Look at it this way Bonk.
I'm grateful Taldren made a game that would sell (read: dumbed down) and make them enough to stay in business long enough to patch up OP to where it is today.
SFC3 sucks, but its existence breathed some new life into OP.
GAW would have been nice, but face it - we are a niche market.
Good point. We still owe Mr. Ferrell a thousand thank yous for his efforts on patching OP.
I hope he is doing well in his current endeavours.
However, my main point was that to be true to SFB any new SFC will require thousands of hours of AI coding and testing by someone who is initmately familiar with all SFB tactics. If the AI was smart enough, innumerable problems with the previous versions would be solved. (mainly seeking weapons smarts)
And remove the Magic-Photon bonuse That gets silly enough with 3 ships.
Actually can we give it +3 in ecm shift Like Capt. Kirk would.
Regarding the magik photons: I think setting photon damage charts to what they are in SFB would go a long way to reducing the blue plague, as it would take true finesse to do significant damage with them. I cannot count how many times I was pre-empted by Klingon disruptors and phasers or Romulan plasma in SFB duels. Basically, don't fire photons unless you're inside range three, or have at least a dozen of them to run proxies, but fighting klingons the best you could do was one or two rounds of proxies before you were outmaneuvered by the superior turn modes and power curve to support the EW battle. If you were lucky you could knock down a sheild or two and then eat the preemptive strike at range 5 and hope you had some overloads left for the overrun on a down sheild.