Re: Depleted Uranium Cannons to powerful!
 

Saben,
I agree with your statement:

"Lastly, I agree that balance is important. But in my mind that balance is between missile, beam, boarding, AMS, repair, carriers, troop transports, and special case ships. The effectiveness gain for bothering to research down more than one beam weapon tree is not worth the research expenditure."

That was my point. I did not mean to infer that a player should research more than 1 beam style weapon.
Unless in the full game you would need to reach a certain level in two separate fields to open a new field. EX: MB level 4 and APB level 5 to get "Hull Fracturing Beam of Kluge" field. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: Depleted Uranium Cannons to powerful!
 

I haven't seen the whole tech tree yet, but it's starting to look to me like there are definite winners and losers in the weapons tree, which is a shame, since all incentive to use the rest of the tree and have a broader tech range goes away.

Something that might fix that would be to add some new parameters to the weapons, making different ones better in certain situations. Perhaps this could be done by making the accuracy vary by weapon-type. Or if certain armors or shields did better against certain weapon types (or vice-versa). (ie: say the next level of shields above the Phased ones only took 50% damage from phased weapons, or say a new armor type that is immune or takes reduced damage from projectile weapons.)

That sort of stuff would make more of a rock-paper-scissors feel to the tech tree, where if the enemy spcializes too much, you could develop the counter-measure.