And yet there's so much in between. The classical example is good old StarCraft. Three very different races, with very different playstyles, yet all were viable on all levels of gameplay, without one being seen as overpowered. (Edit: I have to correct, one was seen as rather overpowered by players early in the game, with limited knowledge about it. But while some people stagnated at that level, most grew out of it. ) So while the set of options is different, depending on which race you pick, victory or defeat in the end is determined by the players skill.
Directly transferring this to ED is hard. But it would already be great if FD would just sometimes strive for it, instead of following the path of power creep, leading to a very limited range of optimal choices.
I feel there is a lot of room for more variety, more flexibility, and better balance.
ED's current attempt a balance consists of collection of hard counters bolted to a
The purpose of it is necessary. Offense and defense were too close to each other before. This meant that it only took a wing of two to attack a single pilot and that pilot did not have a chance.
I don't agree.
In one vs. many combats, TTKs are probably lower now than they were before Engineering. The defensive inflation that is most predominant in 1v1s is superseded by the synergistic effects of many offensive augmentations when faced with multiple attackers.
Some examples that feature pre-Engineer focus fire and/or asymmetric engagements, in no particular order:
I've got some Vulture and Clipper footage somewhere, but my channel and my archives are a bit of a mess and I originally reuploaded most of these to illustrate the difference between the pre (1.4) and post (1.5/2.0) FDL.
Anyway, escape used to be as simple as dumping a heatsink; staying evasive was much more effective when all weapons had damage falloff and default projectile velocities; when nothing could amplify sensor signature; and when SCBs couldn't be canceled.
Not saying Engineering was all bad, but I never felt that ships were too fragile before, and the defensive inflation is most noticeable in 1v1s, where it's more tedious than anything.
The only way to curb the stupidly over shielded ship problem is to either disallow ships from having more than a set number of boosters or banks.
The diminishing returns that were in the 2.3.10 beta test (that I did play heavily) worked well, and if resistances were hit a bit harder (if deminishing returns started at something lower than 30% above the shield gen's values), I think they'd be almost perfect.
SCBs have a long and storied history, but they were probably most balanced around 1.3-1.4...they had reached their current number of charges, but restored less per charge at the higher classes, and could not be activated independently without being disabled or placed in different fire groups, which made heatsinks even more critical. Lake of PP modifications (and the smaller size of PP on the FDL) were also constraints on how many SCBs one could effectively employ. It wasn't perfect by any means, as they had no real counters, but it was at least possible to hammer through them with the damage available at the time and if someone had multiple SCBs, you knew they took a hit somewhere else to be able to use them.