Walt Not much things have changed for the meta, and that's kinda the problem. As right now the multiplayer were dominated by walls and kiters. The introduce of the rail guns were supposed to give the kiters a hard time. But this is not possible since every rail guns have a fixed range that is shorter than an auto-firing missile. And because the rail guns were heavy, they can never get close enough to fire a single round. This is quite a frustrating situation for most players.
Currently there are two types of working designs for the rail gun ships. These are:
Rail gun fan/wall: This is the design that sacrifices all of its mobility in the pursue for front defence and fire power. Usually they are composed of multiple short to medium size rail guns safely protected by lots of shields and armor. Their true power rely on the manual control that focus all of the rail guns hitting one spot. They may move like turtles, but they carry quite a punch, even able to win a head-on fight with the toughest walls. As a trade off, they get reke by the missile kiters. This is good, otherwise there might be no counter to them. In fact, with the fire power they have, I even doubt they should have any range advantage over the other weapons. If there is anything going to be changed for the rail gun's range, I will argue that they shouldn't take any benefit from it.
Rail gun sniper/kiter: This is the type of ships with one or two super long rail guns and, depend on how you use the rest resource for, the snipers will have better defense and the kiters will have better thrusts. However, the idea of sniper doesn't work as the rail guns all have the same range. They are easily out ranged by the missile kiters and, because of their heavy weight, they don't actually make a good kiter either. Any walls with decent amounts of forward thrusts can catch it up with ease and when they do, the rail gun ships lose all the time. This type of ships needs to have a better range in order to be a real sniper, at least they should have the range to reach the missile kitters. Since they don't make a good kiter they should at least have some chance against the missile kiters.
To put it simple, I think the range of the rail guns should be based on the buff they receive. It can go with the equation like this:
Range = 100 + 40 x Buff %
(The shortest rail gun with no accelerator buff has the base of 100%, thus it will have 140 range)
This will give the rail guns a variety of range ranging from 140 to 400. Most of the medium size rail guns will more or less stay the same around 250. This might seem a little bit extreme in terms of balance. But consider this, with the speed ships currently have, these extra range will probably only allow the snipers to land an extra free shot before the walls getting close by. And once the tractor beam or the blink drive come out this advantage will soon be diminished. A face-hugging wall can still defeat the snipers with ease. But for the missile kiters, this will be totally different since now they can't no longer stay far away without taking any damage, and I believe this is what most people want to see.