What are effective weapon combinations other than big cannon/cannon/x?

[Kaamio]

Hi all, I returned to the game after a long pause to check out what has been changed with all the new weapons and such... problem is, most of the combos seem really really bad. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong, but since the new ishant swarms (can they be somehow lessened btw? I often get 6-15 hordes right at the beginning...), small ships seem suicidal and large ship guns seem horribly ineffective unless it's missile (swarm seems best) or rapid fire cannon with maybe punchthrough or explosive effect.

I don't know how to properly describe the feeling from beams and non rapid cannons... they feel like starter guns firing blanks. Sure, good dps and all that, but it's shot, wait wait wait wait, shot. And yay, you got like 10 destroyed blocks IF you hit. Meanwhile the rapid fire cannon has sawed through the hull of the enemy all across the ship and laid waste like the big anti matter guns of old did.

Mind you, my targets are pirate ishants which have practically no shields, so maybe the big hit guns are good against those, but all in all there seems little in the way of main weapon systems due to the low shots per minute and blocks absorbing damage like they do.

So basically, what I'm asking is there good, effective weapon combos beside swarmer/seeker missiles and rapid fire cannons? What scale are they good at, should they have any place in a larger ship or more like fighter weapons? Any advice to diversify my ship designs?

 

[Neon_42]

I like long range beam weapons on turrets. They seem to be able to shoot anything down before it even gets close to my base. For offensive purposes though they are so so.

 

[Planr]

Sadly no. The devs felt weapons were OP so they nerfed the heck out of everything.

The only effective anti-fighter weapons are to spam rapid-fire bullets at them with multiple small turrets, or to use heatseeking cluster missiles, like you said.
There isnt really any need to worry about fighting fighters though. The only viable combat in the game (at least, online) is Titan VS Titan fights. They are the only ships worth using, because weapons scale linearly, so titans are naturally exponentially stronger than all other ships.

 

[Mered4]

Sadly no. The devs felt weapons were OP so they nerfed the heck out of everything.

The only effective anti-fighter weapons are to spam rapid-fire bullets at them with multiple small turrets, or to use heatseeking cluster missiles, like you said.
There isnt really any need to worry about fighting fighters though. The only viable combat in the game (at least, online) is Titan VS Titan fights. They are the only ships worth using, because weapons scale linearly, so titans are naturally exponentially stronger than all other ships.

Actually, while weapon power scales linearly, weapon power consumption scales exponentially.

Big ships are the only viable battles? While I don't play on a PvP server, I don't think that's a problem with the system. That's a problem with both players sitting around waiting for Titans.

 

[jzimmerman4]

Cannons are good on turrets since they have the same accuracy as beams but better range. I personally really like beam-pulse-ion as it can drain tons of shields really really quickly (example). Essentially cannons and beams for shield draining and missiles to blow the crap out of people.

 

[WaffulMann]

While cannon-pulse combos do quite a ton of damage I do believe they are quite underwhelming. Maybe one day schema/omni will increase projectile size/effect depending on damage.

 

[Orphaniel]

I have found Beam + Pulse + (insert desired effect) to be wonderfully powerful, the problem is the absolutely absurd power drain. My old Titan would drain almost all of it's herculean 11'000'000'000 energy to fire it once, at which point it suffers a 60 second or so reload time. However, I have yet to find shields able to withstand even the smaller versions I have fielded (in those cases beam+pulse+overdrive for the truly insane).

Piercing cannons also serve well if they are powerful enough to make full use of the piercing effect - when it comes to rapid chip damage this does little good, but apply piercing to a single enormous round (or better still an array of twenty or so cannons firing one powerful shot and you will carve grandly gaping holes in your foe - of course, for sheer structural mayhem you cannot go past missiles, but it's a nice alternative that can also reliably damage shields.

Finally, the explosive effect applied to cannons or beams should not be overlooked, but as above a sufficiently powerful weapon should be sued to make best used of the damage spread.

 

[Comr4de]

I've found that Missile+Beam+Ion at 75% effectiveness is pretty good at not only draining shields but also making large-sized holes in hull.

For turrets, my big guns are Cannon-Pulsator-Overdrive. Unfortunately when using ion with cannons I've found that the returns just aren't good enough as opposed to overdrive. However I've yet to see how much power they drain with a full salvo. The smaller AA guns are Cannon+Cannon+Pierce/Explosive (I switch between the two), and they do great. Beams I tend to avoid except for drone fighters because their range is mediocre at best.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

I still have to test this theory, but I think this will one day be a doomsday weapon (when break_off finally works):
Beam+50% cannon+100% punch through. That will just tear through ships.

 

[Calbiri]

The intended trend is visible in the comments above. The weapon system was meant to balance between various tactical situations and personal preferences. There is no "best choice" although some systems are under powered or lacking and I am working on improving the mechanics of those to improve their interactions with the rest of the with system.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

@Calbiri , will you also be changing the combinations for the non-weapons, i.e. the salvage beam, astro techinician, power supply/drain beam and the shield supply/drain beam? Because the cannon is overpowered (there is non negative effect), the damage beam is basically useless (the increase in range doesn't account for the loss in efficiency compared to the cannon) and the damage pulse is useless (only negative effects). The only slave that seems to just right is the missile combination.

Edit: btw, the I already found the solution to the bug with salvage cannons in which they pulse. I haven't checked to see if it is already fixed, but you only have to change cooldown and bursttime to 0.

 

[Kaamio]

Good to hear that I'm not the only one who thinks things aren't quite done yet Also thanks for the suggestions, I'll have to try some out. Saves a lot of trial and disappointment to have some spesific uses at hand.

I wish I had some real good advice on how to develop the weapons so they'd feel better, but I can't seem to think anything really awesome. I guess it's just the block damage potential of high shots per second giant machineguns compared to anything else except missiles which I think still provide swift killing after shields are gone but I haven't really tested them in action against player ships...

So... maybe increase basic rate of fire for cannons and beams without altering dps? Pulse modified guns should still be useful after that for giant alpha and then switch to other gun while it recharges, currently you can manually rotate guns as long as they aren't heavily cannon modded. With 2 non-rapid fire guns you still end up waiting a good bit in combat which is, with current manouverability, rather lame. Might change with the planned movement system though, if spaceships actually take time to get into firing positions similar to say, world of tanks.

Also, all of my friends were really disappointed when the beam weapon turned out to be hardcapped to such low durations, maybe consider increasing them a bit? I was really hoping for a proper cutting beam that will eat all your power but would last like 5-10 seconds if properly fed Basically just hold down the fire button for delicious, hot laser death and release when you're sufficiently worried about your reactors. Hard caps and cooldowns keep the beam usage in check though, and sort of pace the fight.

One other thing I noticed is that when firing a big cannon the projectile still looks the same (maybe make rapid fire cannon projectile smaller?) and moves about the same speed, perhaps adding projectile speed increase (lesser than on beam subsystem) to pulse, and adding similar lesser reload speed bonus to beam subsystem with cannons? I don't want main guns to be machine guns, in fact I don't want any capital ship wreckers to be machine guns, but certain halfway option would be nice. It would suit the long range combat hit rate as well.

Please be mindful that I'm basically talking out of my ass now, I haven't played on open pvp servers or all that much at all, just first impressions here. Maybe it's worth something and maybe not.

edit: To improve the feeling of firing a big gun, audio and visual ques are an excellent tool. So, at least partially, if you have the possibility of looking into the sound and projectile design it might really help sell the guns as powerful. Standard "pew" is kinda lame for a gun that fires maybe twice a minute and deals 100k hits :D If sound and shooting animation could be brought to par with the debris effect... it's really awesome to see a hit on a pirate ishant and when it turns, trail of debris is thrown into the void! It's such a space opera feeling.

 

[Planr]

Actually, while weapon power scales linearly, weapon power consumption scales exponentially.

Wrong. Power consumption scales linearly too.
My ship originally had a 7-million-damage missile+pulse+explosive combo. It consumed an approximate 10 times that amount in energy (70,000,000). So I had to downgrade it so that its power would work better on my ship. I got it down to 5.5 million, and it now consumes 55 million power every time to fire.

Ergo, power consumption does not scale exponentially.

 

[BeefBacon]

I use a single large heatseeking missile attached to as many overdrive modules as possible. Does a massive amount of damage. In fact I use overdrive modules in all of my turrets as well. Even small ones become lethal.

For regular cannons I attach Ion modules. Use cannons to tear up shields then use a missile to nuke the hull.

 

[Mered4]

Wrong. Power consumption scales linearly too.
My ship originally had a 7-million-damage missile+pulse+explosive combo. It consumed an approximate 10 times that amount in energy (70,000,000). So I had to downgrade it so that its power would work better on my ship. I got it down to 5.5 million, and it now consumes 55 million power every time to fire.

Ergo, power consumption does not scale exponentially.

0.o

Regardless, there is a point (can't say the exact number, because it wasn't my research) where increasing the power of your ship's weapons becomes inefficient. That is, where doubling the mass of your ship will not lead to doubling the power of your weapons It's a rather tiny size, too - the ship I saw our wonderful engineer 4plains use was a wedge around 125m in length.

What I'm getting at here is that in an equal mass battle, big ships will lose in a pure numbers war.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

Not with damage beams and missiles there's not. It might not even apply to the cannons anymore. It was part of the old system, so it might not be like that anymore.

 

[Keptick]

Sadly no. The devs felt weapons were OP so they nerfed the heck out of everything.

The only effective anti-fighter weapons are to spam rapid-fire bullets at them with multiple small turrets, or to use heatseeking cluster missiles, like you said.
There isnt really any need to worry about fighting fighters though. The only viable combat in the game (at least, online) is Titan VS Titan fights. They are the only ships worth using, because weapons scale linearly, so titans are naturally exponentially stronger than all other ships.

Of course, if you take for example a 1v1 then the 10x bigger ship is going to win, as it should. The lone fighter killing capital thing is just a load of bull, it only happens in movies. And even then, they are usually deployed in massive waves.

BUT, swarms of mini ships actually seem to be more effective than single big ships. I tested a 22 drone swarm (combined mass of ~2.5k ) against two different 6k mass ships (piloted by players) and won both times. First time I lost 7 drones, the second time I lost 3. The turrets of the enemy ships were gone in seconds, from there they could barely do anything (especially since turning on two dozen hard to hit ships is hard). Of course, they could use heat seekers as you said but that would hurt their effectiveness against similar sized ships.

I also think that the next content patch is focused on AI fleet mechanics, so I really can't wait to get a drone carrier working!

 

[Mered4]

Not with damage beams and missiles there's not. It might not even apply to the cannons anymore. It was part of the old system, so it might not be like that anymore.

We did the testing in the new system. Seriously. Try it.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

I tried building big. I didn't look at the exact numbers, but from what I could tell beams always get the same amount of damage per block.

 

[marcus87]

I found the beam-cannon-explosive interesting. It is like a chainsaw for ships :D