SE V: Unique Abilities And Ideas

[Suicide Junkie]

My point is that you DON'T get middle of the road fighters if you do it right.
You can build such multirole fighters in CBmod, but they simply are not as good in battle as efficient specialized designs.

Don't avoid generic hulls because you worry they will lead to a single generic uberdesign.
Balanced components will prevent that without you having to add restrictions.

"Fighter" in SE is IMO very equivalent to "Aircraft" in naval battles.
A bomber is the same basic thing as a dogfighter, just with less speed/engine (QNP is critical), less armor and big, slow bombardment weapons.

In a similar manner, a missile ship, a point defense ship, and an assault gunship are all the same; ships. Battleship size hulls, for a typical example. What you put on them determines what they are.
You can put missiles on an assault ship, but because all that close-quarters armor is a drain and missiles work best from max range, it just dosen't work as well. Mixing the guns is bad too, since you won't be able to use all of them effectively at the same time.
Instead, you have dedicated missile ships and dedicated assault ships and dedicated PD ships. They are individually more efficient, and each design complements the others by covering their weak points.

Because of this, those three designs emerge naturally in any game. A single wanna-be uberdesign fails because a mixed force of more efficient designs can win more battles given the same resources.

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Allowing flexibility and generality does not result in one omnifighter design, provided that you have appropriately balanced components.
It does work in practice. I see it every day in PBW games of CBmod. Dogfighters, interceptors, bombers and eventually decoy fighters are very very distinctive, even though there are no restrictions on what you install, and the hulls are generalized.

In stock, everything is about making the one uberdesign, plus some logistics.
Proper balance allows or even requires multiple designs to coexist in a highly competitive environment with extremely generic and unrestricted hulls.

/end rant of the day