Might as well explain myself, in a fight both players tend to hold 'W' and face each other (for the typical of fights) resulting in rapid decrease in range. You probably have time to get one or two lock on missiles off due to the long reload, so might as well have that as a secondary weapon, go smaller to not drain all your capacity, and go ion (because they will have shields at the beginning, double damage is nice). If you want a more multi purpose missile, pierce. You will only be able to use them when closing or when disengaging.
The cannon-cannon-punch setup is just in general a rock solid build. Might even be a bit unbalanced, still needs testing.
Basically you can do more damaged with a lesser block count than your opponents.
Let me explain
Cannon Cannons have constant damage output and suck down a constant amount of energy. To make your gun go pew pew, just hook up a bit of juice and your good to go.
Now, with alpha and derp weapons, you need both power regen and a set amount of power capacity to make your guns go pew.
Power regen is easy, make a couple L's, T's, X's, and even just straight lines and you are good. Its based on maximum lenght/width/height, and not really on block count.
Power capacity, however, is based on block count. And it takes a lot of blocks to get a large amount of capacity, and this issue only increases as you scale upwards/have more than one output.
So a ship made for DPS damage has a strong power regen, minimal ship mass invested on power capacity, with the eqivilant amount of mass dedicated to other things, like thrust or shields (
or armor, pls don't nurf armor thx). Or interiors. Seriously guys, RP ships should always have DPS style weapons if you still want to remain competitive-ish. Replace your power capacity space with rooms and still have equivalent shielding and stuff.
Alpha derp ships need to have a lot of mass invested in capacitors. Sure if you can keep your distance with missiles you will have the tactical advantage and the upper hand.
HOWEVER, the battlefield is a complex and ever-changing place, you sometimes will and sometimes wont have the upper hand.
With DPS armor tanks, you just point your ship at the enemy at hold down left mouse button once you get in range where you think you can hit. If everything is equal, you will have more systems like thrusters, and you will have a higher top speed.
And derp cannons or alpha beams are useless at this scale too, you really need block removal so it is only missiles. I tested ships with cannon+beam+explosive (4 of them) each heavier than a equivalent cannon-cannon-pulse ship (3 of them).
(
it was a disaster, lost all 4 of the cannon beam explosive ships)
(also I really like cannon beam explosive, you need like 600+600+80 for it to be worthwhile or something but it is a good weapon I thought. Maybe it is just meant for turrets on large ships? Ah well.)
Anyways. In starmade you need block removal to win fights, not core drilling. (
this is why you make a 'black box' and store all combat computers away in it away from your core so you don't lose them in a fight). Block removal means cannon cannon, or explosive weapons like missiles.
Note, Logic missile cannon pierce is a superior weapon to cannon cannon, but requires skill to use, as I have learned. Sticking to cannon cannons :P
Now, a well placed nuke can cripple a ship in one blow, but in 45 seconds that it takes to load the darn thing a buzzsaw cannon cannon punch build can chew you up twice over. And it is not hard for players to swat missile-pulse out of the sky when they have cannon cannon as their primary weapon, it we found it happened pretty consistently if the player knows if the ship they are fighting is equipped with nukes.
Shields go down in the first minute to 30 seconds of the fight. Then it is a mission of who can peel back the armor of the other player faster and get to the juicy system bits. 5 layers of advanced in the front can make you impervious to the first few missile hits, as an example my 1.7k mass fighter has 15 layers and a 5 layer buffer zone/crumple zone of interior in the front to absorb the hits before the armor. I have room to do this because I don't need to have a huge battery of capacitors in my ship. Power lines and cannon barrels are the only things found snaking their way through the armored prow of the ship (the sides are practically made of foil paper though, gotta keep the front pointed at your enemy). Cannon cannon doesn't give 2 shits about armor, punch means you deal 1.5x block damage and
NO downsides. (
explosive lowers block damage by 5% every 10% of effect, peirce ignores most armor and goes straight to the block HP at the cost of all shield damage when using cannons.). Therefore punch is a straight-up default effect to choose from, while the others are side-grades.
You need a few thousand blocks before explosive effect starts breaking standard armor in the blast radius (which is capped at 10% effect ratio if you didn't know, 11-100% is wasteful) which is when I consider it to start being effective.
Sidenote I just thought of, the B&S winner used cannon cannon turrets and had lots of systems devoted to thrust, probably wouldn't of worked as well had he spent more mass on power capacitors.
Cannons have the default old pierce effect which means each shot can deal damage to multiple blocks in a line. If you deal 50% more block damage, then you will be removing more blocks. This also means that unless your opponent has extremely thick and sloped armor, you will be able to score damage to systems first.
To recap, you need more blocks to support an alpha derp, via lots of capacitors for the
same weapon size of a dps oriented weapon.
You need more armor to defend from cannon cannon punch than you do missile beam pierce.
Missiles give you range and hit-chance advantage, but come at a cost of terrible reload and diminishing returns for blast size.
Well that's my input. Any counter-arguments? Am I flat out mistaken or wrong on some points?
