PU better. It's not the old-school space shooter we originally signed up for, but hell, what is anymore lol
As a sidenote, when it comes to PVE (especially sq42), I don't think the main issue is the flight modell. It's the AI. It's just dumb and jousty half the time, and insanely accurate and ruthlessly "dual sticking" strafing around you dickhead style the other half the time, so it feels more aggravating than fun. This should get better over time though. I hope it will lol
I was here from the start btw, still kinda remember the old days.
The oldest model was way more broken then the current one. The ships were flying like planes, but with seemingly random huge drifts/lots of sliding out of nowhere. Dual stick flying backwards was King in AC. It felt unfair and broken to plebs like me with only one stick.
They increased the slide factor again and again then adjusted thrusters to compensate on fighters to make things more "realistic" but it felt wrong, as using scm mad you stop and turn in place after a few maneuvers. It wasn't very good to pit it mildly.
Then it all went from more sliding to the "slow ages" with almost no sliding as you couldn't accelerate over scm speeds and scm was like walking pace. I found that to be more fun in Ac against ai, it felt old-school and I coikd work with that, but it was kinda lame in PU.
What we have now is a better mix of both worlds (planes flying vs "real" space flight), but it's far from ok. One huge "fix" I think is that finally you can't outturn a gladius in a beerfarer. Up until this flight model, you could basically ignore how fast or slow, and how large your ship was, as you could always just turn point and shoot. Finally that's not the case and you can't whip a 180 in a cap ship under 1/10th of a second like in the old days, and that's good. What's not good is that there is still too much drift and we are back to jousting instead of flying. It may be realistic, but the controls feel disconnected and it's more tedious than fun. It's better the it was, but it needs some tuning to differentiate more between dedicated fighter ships and others.
For those who want the old ways of fighter plane combat like in wing commander, I'm sorry to say you are shit out of luck. I would have liked that too, but I can see why they wanted to make something newer to fit the PU better. It's not the old-school space shooter we originally signed up for, but hell, what is anymore lol
As a sidenote, when it comes to PVE (especially sq42), I don't think the main issue is the flight modell. It's the AI. It's just dumb and jousty half the time, and insanely accurate and ruthlessly "dual sticking" strafing around you dickhead style the other half the time, so it feels more aggravating than fun. This should get better over time though. I hope it will lol