[Alpha Kodiak]

Originally posted by Q:

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Originally posted by Taera:

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7. Changed - Engine Damaging Weapons no longer skip shields.

IMO this is the best feature in the listed.
This thing will realy balance the things.

A suggestion:
There are three engine-damage weapons: Ionic Dispenser, Ionic Missile and Massive Ionic Dispenser. The first one is fine because its easy to get, the second one is seeking so its fine too, but there is the Massive Ionic Dispenser. I suggest that this weapon will have "skips shields" innit.

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The more I think about this the less I like it!

I absolutely agree with you Taera that the engine damaging weapons were too powerful. But that's a quantitative problem and can easily modified by decreasing the damage amount, decreasing the weapons range, increasing the reload time, increasing the component size or any combination of these!
But this fix MM made completely alters the quality of the weapons and IMHO makes them pretty unattractive. But the worst is that this is now hard coded and we can't change it!!
If I created or modded a race that uses heavily this weapon type I would be rather frustrated, because the research and design files of this race will have to be significantly redesigned after the Version update.
Why not just add a new damage type (only engines, does not skip shield) while keeping the old one (only engines, skips all shields). That's what you propose for the massive ionic disperser and I strongly agree with you Taera. Then at least we can decide what damage type we give these weapons.
After all patches should add something to the game not remove things!

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There was a lot of concern about this one, but in my experience it is not the problem that it seems to be at first. I was in the middle of developing an AI that used Ionic Dispersers fairly heavily when this came down. They do damage shields and, as long as they are used in conjuction with other weapons, they are quite deadly. Remember that once the shields are down, three hits from an ionic disperser doing at least 40 points of damage (level 3/large mount) in an unmodded game will completely render a warship useless unless it has undamaged supply storage or a quantum reactor. Even if it has those, it is a sitting duck. When I was testing my new AI, I watched a fleet armed with Telekinetic Projectors and Ionic Dispersers tear a similar sized Rage fleet of mixed missiles and PPBs to pieces (after the change to not skip shields). Remember too, that it still skips armor, so they are especially effective against organic races that try to rely on armor.

To make a long story short (too late), I think that it makes sense for shields to interfere with a weapon of this type, and it does not make them useless. Rather it forces them into a more secondary role, which makes sense given the type of weapon they are.