Cosmoteer Official Forum

Kroom
ah it does, huh...

Kroom
The Mass Driver only surpasses the railgun in damage because it's narrower, though at the sizes where it's actually good it will run out of power due to an inability to deliver batteries to the launcher fast enough to power all the accelerators and sustained damage output will stop rising. I'm going to assume that the example corvettes using mass drivers are the scale you're aiming to make useful. The Raven has 5 accelerators and the Venture 6. At that scale the factory is 25 or 28.6% of the volume of the gun. And, incidentally, neither ship has the factories to sustain them or anywhere to put them. And the longer of them falls just short of the range of a railgun with no accelerators. The Venture's mass drivers occupy 16 tiles each, cost 17000 credits, and do 1900 DPS. A no accelerator railgun occupies 12 tiles, costs 15000 credits, and does 2500 DPS. At this scale railguns outperform mass drivers while using less ammo. They need side access for power, but are more compact. It's at larger scales that mass drivers start to become competitive, not the corvette scale they're intended for. Only at 13 accelerators does a mass driver start to outperform a railgun half its length, and only in range; the railgun will still deal more damage with greater penetration. It's not until 25 accelerators that the mass driver also surpasses the damage of a railgun half its length. I don't think it's very reasonable to call something more than 54 tiles long a corvette. To fulfill its stated role rather than being a battleship weapon the mass driver needs stronger base stats, weaker accelerators, and diminishing returns on accelerators. And probably capped range not exceeding the railgun's 400m.

I don't want PD that goes behind armor exactly, I want PD that has the room on the side instead of behind so it can stick out of a 1 tile gap in sideways armor like a laser blaster or electrobolt. Improving the ion array's arc wouldn't help because they aren't actually any good as point defense. Improving the laser/particle/neutron turret arc might serve as they actually provide some measure of useful antimissile defense, though not as good as vanilla point defense. I'm not sure why the barrel clipping into armor would be a problem. The laser blaster and electrobolt can clip into armor next to them, but they recognize that they're occluded and don't try to fire. The fighter guns try to fire when clipping into armor, but the comparison I made to them is only that they have the arc centered to the left or right of the room rather than directly in front of it, not that I think the side PD turret should project through armor like them.

jesus. why are you posting so much text. its just a videogame.

Kroom I did some tests increasing the accelerators buff from 15% to 30% and the price from 2000 to 4000 and also reducing the firing speed from 3 to 4 seconds.

That halves the amount of ship needed to fit an uncounterable kiting weapon.

Kroom Mass Drive +24(+12) accelerators(+360%) -> 54000cost with crew, 4600 dps, 460 range, 23 penetration
Railgun +4 accelerators(+57%) -----------------> 52000cost with crew, 3925 dps, 314 range, 23.55 penetration
At this amount of accelerators the Mass Drive can shot 5 times before starting to lose energy too often.
At this point is better to start using Railguns due to the long time to recharge unless used for its range.

Your conclusion about railguns being better at this price ignores the massive jump in the value of range when you can fire from far enough away your enemy can't shoot back. At this point there's no reason to even look at railguns anymore. You have more range. Wedge a bundle of mass drivers between a couple flak PD with a lot of reverse thrust and you can kite anything. The only things with more range without a preposterous number of sensor arrays are EMP missiles with at least a targeting console or HE missiles with a targeting console, frigate bridge, and at least one sensor array. If you're price conscious and not chasing range you probably don't want to go above two accelerators on a railgun: Just enough to punch through one vanilla shield or two arc phase shields and have damage left over. Punching through two vanilla shields takes fourteen and isn't very practical.

Kroom I dont want to do diminishing returns neither capping the range at 400m because it will be too similar to railguns.

I don't think at least a range cap is avoidable if mass drivers are going to avoid being overpowered on the large scale. The power supply problem might substitute for diminishing returns in damage, but uncapped mass drivers can cheaply and easily do what otherwise takes a minimum of nineteen sensor arrays. It gets a weapon with low or no vulnerability to point defense past 400m range.

Kroom The energy turrets and the beam array they where never intended to be a main defense agains missiles, they are more like a support for the other main weapons (pd and flak).
The energy turrets work quite well as second line defense because they actually hit what they fire at and they actually fire. The ion arrays don't fire against HE unless the missile is coming straight in close to their resting angle. As you say, they'd only be useful against nukes, though they have the same range as nukes so if an enemy is close enough to fire a nuke at you they're close enough that the ion arrays would have discharged against their ship and wouldn't be available to shoot the nuke down. If they're getting the mode switch while still only targeting missiles they might not be completely useless in that role, but they're terribly limited as PD in spite of giving the impression that with infinite shot speed and the same fire rate they should cancel out a HE missile launcher firing through their arc. Not that they should do that at their price for balance sake, but their numbers look like they should.

Kroom I think that the best thing for what you want will be to create an entirely new weapon or change the vanilla pd arc.

My original thought was for a new part. Something with a room shaped kind of like this (at 1/4 scale) with the turret centered in the cup with the smaller circle over the pivot axis.

Atarlost Kiting using heavy weapons doesn't work when you have fast fighters or bombers, and range is the only advantage that the mass drive have against railguns at that amount of money also the firing rate is terrible.

That sketch kind of looks like the side laser cannons of the LAAT Dropship from starwars, maybe i can do something like that.

Atarlost By using these fighter i was able to destroy both ships by using only a fraction of the money, those ships use a lot of money in propulsion but even so is not nearly enough to keep these fighter away form them:

I'm testing a secondary mode for the small energy turrets where the "ball" of the weapon goes out of the part, the way that you describe it.

Kroom By using these fighter i was able to destroy both ships by using only a fraction of the money, those ships use a lot of money in propulsion but even so is not nearly enough to keep these fighter away form them:

The game doesn't spawn homogenous swarms of small ships in high level systems, and doesn't coordinate ships. If you're only interested in MP there's an attention cost to large numbers of small ships because you can't just pause for minutes to give them all orders every time something changes. There's also the ring of death which magically kills kites anyways so it's not a relevant context for balancing long range weapons.

If you made Bounty Hunter spawn thirty Stalker2s in place of a tier 9 ship they would get pulled a few at a time by anything with more than 250m weapon range because they only have fighter cockpits and AI ships don't share vision radius.

In actual play you see maybe two Kilrathi fighters (why never the human stuff or anything original or from other settings?) in a clump with larger ships and can easily avoid fighting them at the same time because of their short aggro range.

Comparing that fighter to other capital ships suggests that it's the fighters that are too strong not the capital ships that are too weak. Running them in battle helper with a movement order to get them into sensor range they beat too many of the design contest winners. They don't decisively beat Excelsis, which tricks the AI into sticking fighter after fighter right in front of its flaks while shooting at armor and stuff irrelevant to the fight and they don't beat the Marathon because after it breaks apart they target the almost harmless and difficult to kill section with a control room and let the missile sections pick them off with impunity.

Fighter guns appear to have mostly fair tradeoffs compared to the vanilla laser blaster only if the value of a crewman and small volume are ignored. The narrow arc and short range are a fair trade for the higher shot speed and the greater price per damage is a fair trade for the higher energy efficiency, but being 2 tiles smaller using 1x1 or 1x2 bunks and 1125 or 1325 credits cheaper depending on if adding crew space would necessitate adding a door. The second tier fighter guns have a further compactness advantage doing damage more comparable to weapons that are either many times bulkier like the large laser blaster or that require an ammo factory. You may have overvalued firing arc, but firing arc has very little relevance on the sort of ship they're intended for. It's wide enough several can focus fire on a single tile, the availability of side mounts and the ability to fire through armor duplicate the advantage vanilla laser blasters and electrobolts get from their >180 degree arcs. The narrow arc imposes little drawback. I'm pretty sure you've also undervalued armor, possibly because the mechanics have changed since you introduced the guns. The low HP of fighter guns may be intended to compensate for being placed behind armor, but something behind a 800 HP 2x1 armor block or even a 400 HP 2x1 wedge is more durable to explosive and penetrating weapons than a 1200 HP standard cannon against explosive and penetrating weapons.

The ability to beat most capital ships with guns renders the single shot torpedoes and the larger, more vulnerable weapons like the fusion cannon and plasma lancer obsolete. If it were just Walt's and David Billingsly's and mine I could chalk it up to poor or overly aesthetics focused designs. If they were losing to bombers or big gun fighters that would be the point of torpedoes and big guns, but it's winning using nothing but the 1 tile no crew fit behind armor guns.

TLDR: Overpowered fighters being able to beat overpowered mass driver kites does not make mass driver kites not overpowered.

Atarlost It is possible to change BH in a way that if a ship is attacked all other ships will defend it even if they have no vision on the attacker, it is also possible to make small fleets of ships, its just that i have not focus on BH much as its going to change soon, anyway.
Right now BH has mostly aesthetics ships, testing anything against them is not a good way to measure something,
even AI vs AI in creative mode is not a good way to test ships, especially fighters since there is no AI designed for them.

Any ship that is fast enough can beat those two ships, doesn't matter if it is a vanilla ship or a fighter made with the mod because at that amount of accelerators it take ages to reload and the DPS drops drastically.

Mass Drive is only overpowered against ships that are slow and has bad defense, same thing happens with vanilla missiles, against a slow ship that has no flak or pd.

I agree that the fighter weapons are a bit overpowered, i have to do them like that. My idea of fighter is that they should shoot with this powerful weapons for a small amount of time before needing to wait a a few second to recharge, a that point they should focus on dodging incoming fire or running away until the weapons are totally charged. Because there is no AI that support that, i had to make them use less energy so they can shoot constantly instead of sitting there and be an easy target.

But even so, these fighters are not all powerfull and they have many counters, vanilla shields is the most notable one because they have tons of regeneration.
I made this fighter to show you what i mean:

If you make them fight you will see that the dps is not enough to take down the shields.
This other fighter can also destroy it with its alpha strike:

Bombers has the ability to deal a massive amount of damage in a second, they advantage is that they usually can get away without taking much damage while fighters that need to stay for several seconds will lost several of them.

I can probably nerf fighters weapons a little bit, but not as much as not been overpower, until there is an AI specifically made for them or nobody will use them.

WaffleGames There is no Hellbringer Cannons in my mod so it must be some other mod you have installed.

Teleporting to Energy storages could be nice, i will try it.

Thanks!

Also the Hellbringer cannons was indeed from another mod, i forgot it was......whoops XD

@Kroom hello, an idea of when we'll have reskinned med and large reactors ?

Tyaestysu I will probably do it, but no idea when.

I've been playing again fairly regularly, and I keep running into areas where there aren't quite any parts that function the way that I'm hoping they do. I normally tend to use the AbH 1x1 fusion reactor for small craft, but I would love to be able to get a 1X2 reactor with reasonable stats. Reasonable in this case being "1/3 the performance and storage of a vanilla 2X2 reactor" If the 1X1 Kroom Reactor's stats are already somewhere in that range, then midway between the 1X1 Kroom and the 2X2 Vanilla.

Other than that, your mod continues to redefine the low-tier game and is perfect for adding that little touch to mid-tier and larger craft. Vulcan Blasters are the perfect fighter-scale weapon to slap across the port and starboard sides of escorts and pocket battleships. They're great for occupying enemy shields if you have something else that can come in and break them.

Finally, RCS blocks. You, sir, are a monster and a genius. I'm able to make microfighters that can pace my big ships with nothing more than a single 1X2 Vector Thruster. My last game had me keeping microfighters around to pick at HP on larger ships until my secondary escort craft were being replaced with 500k-1M shield knockers and missile ships.

Currently, I am behaving and not making alpha-strike torpedo bombers and a teleporter-enabled station to feed them. I haven't done the battles yet, but I'm guessing that you can field 3-5 50K bomber craft and a single 100K tank (probably with a penetration weapon and anti-missile defense and little else) and wipe the floor with everything up to Tier 4. But, the temptation is there.

Your work is wonderful, as always.

hi Kroom, i wondered if you could do different colored type of thrusters?

a suggestion could you please create a roof mounted phaser and a large version one for Version 14.14c possibly

I've been having an issue where my ships won't go back onto the landing pad, is this a normal bug or am I doing it wrong?

driller24 what do you mean? do you have collision avoidance off?