Toast
Space Marshal
I haven't seen much hatred directed at the Gladius, either. It's only in Standoff that I ever noticed anyone disliking the Gladius. It's kind of a minor character in Privateer, and Armada as a whole was kind of a minor player in the whole series as far as plot goes.
If I may be excused for running onto a Standoff tangent, the "guns placement" issue isn't the only problem we're looking at here. The game engines have quirks that result in more "hating" for a fighter in one instance than another. I read that there were some complaints about the Raptor and lack of gun convergence in Standoff, which took a favorite fighter from WC1 and caused it to be all but worthless in Standoff. You can't argue with the "official" ship dimensions - but to the game designer, they're just numbers, right? But lots of weird things can happen with numbers when you start getting into the details of the game engine.
Here's a fighter that really gets a lot of hatred: the Epee.
In WC2, ships were still bitmapped, and the Epee was very heavily derided by fans for its poor durability. I don't remember any official/canon sources criticizing the Epee for its poor armor (granted, I haven't read the novels), but in fanon you can find all sorts of criticism directed at the Epee for being under-armored. (tissue paper, toilet paper, etc.) In WC2, it was about as easy to get hit in an Epee as a Sabre - I don't know for a fact, but I suspect that the collision detection radius for an Epee wasn't much smaller than any of the other fighters in WC2, so you still caught a lot of fire. In Standoff, the Epee is fiendishly effective because it's actually so small, it's very difficult to hit. Where you have to make a major maneuver in a Sabre or Gladius to avoid being hit, in an Epee you can practically just twiddle the joystick and dodge fire by inches. The light armor isn't as much of an issue because even when you do get hit, it's probably not with all barrels of a full guns salvo.
If Standoff were to follow the original game experience despite the models, the Epee would be really awful to fly, and the Raptor would be very potent. I still really, really like Standoff, though - even if the move to the Prophecy engine causes all kinds of cognitive dissonance with memories of WC1 and WC2 gameplay.
As for hating the Gladius - the incarnations of the Gladius are so far apart from one another between Privateer and Armada, I didn't know what to expect from its incarnation in Standoff. Although it's a real trial to fly it, I like that the Standoff Gladius has personality, in the way that the Scimitar has personality. And to make another cross-engine comparison - the Gladius feels a little like the Y-wing to the Rapier's X-wing.
If I may be excused for running onto a Standoff tangent, the "guns placement" issue isn't the only problem we're looking at here. The game engines have quirks that result in more "hating" for a fighter in one instance than another. I read that there were some complaints about the Raptor and lack of gun convergence in Standoff, which took a favorite fighter from WC1 and caused it to be all but worthless in Standoff. You can't argue with the "official" ship dimensions - but to the game designer, they're just numbers, right? But lots of weird things can happen with numbers when you start getting into the details of the game engine.
Here's a fighter that really gets a lot of hatred: the Epee.
In WC2, ships were still bitmapped, and the Epee was very heavily derided by fans for its poor durability. I don't remember any official/canon sources criticizing the Epee for its poor armor (granted, I haven't read the novels), but in fanon you can find all sorts of criticism directed at the Epee for being under-armored. (tissue paper, toilet paper, etc.) In WC2, it was about as easy to get hit in an Epee as a Sabre - I don't know for a fact, but I suspect that the collision detection radius for an Epee wasn't much smaller than any of the other fighters in WC2, so you still caught a lot of fire. In Standoff, the Epee is fiendishly effective because it's actually so small, it's very difficult to hit. Where you have to make a major maneuver in a Sabre or Gladius to avoid being hit, in an Epee you can practically just twiddle the joystick and dodge fire by inches. The light armor isn't as much of an issue because even when you do get hit, it's probably not with all barrels of a full guns salvo.
If Standoff were to follow the original game experience despite the models, the Epee would be really awful to fly, and the Raptor would be very potent. I still really, really like Standoff, though - even if the move to the Prophecy engine causes all kinds of cognitive dissonance with memories of WC1 and WC2 gameplay.
As for hating the Gladius - the incarnations of the Gladius are so far apart from one another between Privateer and Armada, I didn't know what to expect from its incarnation in Standoff. Although it's a real trial to fly it, I like that the Standoff Gladius has personality, in the way that the Scimitar has personality. And to make another cross-engine comparison - the Gladius feels a little like the Y-wing to the Rapier's X-wing.