Ares Starfighter Review - A Giant Flying Space Cannon 

It would be ridiculous to have a fighter take down an idris in 1 shot. Bo way this is working as intended

@@MrBlackjimrogan Well, it's not in one shot, but in one "pass". And it's not destroy, but seriously damage or even almost disable, depending on the skill of both the pilot of the Ares and the crew of the Idris. Moreover, we don't really know whether the Idris we now have in game (Arlington et al) are fully equipped and working as intended.

@Jaume Sabater ah ok i see, i havent been able to play for a while as im waiting on a gfx card upgrade, but im sure they have said yhe npc idris is pretty weak compared to the full player owned one as various systems are not working yet with the ai one

@Jaume Sabater and as an idris owner. Yeah i want it to last more than a few seconds of combat..

I wouldn't be too worried... Nothing that you see now will be the same when the game goes live. A ship such as the Idris won't be damaged to a point where you need worry. It's going to take several passes and if your fighters are doing their job, that will be difficult for them to accomplish without facing damage themselves. Ship fights will be long and drawn out. In the words of the Dev's themselves, you'll be able to limp away from a fight before you just go 'kabloom'.... Look at it like this, we're all playing with paper planes right now. When it's all said and done every ship will have a higher level of survivability and military grade ships with armor will be especially sturdy. You will absolutely need to bring the right tool for the job. Bringing something like a light fighter to an Idris fight will be foolish as the weapons will more than likely bounce off of the hull and get absorbed by the Idris shields. At best, you'll be able to 'hopefully' knock out the Idris shield generators if you can get close enough and stay in one piece. This is the future of SC.

I was thinking just a charged shot would be great, but being able to vary the damage by holding the trigger would be fantastic too.

@@Morphologis Everyone would have likely been 100% fine with that as a solution.

To add for balancing you could have it so the more charged the shot the lower the accuracy.

@@maxfrankovich6254 if it was with the previous version with fixed aim assist why not, now it would jsut be not very usefull at long range

Maybe you could go one step further and have a "secondary fire" on weapon group 2. Maybe the Inferno could also have something similar with high RoF and low RoF.

It's not too effective against light fighters, light fighter PILOTS are lazy and fly in extremely predictable straight lines.

@@44R0Ndin legit had it so often with my ion that gladis that could lowkey fly circles around u just went jousting

@@44R0Ndin +1000, impossible to kill a light fighter with other than a light fighter (unless you have one or several gunners and it might still not be enough depending on the ship)

I really wonder about those changes, I don't think in proper PvP with decent pilots it was ever a problem. For PvE it was hugely effective because the AI was being stupid, so I guess they had to do something while we wait for AI that can deal with an Ares properly. Most of the game being PvE and especially one the most lucrative money earning loops, farming AI bounties is something the old Ion was amazingly OP at. If the NPC bounties would actually fly competently a single Ares would be in deep trouble with 3-4 fighters harrying it while the main target (usually in a bigger ship) runs away.

@@EeroafHeurlin everytime it's all about artificially nerfing ships (buffed initially, for sales) to take upon missing gameplay aspects that would otherwise nerf the money farming the way the current nerfing actually do 🙄

That’s a great idea, we might need to wait a little for manufacturers like Consolidated Outland to have a larger sample size, only having the Nomad in their new style at this point

Not at all, it's not as inaccurate as it might seem. I've found it to actually be incredibly accurate, I think what you're experiencing is how they turned off bullet nudge with its fixed weapon. Every other fixed weapon in the game behaves slightly like a gimbaled weapon where it actually soft locks the target when close enough to the pip. The footage of me taking down CIG's ship team was taken post-nerf.

I'll have to try again, test it more in depth 🙂 Still, missing the canon feel of the ion all the same.

I find it hit or miss but i think the missing issue is due to server and ping health rather than ship performance. sometimes its hard to tell how good some of the weapons are due to the servers not knowing exactly everything is which is not good when the weapons rely on very accurate shots. i find the ion to still be an absolute beast even post nerf. its really good in higher tier bounty hunting missions due to npcs not really flying evasively

​@@Morphologis Makes me wonder if they may have been going quite easy on you to sell more of these.

@@Neogentronyx Or they just suck and had it nerfed accordingly :P

The only reasons I kept mine was because I CCU-chained one for just $70 and because the bonus paint from the Inferno concept sale could also be applied to the Ion. But I definitely understand where you're coming from and I REALLY hope that CIG will realize that they made a HUGE mistake. The ship worked perfectly fine when they set it to the 38RPM high accuracy high damage as it was listed in the brochure when they sold it. Those ridiculous nerfs were completely uncalled for and were the prime definition of "kneejerking" because they nerfed it after the saw some pro player in an Ion oneshotting noobs in light fighters during a video/stream.

I'm not sure I would consider those ships comparable in terms of size and price point. It's kind of picking two very different much larger ships.

@@Accuracy158 The size difference between the prowler and Ares is insignificant; the price point of a ship is not relevant to it's role nor actual performance in combat, everyone knows this. The point is these two very different ships NOT intended for high alpha damage, one not even built for combat at all, can outclass a ship marketed for high alpha. That isn't to say that there can't be ships with higher alpha than the Ion(lookin' at you Idris); just don't market it or falsely claim it has high alpha when the numbers are closer to the low alpha of a Vanguard.

had the same feeling!!! promoting useless scrap !!!

I mean they advertised one thing and changed it to something completely different after the sale was over and people spent money one it. Any other product and that would probably be grounds for a false advertisement lawsuit.

@@GodDragonLich all are unhappy with the change they did the most easy one and stupid, there were other way to do that

@@failomas1443 100%

It's a bit different from the Hawg; the A-10 could turn pretty well when it has the energy, whereas the Ares is manageable but not ideal even in the best of circumstances. But on the other hand, the Ares has a wicked main engine for forward thrust and can outrun Vanguards in a straight line. I think a couple other things stand out that make flying an Inferno different from an A-10C II Tank Killer. firstly, having that first detente on the trigger in DCS is actually great, where you can spin up the weapon and fire it the instant you need it. this makes the GAU-8/A much more usable than the SF7B (which lacks first detente) found on the Inferno. secondly, while both could be considered to carry a lot of ordnance/munitions in their universes, the A-10C's munitions are far more effective (thinking of the APKWS, Maverick, and Paveways/JDAMs). Star Citizen's missile mechanics are still somewhat underdeveloped, and its rocket and bomb mechanics are there but extremely niche (right now it's impossible to mount the Jericho rockets onto the Ares, whereas there are currently no racks in the game to mount the Thunderball bomb) What the Ares will give you, compared to an A-10C from DCS, would be greater speed and ability to travel between areas for sorties plus more trigger time on the gun, though less ergonomics and precision.

At this point I am just holding on to it until something I like more comes along so I can melt and buy it or upgrade into it.

had to be cheating or most likely just shit server performance, they are slower than those LF's and only 100m/s faster than a vanguard, easily compensated with weapons fire. Most likely just shit server performance though, I've yet to find an actual cheater so far

@@chomp7927 wouldn't shit server performance affect both parties involved in the fight?

That or CIG will figure out that the people that were complaining were the bad pilots that flew in straight predictable lines that literally a monkey with a rock could snipe out of the sky. The Ares Ion was and still should be capable of one-shot killing light fighters. It's like the answer to "how do I block a Raging Demon attack from Akuma in Street Fighter?" The answer is that the move is unblockable, you'll always get hit. The way to "block" it is to "be somewhere it's not". Same with the Ares Ion. Don't get stuck in the crosshairs, don't fly in straight lines, be a PILOT and not a Driver.

@@44R0Ndin This. Also they need to up the engagement ranges and accuracy of both ships. I have about 0.1 seconds where the inferno's gun actually matters during a joust. It would literally be more effective if I put plasma blades on my wings and attempted to melee the ships.

100%

She's a blast in her element that's for sure

I was thinking exactly this

Nah. It's the fault of the light fighters for flying in straight lines.

No I killed him after the nerf :P

@@Morphologis oh. They must really suck then.

Yeah, I really hope that once CIG has SQ42 ready for launch that they will actually put people on the balance team that know what they are doing and not just randomly change things. The only guy I like is Yogiklatt because you can get through to him and he understood that the Ares was simply on another level than a Gladius. The other guy though appears to be very arrogant and is probably the reason why the Ares received such kneejerk changes. It worked perfectly fine in a3.15.1 when it was still at 38rpm with high alpha and "Fixed Assist" enabled (as it should because "Fixed Assist" was a global mechanic that was implemented to create controlled parity and to make fixed weapons viable for all ships). They should have never disabled that mechanic imo because it ruined the ship and made it unviable.

oh god, here come the crybabies who think a dps increase is a nerf just because they cant hit small fighters any more... They literally just removed aim assist/bullet nudging and increased the ROF because it was NOT in line with design intent... The ship literally does more damage, you are just bad so you think the ship is *shrug*

@@wolfieperrinaybara9333 I don't see where this is a nerf either. The higher RoF alone means this ship is actually more effective against smaller targets than before, even if you require more than one hit now (boohoo). Lowering the RoF but increasing the alpha might have been the better option to kind of push it towards its intended anti-capital role though, but then the crybabies would have lost their shit completely.

@@wolfieperrinaybara9333 i don't consider myself a a crybaby, too old for that. I don't go after LF with my Ion. Please just invest few seconds in reading the intended use of the Ion: long range fighter. Now try to shoot at a HH at more than 800m, and you'll see a very significant part of your shots not doing any damage. Long range? really? alpha damage? No. Fortunately this ship will change (or not) and then I will melt mine. Finally LF users have been the ones complaining; if they are able to move they would not be hit by Ion pilots. Have a good game - enough drama on reddit and spectrum. I am surprised that Morphologis didn't mention the more thanvery poor precision of this ship into this review.

@@wolfieperrinaybara9333 If anyone is a crybaby, it's the people who whined to CIG about getting oneshot by a size 7 cannon while flying a light fighter. It SHOULD oneshot someone if they get in front of it. That's the same as complaining about an Abrams oneshotting a pickup truck. If you get in the way of a big ass gun, it should be common sense that your ass is now glass. I don't see why that is so hard to understand.

@@wolfieperrinaybara9333 um, no, they added RNG spread as well, ontop of all of that shit you already mentioned, that makes it the only ship in the game to have all that done to it. It was sold as a long range slow firing precision weapon with high damage. Now it's a short range repeater with crap accuracy at 1k even on large targets, not to mention everything else they did to the ship (missiles, missing shield, etc) compared to what it was sold as I love how the white knights show up and the first thing out of their mouth is insults toward the people that were all bait and switched by CIG and now have a very different ship then what they bought. It's essentially the cutty black all over again, although when they fucked the black they at least turned it into something useful even if it wasn't what it was sold as, the ion is just now a slightly worse version of a properly kitted Vanguard anymore.

That's fair, but is probably also based on the game's current state. Single purpose ships are more designed for the game once it's more or less complete and players are using their capabilities with others. For example, a single Ares is kind of meh, but 10 of them could be a terror to any enemy Large or Capital ships. We've got a similar situation with ships like the Starfarer that don't even have their main purpose in the game yet (collecting, refining, transporting, and distributing fuel to friendly ships). Ships that have such a narrow focus are designed for specialization and to be flown in groups as part of a fleet, not to be used solo. Cutty blacks or Lancers are great ships for solo players or groups of 1-3 because they can do a little of everything, but they can't do somethings (like take down Capital ships) and a lot of things they CAN do they can't do super well. But when you're trying to do a bit of everything and don't need to take down enemy Capital ships, refuel your Colonial fleet, etc, then they work fine. This is me saying that specialized ships make sense...once the game is complete. While it's incomplete, multipurpose ships are more likely to be at least passable at SOME of the stuff that's complete, making them seem far more useful. The only specialized ships that "feel" good right now are the ones that are specialized in a gameplay loop that's more or less complete, such as the Prospector.

Really? After getting countlessly destroyed by these big gun ships I highly regret not picking one up, these feel like anti-everything that makes most fighters obsolete.

Why the sentinel? Just curious I love my Warden wondering if I made a mistake

Because EMP, shield changes and "meta", distortion weapons/dmg actually works for a change and the sentinel has big EMP + plenty of DPS so it can take down a shield face quite quickly and then EMP to disable most components in almost any ship (maybe sometimes needs two EMP or following up with a burst from distortion cannons) and then the target is just a sitting duck waiting to be killed (or if in atmo, plummeting to it's hot date with the ground). There also have been (unsubstantiated) reports of the EMP one-shot disabling medium fighters with full shields which would indicate some kind of bug either in the shield or the EMP where it bypasses the shield since it should not even fully down the shield with one hit (some 3-5% should remain).

The ares is easy to beat (forcing them to QT away if not destroying them) with a light or medium fighter in normal dogfight, anything heavier will probably struggle to get into favorable position (above/below). If they boost away, decouple, turn around and continue using retrothrusters to accelerate backwards they're very hard to catch because 1. You can't just fly straight at them or you're easy pickings 2. over large distance they have the advantage because they don't need to rotate nearly as much to keep you in their sights and their guns have much longer range so you can't even shoot back... They're "anti everything" only in PvE because the AI is both "stupid" and flies straight at them (easy target) and in general does not have enough server resources to properly fly to get positional advantage if they survive the closing in.