I really agree with the issue brought up in this topic. The weapons systems in general need some love!
And cannon really need a good rework in the way they work.
People who don't like bugs and playing around them should not play betas, much less alphas. You will only drive yourself insane.
Gotta go zen hippy, "Its all good man, everything will work itself out in the end" and be happy that they've acknowledged that its an issue and that they will address it in due time.
With all due respect, if everyone thought like that, it would make the devs' lives much harder.. Having people whining about bugs now is much better than having people whining about bugs when the game has gone gold!
Besides, they're using a bug tracker, which means they have a way to get rid of duplicates and non-issues themselves. And the frequency at which they get reminded about something might actually help gauge what is more pressing, and whether a bug is actually fixed or not.
Well, without being able to see the base code, I can't really say. But a common one that crops up is that the problem isn't so much with that one small area, but how it interacts with everything else.
Perhaps that code itself is working perfectly, but the code it is based on that is running a dozen other things as well is where the issue is. Thing is, its a big complicated block of code and everything else is running just fine off of it. The change that fixes this one issue might involve changing something else that would break more than it fixed.
Or, perhaps a more likely answer, they don't exactly have a building full of coders and testers and bug fixers. They could hold their daily meetings in a phone booth (heh, do kids even know what a phone booth is anymore?). When you've got that few resources, you spend them on what gives the most immediate and substantial return for your investment. Fixing one enhancement for one weapon type isn't going to give them a vastly improved gameplay experience (not like how the movable rails are), so its low man on the totem pole. One of those "When I've got nothing better to do" kind of fixes.
Whatever the reason, it is rarely as simple as "Oh, I just need to go change this 3 to a 4 and it'll work perfectly!".
Personally, I'm more inclined to think its more of a logical issue than coding issue. Its because the way the game works right now, the explosive effect is basically a beefed up punch-through effect. Punch-through penetrates blocks until all the damage of the shot is absorbed(according to the wiki, but it seems it stops before that..), in a straight line from the impact point. And explosive has a fixed damage radius with fall-off, and it apparently penetrates in all directions from that impact point up to the explosive radius, or at least, that's how it works on the missiles. Because of the fall-off, it acts in a similar way to the punch-through effect, each blocks in the radius taking successively less damage. Particularly given blocks have such low health that the fall-off doesn't matter too much.
The problem here is, what's the point of the punch-through effect if the explosive effect is much more effective already at digging holes and at punching through in all directions? Its redundant.
If they'd change the way they're handling weapons ballistics a little, and make armor effective at absorbing damage they could fix this. Thus, I'm thinking they must be keeping that for a combat overhaul upgrade.
Odd, when I want to kill a core, I prefer beams and cannons WITHOUT explosive modules. Missiles are generally preferred for combat, in my experience, because they don't require aiming. They're virtually always used as either homing or heatseekers, I've never seen anyone use dumb fire missiles as anything but base killers.
I prefer to use beams/cannons due to their ability to do pinpoint damage to very small areas, and to use punchthrough as a core driller. I at least don't WANT to have explosive on them, because it defeats my main purpose for them (to kill a ship with absolute minimum of damage, so that I can either capture it or salvage it). Even if explosive worked correctly on them, I still wouldn't want to use it.
Missiles are great for bulk easy to use damage. Beams and Cannons are great for pinpoint surgical strikes. Pair a beam or cannon punchthrough turret with a turret with a 100% efficient stop effect, and its amazing efficient at taking out smaller ships. Stop beam holds them down, the punchthrough beam drills down to their core quickly and easily, leaving you with a 99% intact ship to claim for yourself.
See, the thing here is that this game isn't a homing and heat-seeking missile simulator. Other weapons aren't meant to be used for harvesting pirate loot more easily. And you've said it yourself, the game will change, and you probably won't be able to use those weapons to do surgical strikes either, except maybe for the beam weapons. There's no need to advertise the use of those weapons in a specific way to attempt to quell others' justified concerns. That's actually a fallacy and it interfere with the actual debate.
If the dev team had explicitly said those weapons were meant to harvest pirate ships, then you'd be right, but that's not the case AFAIK.
However, I think this problem is far more consequential than it's being made out to be. Missiles are used far more than they would be if this were fixed. In the grand scheme of things, this is a pretty big gameplay difference. It drastically alters battle strategy and ship design because weapons other than missiles lack any blast radius (barring multiple outputs, which are far less effective per mass than explosions) making them less effective for hitting cores and inner systems, and less effective for block destruction in general other than (maybe) surface armor.
My proposal is that it is worth the time investment to fix this problem sooner rather than later. I don't want to wait another year to use explosive cannons and beams, and I doubt anyone else does either.
Yeah, missiles are ridiculous as of now. There is so many reasons to use them over anything else..
But its a problem with several causes, and even if they properly fix canons and beams, it will take a little more than that to solve all this.
Its impossible to dodge missiles, they fly faster than anything can, and outrunning the shooter to get out of missile range is hard, given all ship are capped at around the same speed limit. (overdrive is costly in terms of space and not all that common) They're usually fired in volleys and shooting them all down is very hard even for turrets.(especially when missile defense turrets die the second you get in a fight!) They also got a very long range, insane penetration, and the damage per module is out of this world for homing missiles!
There is no missile warning or tracking for those getting shot at, they currently blow up anything, docked or not, inside a ship near the hull, and they can home in into astronauts..
Some of these are meant to change eventually, some are bugs, but they're all contributing to making missiles overpowered compared to all other weapons. Not to mention, missiles typically don't need effects to be effective, while other weapons like cannons will need effect along with a slaved weapon system to be of any use. And several weapon combos aren't working properly as of now. The long-range canon shoots out of visual range, and there is no zoom or anything of the sort to help with that. And the shotgun effect is working oddly right now..
There are a couple more, but I'll stop here ^^;
Hopefully, fixing this bug will get us closer to a weapon overhaul.
