[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
this may be a case of the simulator being jacked, I'll try and run some real-world tests tommarow.

Phoenix-D

Ok, it may be that. It also may be that in my "Real World" test I neglected to play with the fleet arangments and see if that had any impact. I left all that default so both sides wer staying in a nice V formation. It may be that this skewed my results in favor of the APB since it had the larger fleet.

But, regardless of that my test was trying to find out whether they weapons were balanced at a point in the game when PPB was strongest. In real life the enemy would not wait for you to get to PPBV and LC's to attack. My APB and MB races were both well ahead of PPB in ship tech early on. They both had LC and level 2 of their weapon almost 6 months before PPB race had started on PPB's. They were still on destroyers and researching Physics 2.

There very well may be a valid point that the PPB is imbalanced at certain points in the game. When it jumps to PPB II for instance. It also may be that that point in the game corelates with about the time when Master B is ready to move on any poor sap unlucky enough to start near him.

I still disagree that it is an uber-weapon. Yes, it is very popular with the better players. But is that why they are better? I think those people are just modest and don't realize that they would have much sucess regardless of which particular weapon they choose. But that is an argument for another thread.

Early on a PPB using race would have trouble against one that concentrated on DUC's. Late in the game the PPB race would have trouble against races with APB's. It's the mid game when the PPB's are king. But it's also the mid game when most games are won or lost.

Any amount of changing we do to make them less powerul is going to make them less efective in the mid game when they are superior, but it will not make them any better in the late game when they are already inferior.

Geoschmo