Hello,
As this is my first post here on the forums, I would like to preface by saying that, besides the music in the prisons, I absolutely love the Crossfire mod. I played Freelancer a great deal from 2003-2008 and played on many RP servers during that time (Frostworks was my first, if anyone remembers that) and I've been on Discovery on and off over the last few years. I very much appreciate how the look and feel of the Crossfire mod makes everything seem fresh and new again. I also really like the little things like the wings on some fighters folding during cruise. I also like how shield and weapon types matter now for resistances.
Anyway, I would like to propose an alteration for consideration: NPC armor and shield regen. I can imagine the current settings were implemented to make the NPCs "harder," and while something like this is a perfect example of artificial difficulty, I would contend that, in the current state, all this does is make dogfights with NPCs into a tedious grind, rather than making it more fun and challenging. The outlandish speed with which the enemy's shields regen, the seemingly random amount they come back after they are knocked out completely (indeed, both the time it takes for them to come back online, and the amount regained seems to be complete random, from the vanilla amount all the way to full shields), and the seemingly bottomless amount of nanobots the enemy ships have mean that any dogfight I get into is more annoying that anything.
I very much enjoy dogfighting in Freelancer, both against players and NPCs, but now whenever I have to engage with an NPC it feels like a grindfest; while some enemies are downed in seconds flat, some take up to 5 minutes. This also removes something that was present in vanilla: the ability for skilled pilots to take on NPCs in much better ships. While I was never capable of it myself, I'd seen people in Starfliers take on Sabres (both NPCs and PCs) because they were able to grind down the enemies shields, then target their shield emitter. With the speed that shields regen, there absolutely no way for this to happen anymore. You either have big enough guns, or you don't, and no amount of skill on your part matters, at all, when determining whether or not you can take down the enemy.
I understand there's a desire to make the dogfights in Freelancer more difficult, what with their pathing being very predictable, but turning every dogfight into a boring chore is not the way to go.
Thank you for your consideration.
