[Dev Build] Weapons 2.0 impressions from testing the basic 3

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Since beams are actually working now, unlike the last time I tried to compare weapons, I was able to compare missiles, beams, and cannons. Here's my impression of them (using testbeds with 4 groups of 3x5x10+1 weapons with a single computer, against a target <100m long with 10k reactor HP and 495k shields):

1. Beams: Decent DPS vs. shields, only taking a few shots to take them down, but once I hit the hull (aiming directly at the reactor, which is only protected by a layer of blue light slabs), everything slows to a crawl. The beams seem to just take out like 5 blocks per shot (and in a sort of cross pattern, as they both dig deeper under the block they took out and to the side), and the last second of firing seems like it is purely visual.
2. Missiles: DPS vs. shields is about the same as beams, with an extra help from an initial storage of 2 without any capacity blocks added. With tons of capacity added (20 missiles), the testbed can kill the test target in one volley. DPS vs. hull is nuts, it just plain erases chunks of the ship (see below), with the only downside that shields barely start to come back in between shots.
3. Cannons: Asthetically pleasing (basically a Klingon BoP disruptor, which is awesome), but recoil is bonkers. They're a little worse than missiles DPS-wise (both hull and shields) and even pointblank I had so much trouble staying on target that I ended up knocking the test target around. Also, while testing, an Isanth wandered too close to the traders and what followed was a 10-minute light show due to cannons being terribly inaccurate at normal combat ranges in StarMade.

Overall, my main complaints are as follows:

1. Recoil makes cannons a nightmare more suited to putting on space raves than to actual combat.
2. Missiles are a little too high DPS (better than cannons at this scale!), they could probably do with a longer reload if the damage is kept at this amount per module size.
3. Beams are crazy bad against hull/systems, and I don't see myself using them against anything larger than an Isanth without a buff to them.

Test target with missile holes in it (only the deflector area got hit multiple times, that's where the reactor is, this was a later test seeing how much hull stops missiles instead of going thru the blue lights...it's like the hull isn't even there):

 

[Raisinbat]

Beams are crazy bad against hull/systems, and I don't see myself using them against anything larger than an Isanth without a buff to them.

WAFFLE THEM. And shoot moving targets if you're trying to get any kind of useful information out of your tests ffs, real fights aren't stationairy.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

WAFFLE THEM.

More groups with small modules? What advantage does this provide?

 

[Raisinbat]

More groups with small modules? What advantage does this provide?

Beams spread their damage over the surface now afaik, simply waffle them to keep the damage focused on a single point instead of all over the surface.

 

[Briaireous]

WAFFLE THEM. And shoot moving targets if you're trying to get any kind of useful information out of your tests ffs, real fights aren't stationairy.

In life, there exists a place where ppl shoot at stationary targets. Hell, even the military tests their weapons on stationary item first (for example, the naval railgun test videos u can find on YouTube) trial by fire is not advised, but if u wanna live life on the edge.... go get em

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Beams spread their damage over the surface now afaik, simply waffle them to keep the damage focused on a single point instead of all over the surface.

I know that, and I'm sure a little more penetration vs. area would help on hollowing out the reactor, but the beams were barely switching to targets to the side anyways. The bigger problem is simply they don't do very much damage; missiles have about the same damage spread pattern as the beams I'm using and they take out blocks faster.

 

[Briaireous]

Layer them? Like having them right behind one another...

 

[MacThule]

Nice review. Not much to add, sense I think this is a pretty fair assessment of the new weapons in their current initial settings.

I was glad to have beams working again, and they are super effective against shields, not naturally useful against blocks (we can twist about to make then semi-effective on blocks but it seems to not be in their nature). Which is fine, but less flexible than before when a beam could be spun to either focus on shield removal or block destruction.

Cannons are very visually nice now, but not worth using in any situation as far as I can tell. I have gone through a handful of different drones and turrets with a dozen different cannon arrays and none are practical for anything compared to missiles. I have set as many as 50 drones with substantial cannon arrays to attack a single, slow, unshielded target and in 15 minutes they still barely scratch it.

Missiles do decent against shields and amazing blocks, they are very OP, and regen very quickly using little power.

From a practical perspective, you can just outfit a nice beam to eat shields and follow with massed missiles and even a decent sized (tested up to 30k so far) AI ship with advanced armor will go down if you've flown in close enough to land a good strike on its reactor using heavy missiles.

Pretty one dimensional at the moment. Beam + missiles for a classic one-two. Even hundreds of heavy cannons over very long periods can't equal up to that so I am pretty much ignoring them now until some improvement is made to them.

Also, I have to agree that there is bit of a sense right now that the hull may as well not even be there in most cases unless it's a buffed-up, very thick slab of AA.

 

[Raisinbat]

The bigger problem is simply they don't do very much damage; missiles have about the same damage spread pattern as the beams I'm using and they take out blocks faster.

But if you're fighting a moving target at range the missiles have travel time, can be shot down by ams, and can't focus damage in one spot.

I'm just really worried that some complete moron who has never, ever tried fighting another ship in starmade, like for example the devs, read this post and think beams are underpowered because a test that was poorly representative of actual combat showed them to be weak.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Nice review. Not much to add, sense I think this is a pretty fair assessment of the new weapons in their current initial settings.

I was glad to have beams working again, and they are super effective against shields, not naturally useful against blocks (we can twist about to make then semi-effective on blocks but it seems to not be in their nature). Which is fine, but less flexible than before when a beam could be spun to either focus on shield removal or block destruction.

Cannons are very visually nice now, but not worth using in any situation as far as I can tell. I have gone through a handful of different drones and turrets with a dozen different cannon arrays and none are practical for anything compared to missiles. I have set as many as 50 drones with substantial cannon arrays to attack a single, slow, unshielded target and in 15 minutes they still barely scratch it.

Missiles do decent against shields and amazing blocks, they are very OP, and regen very quickly using little power.

From a practical perspective, you can just outfit a nice beam to eat shields and follow with massed missiles and even a decent sized (tested up to 30k so far) AI ship with advanced armor will go down if you've flown in close enough to land a good strike on its reactor using heavy missiles.

Pretty one dimensional at the moment. Beam + missiles for a classic one-two. Even hundreds of heavy cannons over very long periods can't equal up to that so I am pretty much ignoring them now until some improvement is made to them.

Also, I have to agree that there is bit of a sense right now that the hull may as well not even be there in most cases unless it's a buffed-up, very thick slab of AA.

I like the one-two punch, but yeah, I'd love some variety with cannons, missiles at the moment seem non-optional because even when beams can take out over 10 blocks per firing, that's still not keeping up with missiles.

But if you're fighting a moving target at range the missiles have travel time, can be shot down by ams, and can't focus damage in one spot.

I'm just really worried that some complete moron who has never, ever tried fighting another ship in starmade, like for example the devs, read this post and think beams are underpowered because a test that was poorly representative of actual combat showed them to be weak.

I will be testing against some pirates soon. However, testing against drifting targets showed that it's not hard to hit with missiles close up. I think the main thing would be range.

EDIT: Found some Isanths lying around soon after retesting beams (I derped an earlier test setup with only 2 groups instead of 4, the corrected one is still nearly as bad because destroying 8 blocks instead of 5 isn't much of an improvement):

Beams vs Isanth Bc 4-8 at 200-900m took around 10 minutes, 2-3 of 4 beams would latch on and peel off bits of hull. It still had engines to run away in the end and I had to actually finish it off with the missile testbed (screenshot is from around 6-8 minutes into the fight, before it ran away). I later on got really close up because there was some sector boundary issue I think making the beams do no damage, so much for their superior accuracy/range.

Missiles vs Isanth Bb 4-9 at 200m-800m took less than 2 minutes, the first several punched holes to the engines and then once they were gone, it was helpless (screenshot is from initial engagement after first shot, it's already been hit).

All in all, it appears missiles are superior.

 

[Zoolimar]

Considering that Isanths have no AMS, and their systems are more or less non-existent, it's not very surprising. They are basically hull/armour bricks. Even in previous version you needed missiles or at least 5x5 weapon grids to murder them with somewhat sane speed.

 

[Agame3]

Nice review. Not much to add, sense I think this is a pretty fair assessment of the new weapons in their current initial settings.

I was glad to have beams working again, and they are super effective against shields, not naturally useful against blocks (we can twist about to make then semi-effective on blocks but it seems to not be in their nature). Which is fine, but less flexible than before when a beam could be spun to either focus on shield removal or block destruction.

Cannons are very visually nice now, but not worth using in any situation as far as I can tell. I have gone through a handful of different drones and turrets with a dozen different cannon arrays and none are practical for anything compared to missiles. I have set as many as 50 drones with substantial cannon arrays to attack a single, slow, unshielded target and in 15 minutes they still barely scratch it.

Missiles do decent against shields and amazing blocks, they are very OP, and regen very quickly using little power.

From a practical perspective, you can just outfit a nice beam to eat shields and follow with massed missiles and even a decent sized (tested up to 30k so far) AI ship with advanced armor will go down if you've flown in close enough to land a good strike on its reactor using heavy missiles.

Pretty one dimensional at the moment. Beam + missiles for a classic one-two. Even hundreds of heavy cannons over very long periods can't equal up to that so I am pretty much ignoring them now until some improvement is made to them.

Also, I have to agree that there is bit of a sense right now that the hull may as well not even be there in most cases unless it's a buffed-up, very thick slab of AA.

Cannons can still be effective in AI AMSes, as they have a better range than beams, do they?

 

[Scypio]

I dunno... Tbh i doubt that a review based on combat with practice targets and isanth, a 5 years old ship that didn't even got updated with the previous shields mechanics, to be really useful.

Not to belittle your work but... Well.

 

[MacThule]

Cannons can still be effective in AI AMSes, as they have a better range than beams, do they?

So that is theoretically true, definitely, but actually try spawning in 50 fighters packing 8 or 12 cannon outputs each and tell them kill something. Anything. One little thing, one big thing so long as it has AI as well. Utterly useless. In theory they're fine, but in practice with live ships they simply don't seem to hit more than 2-3% of the time. Lucky pot-shots basically, and possibly less than that because I would expect more hits at 400 outputs but I think the way the AI uses them actually makes them more likely to miss than if they were completely random.

The AI doesn't know how to lead with them or compensate for the recoil and I can't blame it - they aren't very useful manually either. I can hit with them on a close pass and they do great damage, but at that point I'm passing close enough to dump a Bomb on the target so why waste time on pew pew?

They outrange beams, sure, but this is only a theoretical edge because their wild inaccuracy means that their effective range (even IRL we assign firearms max ranges and effective ranges and make a very clear distinction between the two) is actually far less than that of beams. I can spray cannon at a huge target one sector over and hit maybe 1 in 5 shots.

The only exception to cannons being ineffectual in their current state is the charge-up heavy cannon. Because 1) recoil doesn't dump most of your damage into the void and 2) it's worth pausing for a few seconds to aim the shot since the result is quite impressive if you hit.

 

[Agame3]

So, what will be the anti-missile turrets using? Beams?

I think from this topic the logical conclusion is that if you have a good anti-missile defense you kill 2 rabbits in one shot: You are secured against the best weapon enemies can bring to a battle and you also make them spend valuable space and resources on their missile magazine for nothing. Like in "1) you do get physically hurt less and 2) you hurt their resources just by not getting as hurt as they hoped, since they have to spend to try to hit you".

This meaning any working anti-missile measure just got its importance upped a lot just by missiles using ammo instead of only energy. Docked rotating armor (2 or more layers one inside another, rotating in different directions), spaghetting, AMS turrets, even spaced force-fields tied to area detectors, anything that works in mitigating missile damage, destroying missiles or tricking them into aiming where there is no target is now more important than ever before.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

I dunno... Tbh i doubt that a review based on combat with practice targets and isanth, a 5 years old ship that didn't even got updated with the previous shields mechanics, to be really useful.

Not to belittle your work but... Well.

I can try big modern moving targets, but I don't see much value in it. Isanths make great little moving targets and the results were nearly the same as against a stationary modern bigger target at point blank range; what would would a large moving modern target possibly tell us in addition?

So, what will be the anti-missile turrets using? Beams?

I think from this topic the logical conclusion is that if you have a good anti-missile defense you kill 2 rabbits in one shot: You are secured against the best weapon enemies can bring to a battle and you also make them spend valuable space and resources on their missile magazine for nothing. Like in "1) you do get physically hurt less and 2) you hurt their resources just by not getting as hurt as they hoped, since they have to spend to try to hit you".

This meaning any working anti-missile measure just got its importance upped a lot just by missiles using ammo instead of only energy. Docked rotating armor (2 or more layers one inside another, rotating in different directions), spaghetting, AMS turrets, even spaced force-fields tied to area detectors, anything that works in mitigating missile damage, destroying missiles or tricking them into aiming where there is no target is now more important than ever before.

Are beams an option in the dev build for PD? I heard only cannons were, and frankly, they can't the broad side of a barn right now in the dev build, I don't see any hitting a missile, especially with how fast missiles go.

Beams would be worth testing if they're an option.

 

[Scypio]

I can try big modern moving targets, but I don't see much value in it. Isanths make great little moving targets and the results were nearly the same as against a stationary modern bigger target at point blank range; what would would a large moving modern target possibly tell us in addition?

Accuracy is the same against a moving target or an immobile one ? At 4 km away ? At 4 km and more while moving in an unpredictable way ?

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Accuracy is the same against a moving target or an immobile one ? At 4 km away ? At 4 km and more while moving in an unpredictable way ?

Accuracy against a small target around 500m away was fine. The big thing to test would be an Isanth 4km away along with some bigger ships. I'm pretty sure at 4km tho nothing will even hit except the odd missile, considering beams struggled beyond 400m and cannons had issues at 100m.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Did some further testing since there's been many dev updates.
It seems that non-cannon weapons are much more powerful; the missiles on my test platform now completely destroy the deflector and several layers of blocks behind it in one shot; the beams kill the whole target in around 5 shots and will gut over a dozen blocks per shot.
Cannon recoil now seems to make the cursor jump really fast without making the ship wobble, making it possibly to stay on target. Still a ton of lag that makes damage take a moment to show up and not in the right spots...and now the DPS is comparable to a very tiny missile setup. Seems like a step backward.

Also, missile capacity is really inconsistent and I don't understand it. Sometimes it's 2 and sometimes it's 1, and with my missile testbed, it was even showing 2/1, and I was able to shoot both, but it only recharged up to 1. Probably a bug, and an annoying one because it affects DPS.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

5 1-missile shots on the test target in the current version, for reference: