Post
by Triaxx2 » Fri, 27. Jan 12, 19:02
Judge not the M4 class on the Elite. The Elite is a POS. And I don't mean point of sale. It doesn't even do that well. When I'm picking up abandoned ships for sale, I just blow up the elites.
M4's are not bad fighters. However, unlike M3's where only a couple is more than enough to deal with most non-capital threats, M4's need to put a lot of ships on the field to deal with targets.
And they are most definitely not for OOS engagements. I've found Pikes to be hideously effective at engaging and destroying targets well above their weight class with two simple considerations. Employ them en masse, and do not 'fully' arm them. Giving them more than four PAC's is a waste of energy. On an attack run, with four they'll still run out of energy before they make the break away for collision reasons and having the longer stream of fire generates more hits per second of fire than a wider stream of fire from 6 PAC's. The L variant of the ship comes armed with exactly that and in the closely mounted center guns.
Do they have some issues? Certainly. They do get incinerated by PBG's, and HEPT eat them for breakfast. Same thing happens to frigates. So I'm not too concerned, and nine times out of ten while a target might kill one ship that way, any others with it will crush it with fire before it can orient on a second target. The other time is usually when it's a Corvette.
The Buster series are a good balance of speed, shields and firepower. Ducking under heavy capital weapons with Buster Raider, then hugging the hull as you chew it up with MD's is quite a rush. And you have to come in around PPC's, or you'll get toasted by flak. Which again isn't necessarily any better survived by M3's, or M6's.
Scorpions are the fastest M4's around and are positively tiny. They're very hard to hit and easy to dodge fire with. Admittedly, they're very much glass cannons, but an M4 that can mount HEPT is no small force to be trifled with. A wing of scorpions will annihilate Corvettes in short order and even if they're firing flak, you can still overwhelm a Frigate if you have to. Admittedly, the rarer Raider is even more insanely fragile, and are literally one hit wonders. As in one hit and you'll wonder where they went.
I will say this however, that M4's are some of my favorite player ships to fly. Sure, they're relatively fragile, but as ships go, they're perfect for the player. They can deal more damage to the competition than M5's and they're more agile (mostly) than M3's.
Incidentally, the Solano is a bit of a weirdo. It's got high M3 class shielding, and yet it's classed as an M4. It's slower than the Buster Raider, but it's faster than most other M4's sans the Scorpions. And however much it might look like a very shiny turd, it's a very deadly ship, particularly when armed with MD's.
