@derakon, on Jan 18 2008, 09:20 AM, said in Making Fighters Fun:

With respect to the original question, I strongly recommend checking out EVO. EVO has effective fighters, but it's a serious accomplishment to take out, say, a Voinian Cruiser in a UE fighter (I've done it, it took a long time and it was pretty dodgy business, but it was fun). Fighters fare best in dogfights, but if you're in a heavy ship and you don't have a screen of fighters, then the opposing fighters will quickly tear you a new one - that is, a group of fighters can seriously hurt a heavy ship even using the rather stupid AI.

What EVO doesn't have is many "mid-size" ships. There's the Freight-Courier, which is pretty slow, and then there's a few alien ships (the Arada and Lazira, primarily) which are decent but don't have the room to make taking down capships a breeze and don't have the speed that fightercraft do. In other words, the mid-size ships are actually balanced by having features of both fighters and heavy ships while not being as good at either as actual fighters or heavy ships are.

And that, Derakon, is one of the reasons EV:O was (and still is, in many ways) my favorite of the three. You really need to plan your moves out ahead of time before you jump into the fray and attack. Even if you outfitted your ship with everything to make it a super-ship and more, it still isn't easy to defeat the Voinian Dreadnought, or the Turncoat Fleet at New Alcatraz.