Actually, I've missed all the noise, folks. I appreciate the apologies, however heartfelt, but frankly, I feel you folks are largely missing the point.
1. Are SS weapons balanced well? No, they aren't. If we disagree about this, we're disagreeing about everything, so let's start with that and talk about examples:
A. Is the Heavy AC worth using, if you have Light Needlers? No, it's not; while it slightly out-performs Light Needlers on per-shot damage vs. Armor, that's literally the only stat where it out-performs them, and that for a huge OP penalty. When we compare the Light Needlers with the Arbalest, it's even worse.
B. Is the Light Mortar worth using vs. the Light Assault Gun? Generally, no; unless you're starved for OPs, the LAG's performance is hugely superior, largely due to higher hit rates and DPS.
These are just two cases where we're comparing weapons in similar job roles, but there are pretty obvious issues just in these areas.
2. Are my methods
valid, mathematically speaking?
The hit-rate stuff is completely obvious trig, so yes, it's valid.
The math behind TTK is just running the numbers, so yes, it's valid.
The math behind Damage / Flux is just like TTK; it's clean.
These things are totally defensible.
So, why all the flak and griping? Well, let's look at the stuff where the math is arguably bad, and then we'll talk about the other reasons why there's so much griping.
1. The weighting of damage types is arguable, and we should argue about it, but I think that it's pretty solidly supported by playtesting at this point. It's probably not perfect, but perfect will have to wait for more testing, frankly.
SS feels considerably harder over here, in the sense that a lot of the "junk weapons" actually don't feel like junk now. As that's pretty much what I wanted to see happen, it's feeling valid.
2. The single-shot damage question is viable and reasonable, but I think it gets weighted far too heavily in a lot of people's minds.
Look, there are
two situations where a high-TTK, high-damage-per-event weapon really shines:
A. When an opponent can be brought to, or over, their Flux Capacity and enter Overload as a result of the hit. AM Blasters are the classic example here; they're really slow weapons that pack so much punch that they can bring a Frigate to its knees in one shot.
B. When a single shot can tear through Armor and leave Armor at the hard-capped 15% value. Here, we're talking about a continuum; when a Light Assault Gun hits a Frigate, it'll tear up Armor but not Hull, when a Heavy Mauler hits, the Armor will generally fail and some Hull damage will happen, and when a Hellbore hits, a large proportion of the damage will get through.
This is great and all, but frankly, it's less-important than people make it out to be, when we're not doing small-scale fights in the Sim.
In fleet battles, generally speaking, Flux-locking (raising Hard / Soft Flux to the point where ships cannot maintain both their firepower and shields) is, generally speaking, more important. It's only when Flux-locking has happened that scenario B really starts coming into play; until then, HE weapons in particular are really bad Flux-traders and are actually losers up until that point.
This is why HE got weighted like it did in the current balance; I feel very strongly that it was inefficient and my fleet compositions pretty much just use Kinetics and Frag in Ballistics, because a fleet that Flux-locks well is punching way above its weight. This wasn't just my conclusion; it was supported by a lot of us who minmax play.
Now, that doesn't mean that single-shot damage doesn't matter; it does. But it's quite situational in nature, and therefore, shouldn't be given a huge weighting, if any, especially if the weapon involved has a really poor TTK. For example, the AM Blaster's great at knocking down Shields and is OK at cracking Armor, but generally speaking, you use it to start a kill, not finish one; other weapons with better TTK and Flux efficiency are used to finish the job.
What's that situational use-case worth? Frankly, it's either extremely important or not important at all; a single AM Blaster is just a terrible Flux-trade against an Apogee with full Capacity available, but it can be the death-knell of an Onslaught if it opens up Armor at a critical moment or leads to an Overload that allows bombers to come in.
This is part of the Fun in a game like this, where we clever humans can feel awesome when we've judged the moment correctly... but in real terms, is it actually way better than the more-boring Flux-trading alternatives, especially when we're talking about AI ships fighting each other?
Generally speaking, no; it doesn't lead to shorter engagement times (which is about the only fair way to measure this) and, other than the Heavy Mauler, which is absurdly efficient, it's usually a bad idea to even give the AI ships these weapons; humans simply have better judgment about when to burn Time in order to pick the moment when these kinds of mechanics will work best. If you're in any doubts about that, I invite you to try arming Medusas with AM Blasters and letting the AI pilot them; you'll quickly see that doesn't generally work out.
In conclusion, while I feel like there are certainly valid arguments about that point and others, the core approach isn't bad and the resulting balance isn't terrible, and it largely fixed the obvious problems in Vanilla, which is pretty much the whole point.
But why this, rather than buff / nerf? Well, two reasons:
A. Buff / nerf is largely the same process, but without any solid basis.
B. Buff / nerf tends to largely create statistical outliers that then need more buff / nerf; it doesn't provide any way to talk about the "why" of outlier cases. This approach does.
Anyhow, that's basically how I think about all this.
I know it's controversial, because, my goodness, if I ever release a proper mod for and people largely agreed that it improved balance... well, gosh, modded content would also follow suit, and the game would be better as a result... oh, wait, that's not terrible, is it?
I mean that quite gently: this isn't something mandatory and it's only going to be popular if I'm actually able to deliver; the market doesn't care what I think about my math, it only cares if the results are Fun.
So, I'm going to continue to work on this until I'm either bored to tears of yet-another fine-tuning or until I get enough useful feedback to correct the remaining problems, etc., or I conclude that I've failed.
If that incenses you, fine, nobody's forcing you to do anything and you can pretend this doesn't exist; it's not like it's hurting anybody here that I'm playing with some numbers, after all. But for goodness sakes, stop the personal attacks; I get that people don't like their assumptions challenged, but for heaven's sakes, it's not affecting you in any way if you don't download and install it, lol. Please take deep breaths and move on to something that actually pleases you