So the red-headed stepchild of the Sins unit roster. It gets hard countered or breaks even with just about everything in the game, and is particularly crap with Visari in the game since they can hard counter it with one lab. What is it good against? Er, supports that anything can beat and with the current flak nerf, flak; except no one will spam flak anymore. With corvettes now in the game and considered viable unit, what exactly is the point of LFs anymore? Corvettes do a better job of cheap cannon fodder, do NOT lose to equal costs of LRFs, and lose to units LFs would have lost to as well.
Problems with LFs:
-Corvettes have similar damage output for less cost.
-They get hard countered by LRFs, a commonly spammed early game unit.
-They get hard countered by HCs, a commonly spammed late game unit.
-They get hard countered by turrets. TURRETS!
-The don't do much to cap ships, a unit that is at the peak of its power during the early game when LFs would normally see the most use.
-While they 'win' against flak, LFs low DPS means they still take eons to actually win that fight. As an option to try and quickly eliminate enemy flak to minimize damage to your strike craft, they fail.
-Likewise their low DPS gives them similar issues against carriers. They can kill the carriers...eventually. But killing said carriers before the strike craft vaporize the rest of your fleet? They fail. If I need flak to survive the strike craft, why not just use those flak to kill the defenceless carriers afterwards too?
Some possible solutions (not suggesting ALL OF THEM AT ONCE):
-Their damage needs to scale better with upgrades.
-They need increased damage modifiers vs the units they are supposed to counter so they are better hard counters to flak and kill carriers faster.
-Visari one isn't in Rebellion yet, but I hope that thing is getting major buffs. It was losing to scout spam it was so cost ineffective.
-They need better base stats so it isn't clearly better to skip them in favour of corvettes for early neutral clearing.
-Give them a new late-game tech option that gives them a significant improvement; not enough to fight units that counter them but enough that they will easily stomp the units they should be beating.