It’s not a sniper.
It is a long range frigate. It is a sniper in context of shooting other ships from afar, in the terms of how our ships are equipped, but not in terms of one-shotting soldiers in the head and lurking at the end of the map all the time.
The long range weaponry takes up a lot of space in the ship, making it fragile and huge. Minefields therefore are used as a defensive measure. It’s quite okay on such a ship, as long as you don’t start by thinking this is BattleField and that’s a sniper class. Albeit even in those games, snipers have claymores, because you might want to secure your sniping position against ambushes.
The other modules LRF have, encourage you to actually fly in the sniper in a frigate heavy team as part of the team:
- you can use a camo which almost lasts forever to either conceal your flank, or drift into an enemy team to deploy your dirty payload.
- you can use IR Pulsar to punish teams which try to focus you.
- you can use you backjump to retreat into your own team behind you.
- you have terribly offensive weapons which are very useful, if your LRF isnt too LR far away.
I don’t see any logical flaws with this ship to be a good minelayer. Minelayers in reality are transport vehicles with medium armor, and usually low weaponry. Laying mines is usually a defensive measure, often done by pioneer troops. In territory you control.
Tacklers as their name suggest, are not submarines. They do not infiltrate the enemy on their own, instead, they use it for tactical purposes, and short term infiltration. If Tacklers would be cloaky submarines, enemy admirals would quickly deploy tachyon detection grids to disable any cloaking ship in a defense position, but since it’s not a strategic ship which can cloak for eons, they just equip small ships with small portable detectors.
Their purpose is to immobilize (tackle) enemies for your team, especially if they want to escape their fate or rush your position. If you are alone, cloaked, far away, you might have a good survival rate, but also a very bad W/L ratio.
The idea to kill the enemy by pooping passive AoE weaponry might sound smart, but it would feel rather gamebreaking if every fight is decided by placing stuff which should keep you from conquering others’ area in the middle of the enemy team non stop. You can already try to drift into the enemy team with a LRF and I think that’s quite a fair move.