bug report + 6 new part ideas

Fulminis

Jakeblake You don't need balancing for vanilla.. since he will make new ships for bounty mode and thus making it balanced, "OP" weapons are necessary to upgrade your ship.. it's not an multiplayer game where you need balancing because of weapons better than others, bounty mode is made to upgrade your ship, having everything balanced wouldn't make it an "upgrade your ship" mode.. just design a ship.
If the game follows what you say the large cannon would be "OP"

Atarlost

Fulminis Balance isn't irrelevant. No vanilla weapon completely supersedes another. You cite large cannons as superseding other weapons, but they don't. They're less efficient than standard cannons in terms of both crew and ammo per damage. The standard cannon is not my preferred choice of weapon, but it does more DPS per frontage tile than the ion beam and is easier to shield around than the large cannon.

Jakeblake

Fulminis Hell yeah you need balancing for any game!!! Just cause a game is singleplayer doesnt mean it should be unbalanced. As of now the game isnt really upgrade your ship but rather expand your ship which means that electrobolts and med cannons are still viable in a massive ship that also has missile launchers and and large cannons. if you made another weapon that was OP but just expensive people would upgrade their ship to have a bunch of that OP weapon accross the front, and there would be no diversity. If large cannons were really OP, you would never use ion beams and electrobolts ever again would you?

Tobi-wan_Kenobi That would be too much anti-missile defenses cause no normal ship shoots 72 missiles at once, and if they do, it must be a pretty massive ship, right? So that means the enemy ships are massive too right? So the enemy would have shields and some point defense to lessen the blow, and other weapons to also attack your ship.
In the end, we already have 3 defenses against missiles - point defense, shields, and good old armor

Tobi-wan_Kenobi

Love the railgun and the decoy.

For the railgun, I think it should be the same size as the ion beam, not 3x5. Make it basically the physical equivalent to the ion beam. The difference is the high alpha for railgun. Ion beam should be higher sustained dps, whereas railgun should do less dps, but far higher burst damage. I like to imagine a tandem railgun salvo of 3 shots - it slams through one layer of shields with two rounds, and the third penetrates deep into the hull in a line. Also, make the railgun use the same ammo as the other guns - just more of it per shot, maybe 8 ammo, just like the ion beam takes 8 batteries. Lastly, in keeping with the design of the other physical weapons, it probably shouldn't use energy at all.

The decoy or something like it is absolutely necessary. I have a missile battleship that fires 72 missiles at once. To be able to defend against that many missiles, you would have to sacrifice half of your ship surface to point defenses.

Tobi-wan_Kenobi

Jakeblake A fair point that there are other ways to tank a missile salvo. Maybe some good player-made ships might be able to tank a 72-missile salvo. All I know is I haven't met any built-in ships that can survive the salvo with enough weapons left to break my shields. The only threat to me is the Cerberus, and that's just because the missiles can't penetrate to its ion beam emplacements for a while.

Atarlost

Tobi-wan_Kenobi

This just means the game needs some anti-missile optimized platforms in the elite and vanguard tiers. Maybe The Beast could be modified since it's otherwise kind of easy to kill for any style of ship.

Jakeblake

Tobi-wan_Kenobi I don't think Walt built any of the ingame ships with the threat of missile spam in mind

Tobi-wan_Kenobi

Jakeblake And that's the problem with missiles - you have to build for them. Every serious ship needs at least a dozen point defenses just in case it runs up against lots of missiles. In most fights, these point defenses will be useless.

Ooh! What if the point defenses were short range machine guns as well! High rate of fire, very short range(40-60), low dps, high projectile speed. An additional bit of high accuracy dps that people won't mind having on their ship. Then more ships might be built with sufficient missile defenses. Make the ship not take them into account for choosing engagement range, and make them unable to be focused - just an automated anti-fighter/corvette defense.

Jakeblake

Tobi-wan_Kenobi That would be really nice but it pretty much HAS to be underpowered because it can shoot down missiles! It will always target missiles over the enemy craft, and will always leave enough shots in its system to at least take 5 shots at an incoming missile.

but because it is a machine gun, shouldn't it require ammo not power?

Jakeblake

Atarlost I'm not exactly sure what you mean but I did mention that PD should alwayst target missiles over shooting the enemy craft

Jakeblake It will always target missiles over the enemy craft, and will always leave enough shots in its system to at least take 5 shots at an incoming missile.

Atarlost

Mounting AMS is not a hardship. They're a single tile, don't require crew, and aren't eating power if there are no missiles to fire at. They could be given more durability so they're not chinks in your armor, but they're already spammable.

Some, perhaps most, NPCs should lack point defense. If they all had it missiles would be useless.

Jakeblake

Atarlost Im pretty sure there are a lot that dont have PD, and the ones that do have very few and can be easily overwhelmed

Atarlost

Jakeblake Most ships shouldn't have much AMS. If they did missiles would be completely useless for the player. That none have really solid AMS is a lack of design variety, not a flaw in the way AMS works.

Jakeblake

Atarlost I'm not saying that PD is underpowered, Tobiwan was the one that suggested to make them have 2 functions, and I'm saying that the weaponized function would have to be very weak as PD already has another role that it has and does well at. If it weren,t people would just use shields instead. I don't think PD should be buffed really, as it is a decent object to place in holes that you can't put a bigger gun in and it requires relatively little power, or none at all.
Also, if there were even more than a few designs with good PD, than the entire strategy of a person could be useless, as other weapons like cannons don't have an anti cannon- defense. Shields defend against everything, but for some people, PD may seen too specialized. If another weapon were released that PD could shoot down, PD would become more than viable.

Atarlost

Jakeblake If the AMS ships have other weaknesses they will force diversification without completely nullifying missiles.

I suggested The Beast for a reason. If you have a fast missile platform you can stick one or two ion beams or large cannons in the middle to deal with it, or at worst buy an Ion Frigate to sell after killing it. There aren't any Elite class enemies as obviously suited for a PD upgrade, but some could be designed.