Are Beams and 100% Explosive Non-Missiles Good Now?

[Tamren Shade]

I just wanted to know if anyone has gotten any testing in with the new weapon changes. I did just finish watching Yamato 2199 and I really want to build some ginormous beam turrets......

Spoiler: Like this!

 

[Kingofanime]

I tested my beam/beam weapon. And for me personally, it does much better block destruction than before, when shooting at close range targets. But it is completely incapable of destroying any blocks of any kind on long range targets (when the target is not in the same sector as the weapon)

 

[-Moose-]

I didn't get to much time to play around with them. However my initial impression is that beams are great if you can keep them focused on the target in one spot long enough to "dig through" the armor. Otherwise cannons still make for a better anti system and armor weapon simply because you can fire and forget them. Beams seem to be much more viable however.

Also, all my explosive weapons need a refit. 10% does not cut it.

Has anyone played with pierce weapons? What was done exactly?

 

[kingreol]

Pierce got fixed to scale with module ratios as should be. No more missiles being full pierce and hitting shields at full. It was rather broken tech, and many knew it, in a way was hidden knowledge for new players cause yah super missiles hitting you hurts a lot more then these fixed missiles

 

[-Moose-]

Pierce got fixed to scale with module ratios as should be. No more missiles being full pierce and hitting shields at full. It was rather broken tech, and many knew it, in a way was hidden knowledge for new players cause yah super missiles hitting you hurts a lot more then these fixed missiles

Darn :/ back to using punch for everything.

 

[Jojomo]

I didn't get to much time to play around with them. However my initial impression is that beams are great if you can keep them focused on the target in one spot long enough to "dig through" the armor. Otherwise cannons still make for a better anti system and armor weapon simply because you can fire and forget them. Beams seem to be much more viable however.

Also, all my explosive weapons need a refit. 10% does not cut it.

Has anyone played with pierce weapons? What was done exactly?

Surely cannons are no better in that respect? Cannons fire projectiles of 10 damage (all from the wiki, which may or may not be correct), and each beam hit (i.e. 5 per second) is also 10 damage.
So if follow-up hits can't be relied on to hit the same block as the first hit, there's no difference: both do 10 damage on the initial hit.

And as vanilla beams fire at peak rates of 5/sec, and vanilla cannons at a peak rate of 1/sec, we can probably assume the beam follow-up hits are more likely to be on the first block that the cannon follow-up hits...which would make beams better in this respect.

 

[jorgekorke]

I may be wrong, but now with this percentage fix means that explosive cannon weapons are a lot weaker now, right?

To get the same thing you had in the past with 100/100/10, you need now 100/100/100 - 90 more blocks to do the same damage it had before...

Someone correct me if I'm wrong please.

 

[Jarraff]

Cannon explosive is not weaker, it is the same. The 210 modules for the 100/100/10 have to be be reproportioned to 70/70/70 for the same damage.
[doublepost=1485838422,1485838265][/doublepost]Cannon explosive is not weaker, it is the same. The 210 modules for the 100/100/10 have to be be reproportioned to 70/70/70 for the same damage potential.

Though I have not fully tested it.

 

[Kingofanime]

They have hot-fixed the range issue that I had. I tested some 24-Beam/24-Beam/24-Overdrive turrets against a 900 mass ship. The shields felt like they went down very fast. The armor hp's felt like they went down at a medium rate. The systems hp's felt like they went down slow and at times not at all. I thought it might have been an accuracy issue, so I followed the enemy ship in a cloak-stick-ship and it turned out it was just the beam pass-through effect damaging blocks but not killing them. I guess I need go bigger, or hit the same spot with multiple shots for block destruction.

 

[StarWars1981]

Cannon explosive effect can now go above the 10% effect it could have before. Say, 100/100/10 can now go up to 100/100/100 and get more explosive effect - spreading damage over a larger area. As far as I'm aware it has not been changed in other ways.

 

[Kingofanime]

I will post my latest weapons test for people's viewing pleasure.

1400-Beam/1400-Beam/1400-Explosive (4 outputs)

Spoiler: ship and target

The target is 1 layer of advanced armor, filled mostly with shield capacitors.

Spoiler: results

62 blocks deep

 

[-Moose-]

Surely cannons are no better in that respect? Cannons fire projectiles of 10 damage (all from the wiki, which may or may not be correct), and each beam hit (i.e. 5 per second) is also 10 damage.
So if follow-up hits can't be relied on to hit the same block as the first hit, there's no difference: both do 10 damage on the initial hit.

And as vanilla beams fire at peak rates of 5/sec, and vanilla cannons at a peak rate of 1/sec, we can probably assume the beam follow-up hits are more likely to be on the first block that the cannon follow-up hits...which would make beams better in this respect.

I don't mean damage wise I mean by nature beams appear to be less effective at penetrating armor. What I mean is, once a cannon hits the enemy ship and goes through the armor, it keeps going through the systems even if the enemy ship moves. While a beam might break through the armor, if the enemy ship moves, then the beam will have to break through the armor again in order to get to the systems.

However once it does get through the armor, HOOOBOY then it really is unmatched against large chunks of shield blocks.

Therefore, I would consider cannons to be a better armor penetrating weapon of choice.

Cannon explosive effect can now go above the 10% effect it could have before. Say, 100/100/10 can now go up to 100/100/100 and get more explosive effect - spreading damage over a larger area. As far as I'm aware it has not been changed in other ways.

This is incorrect. The radius will be capped at 1 block. However the more explosive effect blocks you have the more damage will be applied to adjacent blocks. Basically, explosives are still the exact same, except you have to go above 10% in order to actually break any adjacent blocks. Which kind of sucks for smaller cannon/beam/explosive weapons. They used to break a few shield blocks at 10% but can no longer do so.

 

[Jojomo]

I don't mean damage wise I mean by nature beams appear to be less effective at penetrating armor. What I mean is, once a cannon hits the enemy ship and goes through the armor, it keeps going through the systems even if the enemy ship moves. While a beam might break through the armor, if the enemy ship moves, then the beam will have to break through the armor again in order to get to the systems.

I don't really understand the scenario you're thinking of.

The cannon does 10 damage, as does the initial hit (ignoring the following 4) from the beam. There's no difference in how they interact with movement, because there is no movement - we're talking about a single point in time.

If we then look at follow-up shots the cannon will land them at 1 second intervals, while the beam will land them (the first 4 followup hits) at 0.2 second intervals.

So if we only look at the initial hit, they're identical.

If we also look at follow-up hits the beam will perform either identically, or better (with respect to the performance we're discussing) thanks to the smaller interval between hits.

 

[jorgekorke]

This is incorrect. The radius will be capped at 1 block. However the more explosive effect blocks you have the more damage will be applied to adjacent blocks. Basically, explosives are still the exact same, except you have to go above 10% in order to actually break any adjacent blocks. Which kind of sucks for smaller cannon/beam/explosive weapons. They used to break a few shield blocks at 10% but can no longer do so.

So that means the explosive blocks do not add up any damage numbers, they just distribute the existing damage to the neighbour blocks, right? My initial thought was right, then?

 

[Az14el]

old 10% explosive effect weapons that worked well previously seem to have some trouble now, can't break a single block of adv with piercing using 48 1.7k per hit outputs & 2 10.8k per hit outputs on one c-c-e10 set up (even just the two 10.8k c-c-e outputs would have been able to dig quite deep holes previously)

At the moment that particular gun will obliterate hull or standard very quickly, piercing on advanced or equivalent can stop it entirely reducing hits to "<1", left clicking and focusing a single block for even a few minutes doesn't scratch it, despite the 10.8k hits displaying at around 74 damage (i would have imagined 90+ with the new system, abysmal even if it actually did as much as it said! but then again this is an armor "buff" all around)

 

[Dire Venom]

If you were to make a large array of beam-pulse-expolsive, how big might you make each one:?
Ill do some tests anyway, but I figure if you can size them right they could be very effective (when controlled by the ai)

 

[Ithirahad]

old 10% explosive effect weapons that worked well previously seem to have some trouble now, can't break a single block of adv with piercing using 48 1.7k per hit outputs & 2 10.8k per hit outputs on one c-c-e10 set up (even just the two 10.8k c-c-e outputs would have been able to dig quite deep holes previously)

At the moment that particular gun will obliterate hull or standard very quickly, piercing on advanced or equivalent can stop it entirely reducing hits to "<1", left clicking and focusing a single block for even a few minutes doesn't scratch it, despite the 10.8k hits displaying at around 74 damage (i would have imagined 90+ with the new system, abysmal even if it actually did as much as it said! but then again this is an armor "buff" all around)

They changed the damage model. /e10 is not a thing any more; use /e100 for full damage distribution (the radius is still 1).