Talon1579 wrote:

If we start taking things from the film only- we have no idea how fast ships go, and a single X-Wing can take on at least 6 TIEs. Remember the emphasis here is on one-on-one combat. Unfortunately its difficult to fly in formation and work together in BF2142 due to their ridiculous VOIP system. Yes, it can be achieved with practice - but we want the game to appeal to the casual gamer.

To sum up (sorry for length): We want each fighter to have an equal chance of beating its counterpart. This should be done by giving Imperial fighters more speed and manouverability, like in the X-Wing series, to balnce out against the Rebel craft's shields and stronger hull.

edit: In fact, I posted a balance post designed to address this in this forum some time back. I'll try and find it. There we go: http://fsmod.com/fsforums/viewtopic.php?id=2697

That's not entirely true. From the movies we know that Rebel fighters have shields, we know that standard TIE Fighters are faster than X & Y-wings as we see them outrun by them in the trench runs of ANH. Even at full throttle the X-wings fail to match the TIE's for speed. We also see that when a TIE Fighter manages to get on the tail of a Rebel fighter, due to the TIE's manouverability the Rebel pilot will have a very hard time shaking him off his tail. We also know that Rebel ships are of a sturdier design, you can take this from the visual cues in the design of the models, but you can also surmise this from the amount of fire it takes to take a Rebel fighter down when compared to the amount of fire it takes to take out a TIE. Usually one good clean shot will take out a TIE, compared to an X-wing or Y-wing being able to take a few shots while staying intact. It usually takes a concentrated sustained burst of fire to take out the Rebel ship. And all this can be gleaned just from watching the movies.

So there are some rules regarding these ships set up by the movies regardless of the games that have followed. We just have to find the happy medium between lore accuracy and good gameplay, without resorting to rubbish like giving TIEs shields and missiles, (SWBF2 anybody? ) but there is already balance there as someone mentioned before...

Rebel fighters = Sturdy, shielded, slower ships with secondary weapons in the form of missile/torpedoes.

Imperial Fighters = Unshielded, faster, more manouverable ships.

We just have to work with that formula and get it balanced just right without going off the deep end.