Weapon Diversity & Balance

[stecal]

I was thinking that the DUC would be prime candidate for 1/4 damage to shields. It is a physical projectile instead of the usual energy weapons that are the other SE4 standards. I would think that energy beams would only affect energy shields. Explosive warheads and missiles would possibly be another 1/4 damage vs shields too.

I have found over time, since I invariably seem to run out of minerals, that some "useless" weapons like APB, Torps, ripper beams, and quantums are quite efficient in that they cost very few minerals & low rad to build, reducing build cost, construction time, & maintenance. I usually have an entire range of "E" class economy ships that I can upgrade later.

[Q]

Baron I find your ideas excellent and hope MM listens to you!
I recently discovered something you probably knew already for a long time but for me it was new: the time distortion bomb says "4x damage to the shields plus normal damage". This is not completely correct. It will do either damage to the shields or normal damage. Example: you hit a ship with remaining 40 shield points with a time distortion bomb that does 60kT normal damage (large mount). First the remaining 40 shield points are destroyed (equals 10kT of normal damage impact) then there will be a damage of only 50kT to the ship.
Therefore the new damage type of quarter/half damage to the shields get really very interesting in my opinion for mods like you propose.

[Fyron]

I have found over time, since I invariably seem to run out of minerals, that some "useless" weapons like APB, Torps, ripper beams, and quantums are quite efficient in that they cost very few minerals & low rad to build, reducing build cost, construction time, & maintenance. I usually have an entire range of "E" class economy ships that I can upgrade later.

Ummm.... the Anti-Proton Beam is by far the most powerful weapon in the game overall (esp. when combined with a shield depleter or two). Only a few weapons can even come close to it's power in the later game, and most of them are racial weapons. Look at damage/rate/kiloton ratios instead of just raw damage values. Very few weapons can compare to the APB. High damage per shot weapons generally do much less damage overall, and so are often over-powered by ships using APBs.

[spoon]

[quote]Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:

.... the Anti-Proton Beam is by far the most powerful weapon in the game overall

The only offensive weapons you really need are the DUC (early game), PPB (mid game) and Shield Depleters + APB (late game).

Having weapons that filled more niches would be nice. Close range uber-weapon (current one only slightly beats out APB, so isn't worth the loss in flexibility), Long range + low damage, high damage + 1/4 dam to shields).

Putting them in would require a great deal of balance testing, though...

[Ed Kolis]

Yeah... remember when SJ doubled the APB's damage but gave it quarter to shields in the PBW Version of P&N? I quickly realized that you could design a mega uber ship with just shield depleters and APB's - the shield depleters do around 4 HP/kT/round to shields while the modified APB's do something close to that to internal systems and armor! SJ promptly fixed this by increasing the rads cost of APB's to insanely high levels - something like 1200 rads for just one top-level APB!