How I'd like to see base weapon types act

[Edymnion]

Cannons: High damage, short to medium range, affected by armor %.
Cannons are actually firing physical objects (shells, antimatter, whatever) that are basically just kinetic impactors. They carry a lot of punch and can tear unprotected things apart pretty easily, but are easily stopped by armor. Low energy requirements.

Beams: Low damage, medium to long range, unaffected by armor %.
Beams are energy weapons and are projected, not fired. Upon striking a target, the energy affects only what is directly hit, doing less overall damage than the cannons blowing pieces out, but are unaffected by armor plating. High energy requirements.

Missiles: Cannons with a blast radius. Pretty much as they are now. First layer takes the most damage, second layer takes less damage, until you get deep enough that blocks are just being cracked but not destroyed and it ends.

Pulse: Keep the cannon/missile symmetry, and make these some kind of dense energy burst weapon that ignores armor, does little direct damage, but applies that full damage across all blocks in the radius instead of being reduced every layer.

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How I see combat running:
For small ships, cannons would be pretty much the defacto weapon, as the energy requirements for beams would be too high for them to generate easily. Small ships would also be less armored (due to hopefully heavier armor actually being heavier in future releases). For large ship combat, I'd see beam weaponry being used at long range to soften ships up by cutting through their armor, then once in close open up with the cannons and missiles to chew into the unprotected flanks.

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Other changes:

Make missiles smart by default. I honestly don't know anyone that uses missiles on ships that doesn't make them either heatseeking or homing. The only time I personally ever see dumbfire missiles used are as station busters due to the fact they're fairly worthless against anything that can actually move out of the way. So, lets just make them all lock on by default, and then switch it up so that one of the linking styles creates very strong dumbfire missiles. Make the way they are currently used most the default setting, and make the special use case the one that has to be linked to achieve.

 

[Asvarduil]

This is a great suggestion. The only thing I would add, is to have the AoE effect of the missiles and bubbles not happen if it would impact a shield.

 

[Valiant70]

Realistically, cannons go farther than beams but are less accurate, which is what we see in game now. Lasers are hard to focus at range but easy to aim, while cannons are easy to focus (bullets don't have a habit of falling apart without an outside influence) but hard to aim at range.

For gameplay reasons, the opposite makes sense as it differentiates their roles rather than just balancing them against one another. Whether this happens or not will ultimately be a preference of the player base. I'm fine either way.

Missiles probably should lock on by default. Maybe pulse missiles should be left without lock-on but given a pulse effect rather than a normal blast. The pulse would have to be weaker than a straight up pulse weapon for balance reasons though. That would make pulse missiles like bombs or anti-capital torpedoes.

 

[Edymnion]

Yeah, but I'd say to make the cannons a shorter ranged weapon than beams primarily because of the travel time to target. Its not that the shells fall apart at long distances, its just that the long travel time makes hitting anything with them impractical at those ranges. Beams may have a harder time staying cohesive at range with real life physics, but their instant travel time makes them far more ideal for long ranged combat.

So I'm coming at it as having their ranges be not a measure of physically how well would they work in the real world, but how long their effective ranges would be when controlled by a human. Cannons are already pretty useless as a long range weapon because of how hard it is to judge how far to lead a shot when both you and your target are moving chaotically through 3 dimensional space. If the range were shorter, it would mean that shot leading would be far less important, and hence the usability of the weapon would increase.

 

[NeonSturm]

I want mirror armour to deflect beams.

I would checker-board checker-layer anti-kinetic and beam-resistant hull layers to minimize optimal weapon usage against.

If armour is ignored, I would use shield capacitors or metal meshes as every second layer.
I guess this is desired by you OP, or isn't it?​

At least it would put a use on hull with more HP and less armour%


If mostly-civilian ships use !LAZERS! to channel their (while in combat) unused thrust/shield/jump/salvage--power to weapons, while dedicated war-ships use more !GUNZ! as they are simply too many to effectively pay the power-upkeep, I see USE-CASES

Use lasers where you have excess power
Use cannons for dps​

As for pulse: It would be nice if it were unable to damage armour -- only electronic systems.

Or deal ((10% damage / armour)*blocks) + ((90% damage - armour)*blocks) to mainly damage system blocks.​