I think I found the solution to our problem!
Original Problem:
PPB seems to be unbalanced, being very cheap to research and comparable or superior to the strongest weapons, such as APBs that at their highest level cost almost 6 times PPBs at their highest level.
Opposite positions in the discussion were.
a- it is one of the few late game weapons left. Don't touch it. If any change needs to be made, just increase the research cost.
b- weapon must be weakened. And it must be reduced to a "support" weapon role. Reducing damage, increasing size or reload rate are just different ways to achieve the same result.
To solve the question if PPBs should be a main weapon or only a support weapon, I went back to SE3, and found that PPBs were a MAIN weapon in SE3.
IMHO this entire problem was originated when weapons were converted from SE3.
In SE3, weapons (or any other component BTW) couldn't have different tonnage. Weapons could only be balanced by changing their damage and reload time.
A good balance was achieved and you had a good palette of different interesting weapons.
When weapons were copied from SE3 into SE4, they were assigned different tonnage values, while damage and range were simply scaled up in the same way for all weapons.
That's when SE3 balance was lost, damage rating of "heavy" weapons was lowered while that of "light" weapons was increased.
Proposal for a quick "balance mod": make tonnage of all weapons equal, say 30 or 40 kt.
Suddenly many "forgotten" weapons such as Torpedoes, Wave-Motion, Graviton Hellbores, Incinerator Beams are back among the highest damage weapons, and there is not a weapon far above the rest.
I think we can have SE3 balance back this way, and remove the unbalance I intuitively noticed since the first time I played SE4, but I didn't actually recognize until now.
You should be a little more careful with some weapons that were not in SE3, since some can grow too weak or too strong.
But there are A LOT of different late game options.
If you want I can show you some numbers to help you see my point. Or I can make and post this "SE3 balance" mod.
I admit that I initially though position B was right, and I voted to decrease PPB's power.
Now, after this observation I'm changing my vote to other.
My conclusion is that TONNAGE of ALL weapons, not just PPB needs to be revised.
Or if you want to keep current tonnage, compensate by changing damage.
If any change has to be made ONLY to PPBs, I'd agree that it should only be increasing its research cost to make it more fair to pay the same research points to get a similar weapon.
Tenryu's idea, increasing research cost by adding more techs levels and intermediate steps, instead of just increasing the initial cost sounds very interesting.
[ May 30, 2002, 04:44: Message edited by: Andrés Lescano ]