Dalas120 Not at all. What tractor beams do is give heavy ships a chance to fight fast ships. If I wanted my heavy brawler to catch your strafer, I'd need to spend something like 500k (compared to your 100k strafing engines). But using tractor beams my heavy brawler can force a fight for only 200k - much more expensive than your engines but still much cheaper than getting engines of my own.
Range gives heavy ships a chance to fight fast ships. A heavy brawler should not be a thing. If you are ever able to force the opponent to not move while not crippling your offense so much that mounting the weapon at all amounts to forfeiting the weapon is too powerful. Strong crowd control applied against players is bad game design. It's okay as a power fantasy that's only used against NPCs, but it's never okay against players. The resources used to get the effect don't matter because it's a player agency problem not a competitive balance problem.
Slow brawlers simply should not be a viable ship type. Anything that forces them to be viable makes kites, pursuit ships, and snipers not viable. When tactical jumpdrives make it in, jump brawlers will be viable, but even lacking realspace speed they won't be slow.
Dalas120 Are sumo ships unbalanceable too then? What about railgun knockback? What about the ring of death? Heck, I can just destroy your engines to take away your control - is that doomed to be a broken/useless strategy?
The ring of death is a horrible kludge. It should not remain in the game once tactical jumpdrives are introduced. Even as it is it's a worse solution than warping space into a torus.
Sumo ships if they actually work like sumo wrestling are an artifact of the ring of death which should never have existed.
Railgun knockback does not take movement control away completely and has an extremely short duration. It's actually weak enough crowd control to be acceptable even as an addon to a damaging ability.
If you can't understand the difference between a magic beam that takes away movement and breaking through the enemy's defenses everywhere to destroy all of their engines you have no business pontificating on game balance.
Dalas120 Tractor beams can 100% be balanceable and fun, as long as there's reasonable interaction and counterplay.
The only counterplay Cosmoteer supports is to focus fire the device, which is impossible if it's internal, or to mount an equal range/power pusher beam that cancels it out. This effectively makes any tractor beam for which there is counterplay a single use against opponents that mount electrobolts. A single use device cannot be viable in fleet play or against anything that can survive a single close encounter. If you think the tractor beam is "balanceable" (sic) you have not even an educated layman's understanding of multiplayer game design. This is basic. The duration and strength of a crowd control ability acceptable for use against human players are inversely correlated. One second is a typical rooting duration. Two seconds is an eternity. If a short cooldown is possible with good crew flow repeated rootings amount to a slow, which can last a little longer, but an effective slow based on a short root cooldown has indefinite duration and is also unacceptable.
