Why the Lancaster is now Much Much Worse.

[!cER]

The use of a ship will always increase if the settings on it change, in a month or 2 your pub will look pretty much as it did before the base lanc came in. Personally i think the lanc is slightly better now, but the wb is still, as always, overpowered :P

[Sufficient]

Btw ... the lanc has superior thrust now. Check it out ... I can basically fully thrust all the way from spawn to roof ... pretty neat I'd say, and useful at times for dodging/rushing.

[Vykromond]

make the recharge a little faster and lancaster will be a great terrier sniper, that spread- oh my!

edit: this post, of course, completely ignores the point of the thread (which had to do with lanc in pub), but i'd like to see the threadmaker respond to mallad's comments first

[Ewan]

I believe also that using multifire actually changes the new lancaster back into a one-hit-kill ship. So you can actually decide whether to... a) Use multi & have a higher chance of killing, but be vulnerable for longer afterwards, or b) Use normal shots to vulch/neg & still have the energy to escape.

Just another thing to consider.

You do realise that a multifire shot does the same amount of damage as a non-multifire shot.

[Twerp]

I know not many people played the Lancaster much before the recent changes, and might not have much to compare it to, but I've flown the Lanc almost exclusively for years now, and I think I might have some insight on it's value, and how the recent changes have made it much less usefull.

First a caveat: I only play pub, and lately only pure-pub. I imagine things work differently in leagues with more experienced players and the action more focused around the flag room.

You've basically taken the slowest, least maneuverable of the dogfighters(WB, Spider, Lanc), and required it to make 2 out of 2 shots in succession to get kills. Getting two hits in rapid succession means the lancaster now has to fight much closer to it's opponents, where it's lack of speed and maneuverability put it at a marked disadvantage. Wheras the spider has to only make 3-4 out of a 5-7 shot burst to get a kill, and has the maneuverability to chase weakened foes, the new lancaster can rarely keep up with an opponent if it's first attack fails.

The 2 or 4 bullets of the lancaster aren't a great help for this type of fighting either. For one thing, they're an awful lot slower than WB and spider bullets. Hitting anything that isn't close, or flying right at you, takes more practice than you'd think. And with the changes, you now have to hit them twice. The lanc also only gets 3 shots within the first few seconds. A spider gets 10.

Pre-change, the lanc was always best when fighting in mid-base, shooting at range. The mid-base restricts opponents flying enough to give them less room to dodge your spread, and for you to more easily predict where to send your multifire bullets for those speculative shots. There's also enough room to duck behind something to recharge, which the Lancaster needs lots of time for. This isn't glamorous fighting, but it is effective. Flying a Lanc required as much strategic and positional thinking as it did raw aiming skill (aka Warbirds). But, all of this strategy hinged on one thing: One shot kills. Aside from the spider, every ship has this ability (The Terrier does have those nasty bursts). Without it, the lanc is a sitting duck.

Post-change, you have a marginally effective flag room fighter. The spider still wins out on it within the flag room in my eyes though, and outside the flag room, the Lanc is easy prey for warbirds.

In short, you took an effective if underused mid-base ship, and turned it into a weak spider.

Like I say, for league and proper basing play, where the action does focus around the flag room, the new lanc might work better. But for Pub and pure-pub, where the action is generally a bit lower on the map, the old lanc was much more effective. I know pub players bragging about stats and records is a bit laughable, and people rarely believe them anyways, but I think this proves a point about the old Lancaster: Flying a lanc almost exclusively, I usually had an average kill of 120-140(i.e: Usually on the flag-holding team), and with Kill/Death ratios between 2:1 and 3:1. I am not boasting; I know there are better players with better records, but from what I've seen, this is usually pretty good. And this is Basing with a Lancaster. It was a very good ship prior to the change.


And for all the Lanc haters: The easiest to learn, most dangerous, and most popular ship with newbies is and always has been the Warbird. Stop calling me a newb when I shoot you. :-P

I don't know how you can right so much about a ship in a game.

[Gemfire]

Just like that.

The new lanc is more of a...basing ship than fighting in spawn ship...theyre better to play in fr battles than other places, imo.

[GoldenPlums]

I don't like this new pub lanc much. Each ship should be useable and useful, but I also thought the idea was that each ship was different. This new lanc is like some sad compromise. It's a bit of this and a bit of that and a bit of nothing really. I would have thought if you're going to change a ship's settings you could have come up with something better than this.

[Gemfire]

Lanc before was lame, any newb could come in and just fire multi randomly and kill with spread. Now it takes skill to kill people...like every other ship except weasel.

[Nam Tobor]

Secondly, I don't see how being able to charge close to an opponent just after he shot and paint his face full of yellow bullets is a bad thing? For me lancaster has become much more fun after the change.

I've never much like the idea of giving an opponent a chance to shoot before I can kill them. The best way to dogfight has always been to put yourself in a position where you can kill your opponent, but he can't kill you. Having a ship that can only kill weakened opponents makes that alot harder. The spider partially gets away with it beacuse of it's rapid fire rate. The lancaster isn't so lucky.

Thirdly, think spider scary, warbird ez pie.
Spiders can kill a lancaster easily, they just hit you once in a while and hold your energy down and you cannot shoot at them not risking to get killed by one bullet.
Warbirds on other hand are easy to kill, either hit them after they shot, or get a shot in on them, get close and kill them with another shot. I rarely get killed in a dogfight against a warbird now.

I don't know if I agree with that. WB's now fight lancasters like they used to fight spiders. By keeping their distance, making the lanc chase them, and firing when it's safe. Obviously this is a viable tactic when fighting ANY ship, but especially against the new lanc. The spider is alot better at chasing, and the new lanc has no long range options like the WB or old lanc.

I don't know how you play with Lancaster but I think it has become a MUCH better ship after the change. But you must change the style you use, the old fashion way of using Lancaster is as you say not working anymore.

I agree with you 100% on this one. I didn't intend for my original post to sound so much like a disgruntled pilot whining about his now outdated tactics. If the new lancaster stays as is, I imagine I'll get used to it pretty quickly.

My original point was that in an effort to make the lancaster more competitive, the admins may have miscalculated. The idea of creating a ship halfway between a WB and a spider is a clever one, but I don't think the new lanc holds up competitively. I think it's actually a step backwards.

Other posters have pointed out that right now lancaster usage is artifically high, as people are trying out the new settings. We'll have to wait and see if it stays up. I'm predicting that it won't, but lord knows I've been wrong before. I'd be curious if there's any server-side statistics of ship usage, so we'd know for sure if it's up, instead of relying on anecdotal evidence.

[AlbaRst!]

i don't really know how this ship was before it went through its changes, but it seems that this makes it harder to play this ship. in tw opposed to chaos, the lancaster is much much slower, and than having to hit people twice with the bullets seems kind of wrong. it should be a one shot like warbird, which i heard it was before..but i'm a newbie so what do i know right?

[1ight]

Face the facts, be a man, stick with it. I have had no problems with the new lanc when playing with it. And you don't need to be 1 cm from the opponent to get sure hits.. the thing is that you don't know your own ship (and most likely you are new to the game). It takes time to manuver a ship, and time to understand it.

[colony]

Like 1 blow to the head isint enough, they start to hit me twice!
I dont like it :/

[duel pasta]

To much people are using that silly lancester now. You can make a lancaster turret now, it's fun.

[Rion.]

People did Lanc turrets before...

(Ice Weasel?)

[Ewan]

I think the new Lanc is a good idea but it's still rarely used, and normally quite useless in a basing game. I do like playing it, but it seems that it never gets as many kills as a spider, jav or even sometimes a wb. I thinj TW needs to look into tweaking it a little more, maybe make the bullet speed a little higher, and the recharge too.