Walt Currently, armor is an even better protection against cannons because it blocks their penetration.
I was thinking that cannon fire should penetrate armour but be greatly reduced by it. Having energy counter physical and vice versa forces more varied forms of defence which should keep things interesting.
Walt 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.
Yes, I understand that, but I've seen cannons fire off shots that are way off their target by a good 20+ degrees indicating that something seems to be wrong. I have no issues with and indeed like the idea that large cannons should be inaccurate and used mainly for capital ship battles, but having it miss by such large margins makes me question if it would be worth it at all. Only explanation for that which I can come up with is that the enemy ship was changing maneuvers so the predicted position of the ship moved greatly resulting in the large cannon fire going way off.
Walt Increase missile splash radius on shields by 50%
What I meant is the missile explosion damage radius when it hits the shield. It seems to do damage and set fires to 1-2 tiles behind the shield from the point of explosion, so increasing that to 3 tiles would buff it against shields protecting weapons while being the same effectiveness vs shields that are not protecting weapons (pure defence)
Walt 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.
The issue is I think the AI sets the range based on the middle of each ship to each other so kites are closer than intended. I am not sure if this is intended or not, but on large ships vs ion kites, cannon fire from large ships can potentially hit ion kites despite there is supposed to be a difference in ranges.
Walt Not sure this would be a good thing. Ion kiters might be OP right now -- I haven't seen a better strategy.
Ion kites should lose to fast ships, if the AI gets fixed where the pursuing ship should be checking its movements based on the predicted position of the enemy ship rather than the current position. As they slow down on approach to the kite, the kite simply speeds up to maintain the distance, so a 'balance' is reached where the kite is barely out of range and a fast ship with lots of thrusters would be unable to catch a kiter unless it also has a lot of reverse thrust to trick the AI into thinking that the braking range is a lot shorter so it keeps on accelerating and only decelerates when a lot closer to the kite, allowing the fast ship to catch up to the kite.
This issue on kites being OP can be fixed by changing the AI system to allow players to set specific ships's AI to specifically target kites, so in fleet on fleet battles there would be dedicated fast fighters which would only chase after the kites to intercept and kill them or chase them away.
Walt 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.
Oh, I thought the PD was aiming at the predicted path of the missile rather than the current missile position.
Walt 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.
If you add in new electrobolts that can splash shields this issue will be solved very rapidly and greatly reduce the effectiveness and need to stack shields in favour of making use of single stronger shields to protect a location (now you'll have to add in more shield varieties as well XD)
Walt 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.
You can balance that by making them massively weaker and have a very high energy drain. They would then be situationally useful (on small fighters that have an extra reactor to protect against a few shots at the unprotected rear) but would be greatly outclassed by the normal shields.