With little to no restriction on speeds up to the cruise velocity cap, what game mechanics will be implemented to force players to slow down and for dogfighting to occur?
TL;DRAt cruise-speed velocities ships can barely turn and just drift, so players must slow down to dogfight, while high-speed pursuit is meant to be its own style of combat.
In our panel, we talked about that. If you get up to those velocities, you can really not turn.
Yeah, you're very handicapped at that speed. Even in decoupled, you just drift for miles and miles, because the ships don't have nearly the acceleration they once did. So you just drift and it's useless. So the option is there to escape, if people want to escape fights, and maybe someone can chase them. The hope with this was also that you could chase them. One of the topics that came out of removing AB2 was, if we get rid of that acceleration limit and we let you accelerate in all directions uniformly, you can actually chase people. And we would like that to be a thing. But for slower dogfighting, you're just so useless if you're not at a slower speed.
You need to slow down. Combat at cruise speeds is almost like its own separate style of combat to regular dogfighting. If you want to have that dogfighting experience, you can't really do it at cruise speeds. If you do it at cruise speeds, you're probably in this weird scenario where you're two ships chasing each other, decoupled, essentially turreting, but moving at high velocity in one direction, shooting each other until one of them decides to uncouple and, more accurately, just slide off into the distance.