Submitted.
While I did a good job of talking about my choices (except for the ones that are self explanatory), I had some thoughts you may want to share with Schine that it seems like other people have already said. Since this is going to Schine, I think I
should say them anyways.
First: All the ridiculing of Damage Pulse? Warranted. If Damage Beam is a "Ship Melee" range weapon, Damage Pulse is "Ships punching each other in the face." While I haven't seen the most StarMade combat of any player, I have seen enough to see that ships
just about never get that close to each other. Damage Pulse is also not good as a secondary system, either. To me, the Damage Pulse weapon is a solution searching for a problem.
I think the same general complaint applies to Damage Beam, except I have heard tell of specialized 1v1 fighters that use Damage Beam to eat shields. It seems like the primary use of Damage Beam is on the Missile + Damage Beam combo for homing missiles (I'm using this on my current medium fighter design.) As it is, Damage Beam is situational, and this could be OK.
In my opinion, normal cannons/autocannons are almost useless. They deal scratch damage to shields, it takes horribly huge groupings to get half-decent damage out of them (on my medium fighter, I have two banks of 30 Damage Beam modules, and a single damage beam module as the output for the system. In testing on asteroids last night, the result was 75 damage when focused on one point, or roughly 2.419 damage per block, which is
useless.) I read somewhere that cannons were nerfed due to being more OP than missiles currently are; I think Schine may have overreacted a bit. They need a slight buff to be competitive with missiles - I'd say +10% per block. I do think that keeping them situational is a good choice though, similar to the Damage Beam.
The real problem that missiles have in the greater scheme of the game, is that they are
too multipurpose at present, but I think it's really due to other weapons not being useful enough. Missiles are the kings of Starmade combat. They scale
excellently according to group block count, they use a respectable amount of power, but nothing you can't overcome with a decent reactor design, they deal awesome damage, and they splash. Other weapons generally act as useful modifiers to their capabilities. I think if other weapons get "buffed"/made more useful, missiles will be forced back into their niche - high damage at the expense of speed, and the ability to be destroyed by other weapons in transit. I'd suggest nerfing the scaling of missile groups,
slightly (about 5% should do.)
Edit: Weapons in context
Something your survey doesn't do - probably due to the weapon-specific focus - is examine the weapon meta in context with other game systems. Right now, armor blocks provide something like 400 effective HP of mitigation; as a result, to damage an unshielded vessel, you need to build a system that deals at least 400 damage
per shot. A small missile battery
easily crosses this limit.
A good question to ask Schine, to get him to think about the relative buffs or nerfs that a weapon needs to have, is: "How many blocks of a given weapon system should it take to cause 400 HP of damage?"
Right now, with cannons, that number is
huge, and there's
some evidence of diminishing returns on each block you add, which theoretically makes a "Waffle Blaster" a good idea (note to self - figure out how to get this on the
Defiance...) Damage Beams do the damage, but the range is so short that it's nearly pointless (and, AIs can't use Damage Beam, which makes them pointless for point defense.)
I hope this Great Wall o' Text helps the Council's conversation with Schine.
