E.G. You have a big mutha canon (204 damage, range 2) firing at a token with 10 enemy ships. Do they each take 204 damage, so 2,040 damage in total?

Unless im missing something, range 3 beams seem to cost significantly more resources than torps of the same level. And if you have enough miners or planets you shouldnt be running into a mineral shortage anyway.

If we look at armageddons vs AM pulverizers, the armageddons can get off two salvos before the AM pulverizers can even enter firing range and the beams take a damage penalty for distancea s well.

jammers are significantly weaker compared to computers, you can never put enough jammers on a ship to jam enough of the incoming missiles.

Deflectors vs capacitors is a much more balanced comparison.

And if you are going to use beams to try and tank enemy fire

(Which doesnt really work against missiles,

since the missiles will see a heavily defended target with jammers and go after YOUR missiles instead)

you would be better off using sappers so that your missiles can do double damage faster.

Sappers + Missiles are a much better alternative to trying to use beams unless you are very short on minerals.

for example if i do 1k damage to shields and 1k to armor, does all of the 1k armor damage apply to a single ship or is it spread out over all ships in the token?

... And if you have enough miners or planets you shouldnt be running into a mineral shortage anyway.

if you have enough miners or planets you shouldnt be running into a mineral shortage anyway.

Forum ate my post and didnt auto-save anything so this is a short version.

Beams : (not sappers, regular beams) seem pretty underpowered. Gatling ones have an obvious use, but the regular ones are too short ranged one and simply cannot outdps regular torps, let alone missiles at higher tech levels. The range is a huge problem because there is no way to make a tanky, close ranged fighter, since jammers are not equal to computers and there is a limit to how many jammers you can stack. Going from 3 to 6 jammer-50s does pretty much nothing except waste slots for example.

Torps : They get out-dpsed by missiles in almost all situations, even when firing at shielded targets with jammers. They dont have any clear role when missiles are basically far superior. The fact that torps and missiles do 50% damage through shields is a huge balance problem because it means that using smaller ships (like DEs) is pointless because torps will wipe them out through shields, which forces you to spam battleships and nubians instead (since they have the hull armor to tank the shield penetrating damage).

Missiles : Extremely OP, its supposed to be an anti-armor weapon (which is necessary when armor is roughly 3x as effective as shields for some reason), but it does 50% penetrating damage AND is highly effective against shields as well. And since their base damage is so high, they still outdps torps even with their deceptively low accuracy (which gets huge boosts from computers, while torps get much lower bonuses).3x jammer-30s vs 3x omega torps give the torps an accuracy of 84%, which is very poor compared to armageddons going from 30-45% accuracy in the same situation.

Because missiles are so OP, it forces people to use stuff like chaff which doesnt make sense (there is a reason why nobody uses ships as "chaff" in real life). Meanwhile you cant use a setup where you have tough ships with jammers distract enemy missile boats while lightly armored ships in the rear fire missiles, because the targetting will ignore the closer ships. So fleet building strategies degenerate into mostly missile boats with chaff vs missile boats with chaff and mixing in some gatlings/sappers in between.

...Speaking of chaff, it was an intended mechanic and is not as unrealistic as you think.

magic9mushroom wrote on Thu, 09 June 2016 19:35

...Speaking of chaff, it was an intended mechanic and is not as unrealistic as you think.

The OP was specifically referring to using actual ships as chaff. Which I agree is rather unrealistic.

Then again, space military realism was not a primary goal of the game's design.