Walt I think you're over-estimating how debilitating tractor beams will be. They won't prevent lateral movement at all, probably won't be great at preventing rotation, and will use enough power such that their long-term use will effectively make them much more expensive than thrusters per unit of force. They limit player agency far less than kiters do (being kited is really no different than a status effect which disables all weapons, a tractor beam isn't nearly that bad) and even help to mitigate the negative agency impact of kiters. Plenty of games have mechanics that temporarily restrict the player's agency and work totally fine, including many PVP games. While I agree that completely removing player agency, even temporarily, is almost always a bad thing, temporarily limiting player agency and forcing them to come up with alternative strategies can be a very, very good thing.
No crowd control is weak enough to allow to operate indefinitely. If the tractor beam overheats in a second and can't be used again for twenty that's on par with CC in other games. It'd also be useless in Cosmoteer.
Kites are countered by not bringing ships that cannot counter them. No kite can mount as much reverse thrust as a pursuer can mount forward thrust because it needs to mount its weapons forward. No kite can mount as much railgun as a railgun sniper that doesn't try to be a kite. You can also have no agency if you load in with big block of armor with no weapons, but that's your choice.
Walt Can you elaborate why viable slow brawlers would necessarily make kiters and snipers not viable? I don't buy that that's true in all cases.
Kites counter brawlers. Pursuers and snipers are two distinct counters to kites. One seeks to negate the speed advantage and the other the range advantage.
Brawlers crush pursuers because they're not paying for engines.
Snipers may beat brawlers if they start with a sufficient range advantage, but if they start too close they can't compete because short range weapons are more efficient than long range weapons. If they weren't brawlers and kites would never have arisen.
Pursuers may or may not beat snipers depending on how much they're forced to invest in forward thrust by the kites in the metagame.
Anything that protects brawlers from suffering for their decision to skimp on both speed and range directly removes kites. They are now countered by everything. It has the same effect on snipers: brawlers can force them to fight in their phonebooth where their more efficient but shorter ranged weapons dominate. Pursuers already lose to brawlers because they have no choice but to fight them on their own terms.
It's the existence of kites in the meta that allows pursuers and snipers to have a niche. If ranges were several orders of magnitude larger or ships smaller or the game was 3d or shots passed through friendly ships, snipers would have a fleet role independent of countering kites, but at the scale and dimensionality Cosmoteer operates at they just get their shots blocked by the allies that are keeping the enemy from closing.
