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[SafariJohn]

They used to have three mortars I believe and were hilariously powerful.

There was a bug that caused their mortars to hit multiple times per shot. For some reason they still got nerfed when the bug was fixed.

[Megas]

Some fighters had different weapons in earlier releases, when they were ships.  Warthogs might have had LAG originally.

[FooF]

In my last round of playtesting with Warthogs, I tried a few things:

Assault Chaingun - without adding any kind of native dissipation, Warthogs fire three shots and then waits about 1-1.5 seconds to fire again. The advantage it has over the Light Mortars is that they tend to all hit. If you add a few vents to the Warthog, the damage steadily increases but even 2x Light Mortars are flux-capped so it's an unfair comparison to increase vents on an ACG but not on the default loadout (if you wanted to improve the Warthog)

Added a Vulcan to Weapon Slot 3 - I actually think this is the sweet spot. You still get the 2x Light Mortars doing slow/steady HE but the Vulcan allows the Warthog to begin to chew threw hull once armor is stripped. It basically doesn't do anything outside of that but it gives Warthogs more finishing power. It also puts a gatling gun on the nose of the ship and you can see it spewing bullets as a proper Warthog should. Also, since Vulcans barely cost flux, and have low range, it really doesn't effect the Light Mortars that much. I think as small of a change as it is, it works well for the intent of what the Warthog should be doing.

[Thaago]

A vulcan is interesting as it also reinforces another role I've had a bit of success in with warthogs: defensively fighting other fighters. They are too slow to catch enemy ships, but when escorting do a decent job of killing things that come to them. Adding some point defense capabilities would help them shoot down swarmers and missiles heading for the host ship as well.

[FooF]

As a complete aside, it wasn't until I started really paying attention to fighter flux levels did I realize how often they stay flux-locked. The Warthog only has 50 dissipation, which means it can't even support the two Light Mortars it has! It can fire off a pair of shots to reach its capacity (200) and then it basically is just using a single Light Mortar the rest of the way. No wonder it feels underwhelming. Bumping dissipation up to 75 makes it 50% more effective!

With 75 dissipation and a Vulcan (which means it still can't fully support all weapons firing at once), it's pretty effective if it can keep up and stay in range.

[BigBrainEnergy]

As a complete aside, it wasn't until I started really paying attention to fighter flux levels did I realize how often they stay flux-locked.

Incidentally, this is why you may find modded fighters are often much more powerful than vanilla ones of a similar price.

[Thaago]

As a complete aside, it wasn't until I started really paying attention to fighter flux levels did I realize how often they stay flux-locked.

Incidentally, this is why you may find modded fighters are often much more powerful than vanilla ones of a similar price.

True - people tend to stick the same number of guns on but its often the dissipation that is the actual firepower limiter.

[SafariJohn]

As a complete aside, it wasn't until I started really paying attention to fighter flux levels did I realize how often they stay flux-locked.

Incidentally, this is why you may find modded fighters are often much more powerful than vanilla ones of a similar price.

True - people tend to stick the same number of guns on but its often the dissipation that is the actual firepower limiter.

And that's terrible IMO because fighter flux is not a player-facing mechanic.

[WhisperDSP]

So to improve many of the fighters, just tweak the vents/caps a little?

[Thaago]

If you want to tweak the DPS and/or Burst of many fighters, then yeah. Raise or lower the vents/caps.

Broadswords for example are flux limited (10 dissipation per fighter to support 38 worth of guns), but they have enough capacity (80) that their initial volley is a whole lot of damage (great for spiking flux before the bomber wave come in). I think they are in a really good place and are an example of how the vents/caps works to cement their role as bomber leaders (alongside the flares).

Personally I think Gladii are good fighters already, but an increase to their dissipation would help to cement their role as 'catch then kill interceptors' by upping their sustained DPS. They currently have 100/400 dissipation/capacity as a wing compared to Broadsword's 30/240, but they have that IR pulse laser to support as well which is a lot less efficient than the lmgs. I would have to watch their behavior to see if they keep the dual machine gun continuously firing and just throttle the IR, but thats what I would naively expect them to be doing.

[FooF]

To Thaago's point, when you look at Broadswords in a vacuum you ask yourself "why the heck does it only have 10 dissipation!?" but then you see the weapons and capacity and it makes more sense. What doesn't (immediately) make sense is why Khopesh have 100 dissipation, but then you find out they originally 2 Vulcans and a LAG before they had Annihilators. It's one of those, "it doesn't hurt anything so why change it?" type situations.

But to the point at hand, does 50 dissipation for the Warthog make sense? Going back to the accuracy issue, even under the best of circumstances, it's not landing every shot. Or to put it another way, why am I spending 12 OP for slow fighters that, once committed to the fight, only contribute the equivalent of 3 Light Mortars (6 OP) under ideal of circumstances? With some luck, they might actually output 6 Light Mortar's worth of firepower briefly.

To SafariJohn's point, when the tooltip says "2 Light Mortars", the player isn't exactly informed that really that drops to 1 Light Mortar when flux locked (which is within 2 seconds of fighting). If the fighter has weapons on it, I think it's a reasonable expectation that they're able to fully utilize them at all times. That they can't is...odd.

A couple more Warthog trials:

Assault Chaingun with 130 dissipation on each Warthog: fires 3 shots before pausing briefly to "reload" and fire again. Shots tend to be highly accurate. You're getting a single ACG split between three fighters (10 OP) so this feels close to an equal trade-off.

Thumper with 2 Light Mortars and 120 dissipation and 400 capacity. Thumper uses all 400 flux on approach and then Light Mortars kick in. Since dissipation is slightly above the 2 Light Mortar's output, it eventually gets back to 0 and the Thumper fires again. Depending on positioning, there's a 5-10 second delay between Thumper barrages. Gives some burst damage and additional range. It's also visually distinct but it absolutely murders low armored targets.

For 12 OP, how powerful should Warthogs be?

[Bummelei]

A couple more Warthog trials:

Assault Chaingun with 130 dissipation on each Warthog: fires 3 shots before pausing briefly to "reload" and fire again. Shots tend to be highly accurate. You're getting a single ACG split between three fighters (10 OP) so this feels close to an equal trade-off.

Thumper with 2 Light Mortars and 120 dissipation and 400 capacity. Thumper uses all 400 flux on approach and then Light Mortars kick in. Since dissipation is slightly above the 2 Light Mortar's output, it eventually gets back to 0 and the Thumper fires again. Depending on positioning, there's a 5-10 second delay between Thumper barrages. Gives some burst damage and additional range. It's also visually distinct but it absolutely murders low armored targets.

For 12 OP, how powerful should Warthogs be?

There was a fighters from Disassemble-Reassemble mod (if i remember it right), and they had a chain gun as an armament, and oh boy it was painful to fight against. And i kinda afraid ACG will make them into monsters once again. How about an all-around enhancements? A bit of range, a bit of speed, and dissipation improvement for it to able to handle it's mortars?

[FooF]

ACG without any additional dissipation on the Warthog is very underwhelming. I don't think it would be in any danger of being terrifying in the least.

But to your point, yes, I think if you were going to make the Warthog better, the first thing to do is bump its native dissipation up so that both Light Mortars are actively engaged more often. I don't think it's unreasonable to let Warthogs fire both at all times (i.e. 100 dissipation) since Mortars miss so much anyway. I will say this, 3x Mortar with enough dissipation to keep them all firing, is terrifying.

FYI, my testbed has been an unskilled Condor with a Warthog and Broadsword wing. I have no weapons on the Condor and I've been using the Sim Mule as the target (it has Heavy Armor on it so has roughly Cruiser-grade armor to punch through). Time to Kill has been the metric I've been using to judge, using the Peak Performance Time of the Condor as the stop time. The current Warthog/Broadsword combo kills the Mule with roughly 220 seconds left on the Condor (TTK = 140 seconds). Faster times to tell me that the Warthogs have improved. Slower means a step in the wrong direction.

3x Mortar with full dissipation, for example, were killing the Mule with ~300 seconds of PPT left. That means they killed the mule in 60 seconds rather than 140. Bumping standard/current Warthogs to 100 dissipation, they had TTK times averaging around 100. If you add a Vulcan on top of that, TTK was ~80 seconds. Obviously, if you want to make incremental adjustments, just bumping the dissipation sees a solid improvement.

[BigBrainEnergy]

I have tried 100 dissipation on warthogs before and they were definitely too powerful. Maybe an increase to capacity rather than dissipation would be better.

[Thaago]

...
FYI, my testbed has been an unskilled Condor with a Warthog and Broadsword wing....
...

I think thats a good test bed, with the caveat that both 100% CR and skills are going to boost the mortar's accuracy. It sounds like that might make more of a difference than usual.