Thanks for this feedback!
To be clear, I'm not opposed to making balance changes and am happy to make balance changes that are clearly needed. I just don't want to spend a lot of my personal time fine-tuning balance when I should really be working on new features. Hence why I'd love for someone else to spend time fine-tuning and make a balance mod.
dieaready Decreasing the accuracy of the cannon fire decreases the cannon's potential to put a massive amount of firepower on a single point of a ship, thus decreasing its maximum killing power in groups without decreasing overall DPS.
This makes sense to me.
dieaready physical protection is the counter of energy damage
Currently, armor is an even better protection against cannons because it blocks their penetration.
dieaready decreasing its penetration resistance allows large cannons to potentially counter it by allowing large cannon fire to punch right through it and potentially detonate any unprotected ammo factory/storage behind it
This is certainly an interesting idea that I'm open to, though it's probably best to use the same penetration resistance for all "front-line" weapons (lasers, electro-bolts, cannons) for the sake of consistency.
dieaready Large cannons are fairly weak compared to other weapons due to its high spread and slow projectile speed despite its relatively high DPS.
Cannons do not currently have any spread. The inaccuracy you're seeing is purely because of low projectile speed and it trying to hit a moving target. The large cannons are intended to be mostly effective vs capital ships. If they're not very effective vs small ships, I'd say that's by design.
dieaready Large cannons also often fire early and switch targets, resulting in the fired shells despawning way before the first shells get close to the enemy ship
I'm wondering whether the targeting range of cannons should be reduced, because there's definitely an issue where cannons will unload their initial volley well before they get into effective range.
dieaready Not 100% sure if that is the case or if the large cannons are targeting where its target SHOULD be at and the enemy ship slows down on approach resulting in the shells despawning
Pretty sure that's the problem.
dieaready By allowing electrobolts to penetrate
This is certainly an interesting idea!
dieaready Missiles currently feel underpowered at the moment due to how PD counters them so hard
I agree with this.
dieaready they are near useless on smaller ships
I'm okay with this.
dieaready Increase missile splash radius on shields by 50%
I'm not sure what you mean by this.
dieaready In terms of its range, the AI seems to target the middle of the enemy ship with it, resulting in ion kites getting dangerously close to large enemy ships
The AI basically doesn't target ion beams at all. It just faces the ship towards the enemy and lets the beams shoot at whatever they can hit.
dieaready They also do pretty low DPS for their size
Depends on how you measure size. Despite being 4 tiles deep, the ion beam uses only 2 tiles of perimeter space has very high DPS for a 2-wide weapon.
dieaready it would make ion kites function better
Not sure this would be a good thing. Ion kiters might be OP right now -- I haven't seen a better strategy.
dieaready PD right now feels a bit too OP due to the fact that the sheer amount of missed shots from a battery of 3+ PD throws up a wall of fire that kills most missiles behind the first missile unintentionally. While visually pleasing, it prevents all but the heaviest missile barrages to break through an area protected by 4-6 PD and with the AI being unable to volley fire missile barrages, it only worsens the problem making missiles near useless unless using dedicated large missile kites
I agree with your assessment of PD.
dieaready By decreasing the rate of fire and decreasing the spread, the PD is able to hit incoming missiles more accurately
This is actually not true, due to their inability to perfectly predict where the position of the incoming missile. A PD with 0 spread will usually miss-predict the location of the missile, whereas a PD with a spread will sometimes "accidentally" hit the missile anyway even though it miss-predicted its location. I've actually been considering reducing the spread as a way of nerfing PD.
dieaready By tripling the energy cost of the PD, sustained missile barrages from dedicated missile ships have a chance of eventually breaking through the PD shield of a ship by running the PDs dry
I like this idea a lot.
dieaready Armour feels a bit too weak at the moment for its cost and weight
I think I agree that armor is too heavy and maybe too expensive. Not sure I agree with the fundamental premise that armor should be less effective vs cannons. (One of the things that makes armor an actually-interesting mechanic instead of just a punching bag is that it can block cannon penetration.)
dieaready Overlapping shields at the moment can be very overpowered
Yes indeed. Not sure what to do about this. I've been thinking about increasing the prohibited zone in from of shields from 2 tiles to 3-4, but that'd only nerf directly stacking shields and would have other ramifications.
Maybe some sort of feedback effect, such that when one shield goes down, other shields that are very close also go down, or at least lose energy?
Planning to add this, just haven't had time to make the art for it.
I haven't added bubble shields because I'm worried that, since you can put them anywhere and they protect everything in their range, they'd make ship design less interesting, even if they are technically balanced with the other shields.
RyMarq I am likewise a bit unclear of splash from missiles actually goes through shields. The code would imply it, but my experience makes it feel unlikely. I will test.
There's no code to prevent it, but the AOE of missiles might not be large enough to do a significant amount of damage when hitting a shield.
RyMarq Its a real problem though that engines do not close distance correctly
Can you please elaborate on this problem?