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46

General Discussion / Re: We need weapons that counter fast ships

« on: January 12, 2022, 01:59:05 AM »

SO Hyperion is a 15DP ship that barely has any PPT. If it wasn't OP during it's short window of opportunity, why would you ever use it?.

The window of opportunity isn't much shorter than other ships - PPT time is vastly outweighed by CR decay time, especially for SO ships.

The simple oversight is that Hyperion is missing the Delicate Machinery hullmod that phase ships also have to make CR decay time meaningfully different. The recent Wolfpack Tactics nerf to PPT was clearly aimed at Hyperion, without considering how minor the impact is when post-PPT CR decay rate is so easily countered by Combat Endurance + Hardened Subsystems without Delicate Machinery.

Without Delicate Machinery, the SO malus is simply not significant enough to outweigh the disproportionate gains for Hyperion compared to other ships with SO.

The other issue is that despite being described as a "hangar queen" in the Codex, Hyperion actually takes the same to recover CR as high tech ships like Astral or Apogee (5 days to recover from a single deployment, compared to 17 days for Ziggurat). In fact, Hyperion recovers from being reduced to 0% CR far faster than those ships as well, which only further rewards running the Hyperion deep into CR-decay territory. To be more consistent with the Codex description, IMO Hyperion's daily CR recovery rate should be reduced to 5% (8 days to fully recover), which would still be much closer to other high tech ships than to Ziggurat.

I don't think the performance of the Hyperion is a problem at all - it's just not being properly constrained by CR mechanics right now.

47

General Discussion / Re: [REDACTED] weapons discussion

« on: January 10, 2022, 09:58:44 AM »

Reality Disruptor: The mother of all EMP weapons. It's basically the ultimate support weapons since you must sacrifice 30 OP and a large weapon mount for it, so I'm not sure where this would be a good pick. I've been thinking about making one Apogee a shield tank that also EMPs everything in front, other than that I'm kinda iffy with spending so much on a weapon that doesn't deal damage (ok it does very very little). This thing would probably be great against stations, but I'm yet to try it out there. Overall I like what it does and how it looks in combat, but I think it's yet another "looks broken on Doritos, kinda meh on player ships" situation. Now that I think about it, Radiant has large mounts to spare and it could work well there due to Phase skimmer system, but my current run doesn't have the skill to recovers them so it'll be a plan for another playthrough.

A criminally underrated weapon IMO. Very few enemy ships have 360 shields, so Reality Disruptor basically shuts down enemy weapons/engines at will. This greatly reduces the damage you receive and prevents the enemy ship from escaping once it gets into flux trouble, which means a much higher rate of actually finishing off an enemy, especially fast enemies with mobility systems. Also has a surprisingly low flux overhead for a large weapon - great for ships that are more limited by flux than mounts, and works in missile mounts for builds where it's not as cost effective to fully invest in Missile Spec + EMR + ECCM etc. For example, you could use it on the large missile mount of a Champion and focus on using the large energy + medium mounts for damage.

Also: doubles very well as PD, zapping entire waves of incoming missiles (completely neutralizes Squalls) and paralyzing fighter swarms.

Rift Cascade Emitter: The buffs made it much better, but as others have previously said many times, this thing has an identity crisis. It's a 1000 range beam that murders everything in close range, but your ships will mostly use it a near max range where it does like one explosion and that's it. That's a waste of flux and it feels bad. You could probably put it on a reckless officer with lower range weapons but I'm not a fan of my fleet having kamikaze ships. It's perfectly made for Doritos who come in your face to deal damage, less so for player ships. I mean I'm still going to continue using it since it looks so sexy.

The RCE buff wasn't as earth-shattering as people make it out to be: at max rifts (5), its total damage increased from 5250 to 6500, a 23.8% damage increase. Very sizable, but the previous version was already quite usable. It's actually a bit of a sidegrade since at long range (1-2 rifts) RCE does less damage than before; however, because the rift damage was changed to be much more back-loaded, RCE now has a lot more potential to utterly wreck targets when it successfully wraps around shields, especially against smaller ships.

I'm not sure why people say RCE has an identify crisis: you can use it where you'd normally use Tach Lance and receive extra hard flux damage (much more valuable now that HSA is borderline unusable again) + close range "insurance" for when ships get too close to a long-range ship. It's a bit flux-intensive when used this way, but quite worth it IMO. You can also use it where you'd normally use Plasma Cannon and receive extra long range sniping damage before your ship closes into range to use all its other weapons, and it has better stats to boost when you can proc all 5 rifts. In this scenario, it's actually quite flux-efficient:

• Rift Cascade Emitter (5 rifts): 6500 damage at 4500 flux per 6.5s = 1000 DPS (769 hard flux), 1.44 damage/flux, 500 beam hit strength, 750-1250 rift hit strength.
• Plasma Cannon: 750 DPS, 0.91 damage/flux, 500 hit strength.

Because of its multi-range versatility, RCE really shines on ships that are very mount-limited where a single large energy has to carry a lot of water in all situations. For example, it's far and away the best choice for the large energy on an Apogee. It's also completely broken on the Ziggurat, but that ship is a noob cannon anyway.

Rift Torpedo Launcher: I had crazy RNG that I'm yet to see this thing drop for me in 2 runs. Tested it a bit outside campaign and it seems like a super Antimatter SRM Launcher, 1.0 efficiency regenerating missile, but one that outright deletes everything it comes into contact with. Travels very very slowly but has high hitpoints so it appears balanced. I need to get this thing in campaign and properly use it to have a concrete opinion.

Because of how highly the AI prioritizes blocking the Rift Torpedo with its shield (rightfully so), it's primarily an anti-shield weapon for high tech - it'll hit shields 90%+ of the time unless used in linked pairs. Basically the same 1.0 flux efficiency as a Pulse Laser, but with 2000 range and a long delay before impact. The real value IMO is how you can use it to influence enemy AI behavior:

• Completely shuts down enemy venting in a wide radius.
• Locks enemy shields into the torpedo's approach trajectory to expose back for flankers.
• Protects vulnerable ships, discourage swarming, and creates space for venting since enemies are very hesitant to approach an active torpedo and want to back off out of its range.
• Creates openings by causing frequent overloads.

I think people who want to use it as a finisher to instantly delete ships are going to be disappointed at how badly it works in that role due to the terrible projectile speed, but it's actually a very tactically flexible and effective weapon when leveraged correctly.

Rift Cascade Emitter: I use this on the front 2 large slots for Paragon, in place of the Tachyon Lances I had. It's not strictly better, but it does have considerable advantages when mounted on the paragon on a beam build. The rift distance is based on the weapon current maximum range AFAICT. On the Paragon, the beam's range is over 2000 units, with advanced optics.

RCE has very strong synergy with all range extension (Gunnery Implants + Advanced Optics are basically required for max DPS) so it's strictly better than Tach Lance on the Paragon due to its ATC. That said, the Paragon isn't the most exciting or DP-efficient ship to use.

48

General Discussion / Re: The space battle AI is absolutely ruining this game for me. Tips, please?

« on: January 05, 2022, 02:04:51 PM »

Because it's a short-range brawler, I didn't worry too much about shield killing; by the time anything gets close to the Paragon, the other ships in the fleet have stripped shields.  I very much built the fleet to work as a group, which is sort of what this thread was all about; my inability to keep the fleet together because the game AI is so hell-bent on sending ships out on their own.

If the design concept of the game is every ship needs to stand on its own then a) that's terrible design and b) good to know, I'll stop playing and stop posting about my problems, since the game won't ever make sense to me.

It should be the other way around - the Paragon with its superior range is better suited for hitting shields before enemy ships enter the range of your other ships. Hence the others' suggestions for weapons that can output significant hard flux damage at range, such as Heavy Needlers, HVD, Autopulse Lasers, and Plasma Cannons. Of course, all these weapons have varying other performance considerations, such as flux usage, performance vs armor, etc.

HSA (in its current iteration, in RC6) actually decreases a beam's base range to less than that of comparable weapons, which is why people are telling you it's a poor choice for Paragons.

Ships don't necessarily have to be self-sufficient, but they should be assigned roles that are synergistic with their strengths and weaknesses and outfitted accordingly.

I swear every time there's a post with someone saying AI is broken and bad and can't do a thing in combat, it's ALWAYS due to people throwing random stuff on a ship or using autofit. There really should be a quick course or tutorial in game that's mandatory, that explains how to make a decent build in general. That's the single hardest thing in the game with a crazy steep learning curve, and imo the biggest reason why new players get frustrated and quit the game since they think it's too hard (I mean it is honestly).

Agreed. Often when people complain about poor AI performance, it's because the AI is struggling to do what it can with the loadout that the player has assigned it, and a lot of newer players also have little understanding of issues like weapon range and weapon group assignments when implementing their loadouts. A basic sanity check for loadouts is a great first diagnostic step when it comes to addressing AI performance issues. That said, I'm not sure if there's a better way to understand loadouts other than a lot of trial and error in the simulator.

49

General Discussion / Re: The space battle AI is absolutely ruining this game for me. Tips, please?

« on: January 05, 2022, 10:08:37 AM »

Have you tried using smaller ships? Capital spam is not really the best strat and it's no wonder your ships are derping out when they have to fight 10 ships at once.

I have. Smaller ships tend to sublimate on contact with enemy battleships which is not really a survival strategy, so I try to deploy two, and sometimes even three, capital ships per battle, with cruiser escort.  I save my destroyers and frigates for a mop-up pursuit fleet, usually - early in the game they had some survivability but by 211 or 212 the game world had ramped up enough that those smaller ships just couldn't hang in the fight long enough to matter, and 30 deployment points of destroyer/frigate invariably did less than one heavy cruiser or two light cruisers.

This here is the problem: fleet composition. You need more smaller ships to break up enemy formations and give enemies more targets to shoot at so that the enemy isn't swarming you and dictating the terms of engagement. If you're having issues with frigate survivability, start by adding a few Monitors into the mix. Then after that, see if you can work out builds for Hyperions, Omens, and/or Afflictors that keep them alive - any of these will add a ton of valuable disruption against enemy ranks, and it's pretty straightforward to make them endgame-capable.

If you try turtling with only capitals/cruisers, then the fleet AI and giving orders can't save your ships from being outnumbered, separated, and picked apart when you're fighting decent enemies like Ordos (and IMO they're much weaker this patch than in 0.95, due to Radiant/shield nerfs). It's a numbers game. To illustrate: take one of your caps and one of your cruisers and let them both autopilot in the simulator against an equivalent DP number of frigates (for example: Onslaught + Champion vs 65 DP of frigates, roughly 12-15 or so.) It doesn't matter what orders you give for your cruiser to cover the Onslaught's back - the raw number of enemy targets simply work against them tactically.

Also:

it's not that my ships aren't good enough [...] There has to be some way to keep my speed-boosted Paragon from going off on its own and getting torn to shreds by three cruisers

A Paragon is roughly the same DP value as 3 cruisers, so if your Paragon can't handle that on its own, then it might be the case your loadouts actually aren't good enough. Remember that capitals are very DP-intensive and it's completely expected that they should, at minimum, be able to handle an equivalent DP of reasonably-numbered enemy ships. For example, a well-built Radiant should at least be able to solo 3 of the SIM capitals at the same time on autopilot, and up to all 5 with some optimization.

50

General Discussion / Re: Thoughts on the latest skill changes

« on: January 02, 2022, 01:58:56 PM »

First of all, I think it's appropriate for Systems Expertise and Missile Specialization to remain top tier skills - they're niche but very loadout-enabling for the targeted builds. If the Combat tree were completely flat, I think it would funnel players toward flagships with missile/Sabot spam and/or systems spam (such as Doom/Radiant) without the need to significantly invest into Combat. Keep in mind that players already use missiles and ship systems much more intelligently than the AI does, and if the skills enhancing them weren't gated behind Combat tiering, then it'd actually reduce flagship diversity since those ships/builds would become no-brainer flagship choices requiring only minimal investment.

I think it'd also be a bad idea to make higher-tier "combination" skills since officers use the same Combat tree, and again it'd become no-brainers to only use officers with higher-tier combo skills, reducing officer diversity.

I think one way to make player investment into Combat more impactful is actually by moving a portion of the base bonuses into the elite portion of the skill. (For example: instead of +10/15/20 for Target Analysis, make Target Analysis only +5/10/15 with an additional +5/5/5 for elite, on top of the other elite bonuses.) Officers have very limited choices in elite skills, whereas the player will have access to elite versions of every personal skill they choose, so a player investing into the Combat tree and having all elite skills will be rewarded with a noticeable edge over officers with only 1 elite skill (before additional bonuses). This would also provide more incentive for players to pilot the most powerful ships in their fleet instead of assigning them to officers, and also provide better synergy with skills providing more elite skills to officers (Officer Training and Cybernetic Augmentation) since IMO those are a bit underpowered right now. It would be nice for elite skills to be actually "better" at their core bonuses and not just provide some random semi-related bonuses.

Lastly, I also think it would be a mistake to simply buff the entire Combat tree - officers are already very strong, and improving the entire Combat tree is just going to make non-officered ships obsolete. The goal should be to reward the player for investing into Combat themselves.

51

General Discussion / Re: The State of Derelict Contingent

« on: December 29, 2021, 09:40:27 PM »

10% less range on a Paragon doesn't matter that much, it's still never getting outranged by anything but another Paragon. The cr penalties aren't very meaningful, they give the Paragon a slightly worse operating time than a pristine cruiser.

CR penalties decrease performance across the board - damage inflicted, damage taken, etc.

You seem to be fixated on how Paragons can ignore a lot of d-mods and still be effective, which says more about the Paragon than about d-mods or Derelict Contingent. As was brought up earlier, different d-mods are going to impact different ships very differently, which is reasonable given the diversity of ship strengths and weaknesses in the game.

First of all, I should have made it more clear in my first post that current dmod mechanics make derelict contingent an overpowered skill when run optimally or close to optimally. If you get ships with good dmods, you basically get to deploy 30% more ships.

The real question is: overpowered compared to what?

Compared to the previous iteration of the skill, which rendered sufficiently d-modded ships effectively immortal, I don't think the current Derelict Operations is anywhere close to that level of "broken" or "overpowered". I also believe that reduction in deployment cost is a better lever to pull than d-modded ships being able to withstand immensely more damage. Of course, one could quibble with whether -6% per d-mod is the right number - I'm sure Alex would appreciate feedback on that.

Compared to other current top tier skills: I think the jury's still out on that. Is -30% DP with varying penalties to combat performance depending in ship/d-mod combination too powerful? I'm not sure if it's any more powerful than access to Radiant/Glimmer/officers with 8 elite skills, or +1 s-mod and being able to completely negate enemy officer spam and still be able to deploy all your ships in combat, etc. Unofficially, out of the skill layouts I've seen shared on Discord, Hull Restoration has been much more popular as the Industry pick. The point is that all the top tier skills are supposed to be special and very impactful, and Derelict Operations is no exception. I'm personally not seeing Derelict Operations as "lul must pick or ur dumb" right now, but it's still pretty soon after a major skill revamp and perhaps sentiment will evolve over time.

52

General Discussion / Re: About legion class carrier

« on: December 28, 2021, 10:50:55 PM »

While the Legion is in a bit of an odd spot being a hybrid of 3 different offensive strategies (fighters, missiles, guns), it got significant gains by just needing any officer to get the carrier buffs instead of needing to invest points. Ordinance Expertise also goes a loooong way to solving any flux troubles it has, especially as OP spent on fighters and missiles turns into flux for the guns.

Agreed - ironically, Legions are stronger in 0.95.1a than they've ever been in recent memory, thanks to a ton of flux from Ordinance Expertise, officer bonuses to fleetwide carrier skills, and the armor/hull buffs the ship received this patch. While the XIV is likely still better, the stock Legion is also more usable than before thanks to receiving full bonuses to Ballistic Rangefinder with its large ballistic mounts.

Battlecarriers used to be inefficient jack-of-all-trades, but they're much more viable now with the right officer setup.

53

General Discussion / Re: The State of Derelict Contingent

« on: December 28, 2021, 02:14:56 AM »

My biggest problem with derelict contingent is that how strong your ships are is significantly RNG dependant. For example, the player could get a Paragon with faulty power grid, degraded shields, degraded engines, compromised armour, and compromised hull, which would make it shoot 15% less, tank about 25% less damage with its shields, have 20% worse armour, have 30% less hull points, 15% worse turn rate, and 15% worse speed. This is terrible compared to a Paragon with glitched sensors, unreliable subsystems, faulty automated systems, degraded life support, and increased maintenance, which gives the Paragon trivial debuffs in battle and higher logistical costs, which become irrelevant going into the late game. In addition to logistical dmods that are mostly meaningless in battle, some dmods have little effect on certain ships. For example, compromised armour and hull matters little on high tech ships because they mainly use shields to survive. With a system of giving buffs like this, the player can acquire ships that cost 30% less dp and have little meaningful downsides in combat, but the process to get them requires a lot of grinding.

Firstly, the "trivial debuffs in battle" you listed (Glitched Sensors = -10% range; Faulty Automated Systems, Degraded Life Support, Increased Maintenance = -5% CR apiece) aren't really that trivial.

Secondly, it's true that some d-mods (like Unreliable Subsystems and Compromised Hull) affect some ships more than others, but that's to be expected given the different combat stats that different ships rely upon in different ways - there are definitely ships for which penalties to CR/PPT or armor/hull would be huge drawbacks.

Lastly, consider that Derelict Operations directly competes against other top tier skills (additional s-mod + battle DP equalizer; access to some of the best ships and tons of free officers; +10-15% CR and greatly reduced impact of combat losses and salvaging; etc.) and its benefits should be commensurately powerful as well, especially given that unlike most of the other top tier skills, it has a very distinct downside to use.

Personally I don't have an issue with the randomness of d-mods: it gives another layer of consideration for how "good" a particular ship is to recover. Running Derelict Operations certainly makes salvaging a lot more interesting when you're on the lookout for "good" d-mods for a particular hull.

54

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: December 27, 2021, 10:42:48 PM »

With the player having the Combat Endurance elite skill, in some battles the hull repair seems to get stuck and stops working for the rest of the battle.
It works fine the next battle though.

Hull repair isn't infinite - it'll stop repairing once it's recovered 2000 points or 50% of max hull (whichever is greater) during each battle. It's effectively akin to a more active version of the hull boost from Reinforced Bulkheads.

55

General Discussion / Re: Genuine question about the phase changes

« on: December 23, 2021, 07:14:45 AM »

Mind posting your fleet and phase ship builds? I'm using phase anchor on my two afflictors and shade, tried using it on harbinger with bad results. Sounds like I can learn something from you.

I'm working on a full guide for my current fleet so I don't want to prematurely spoil the content too much, but since it's relevant to this discussion, here's the loadout and a sample simulator battle for my Doom putting Phase Anchor to full use. Note that this is on full autopilot, because I no longer pilot phase ships as a player since doing so tends to trivialize content too much. (Exception at start of every new run: rush Z, pilot Z to take out Doritos, then store Z and start exploring and fleetbuilding in earnest.)

Spoiler

[close]

This particular build is specialized toward eliminating frigates/destroyers safely and efficiently using pure alpha, and leaving sustained damage against larger enemies to the rest of the fleet. Since this is a pure alpha build, Phase Anchor is an ideal hullmod. Note that this build specifically omits PD so that the AI will use phase more frequently to dodge, thus squeezing a lot more ammo/DPS out of Phase Anchor. As you can see, it's quite capable of dispatching smaller ships nonstop while receiving very little damage in return, and is limited only by CR/PPT.

Phase Anchor works best on 3 categories of weapons:

• a) Long recharge (e.g. Phase Lance, AMB)
• b) Recharging ammo clips (e.g. Ion Pulser, Burst PD)
• c) Both long recharge and recharge ammo (e.g. Omega missiles, mod weapons)

Since Omega missiles are the only vanilla weapons in category c), they are ideal for use with Phase Anchor. However, you can easily make solid Phase Anchor builds using weapons from category a) and/or b).

Also note that phase ships that aren't built for burst damage don't need Phase Anchor. I like to build my Afflictor (P)s for long range support, so they don't have Phase Anchor and the phase speed reduction also doesn't bother them at all. It all depends on the build and its intended role.

56

General Discussion / Re: Genuine question about the phase changes

« on: December 22, 2021, 07:57:19 PM »

It mostly seems to have gutted phase

A knee-jerk conclusion, due to many people having not yet learned how to build around Phase Anchor. With proper builds, phase ship DPS has much higher potential than before, which is well worth the new risk of overextension from speed reduction. My current fleet actually contains more phase ships than before due to the increased DP softcap on Phase Coil Tuning (from 30 to 40) and the cost-effectiveness of Afflictor (P).

The fact that AI phase fleets are much less annoying to finish off is a very nice QoL improvement as well.

57

General Discussion / Re: How come high intensity lasers deal explosive damage?

« on: December 22, 2021, 04:30:35 PM »

Rift's weapon card says it does 1500 damage per burst. Doing a couple of quick tests in the simulator, it looks like at max range it does around 2100 damage per burst (i.e. the regular 1500, then a 600-damage rift), going up to about 4500 total damage at point-blank range, against shields, due to the additional rifts. (Yes the weapon card says the rifts are 750 to 1250 damage, but it seems like they're centered a bit away so they don't do their max damage.) So at max range the actual DPS (assuming rifts match the weapon's hit strength, even though we know they'll be somewhat different) will be roughly 140% of what's shown here, while at point-blank range the actual DPS will be roughly 300% of what's shown here. At point blank range they may even have better DPS than the Paladin PD, though you'd have to be ramming the enemy ship to get there heh.

It's a lot better than point-blank range for max rifts: 1 rift spawns at max range, then 1 additional rift per 200 units less than max range up to 5 rift max. For a capital, that's 1 rift at 1950 range and 5 rifts at 1150. (Compare: standard large energies have 1225 max range on a capital.) So RCE basically has roughly Tach Lance DPS at Tach Lance range, and roughly Plasma Cannon DPS at Plasma Cannon range - at least on paper.

The wraparound mechanic also annihilates smaller omni-shield ships, like Remnant frigates. RCE is an extremely underrated weapon.

58

Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Detailed Combat Results v5.2.0 (2021-12-20)

« on: December 22, 2021, 12:52:03 AM »

Happy to report that Flash damage is being reported with the new patch. Kudos!

I noticed that Reality Disruptor's missile tallies are reported but not its actual damage. Are there plans to include this in a future update?

59

General Discussion / Re: How come high intensity lasers deal explosive damage?

« on: December 21, 2021, 10:38:52 PM »

Sorry about the late reply, had some RL matters plus this needed some modifications to the Excel file so I'm trying to get caught up on some past posts now.

The weapons' DPS themselves are relatively more straightforward to model. However, the scripted effects (Tachyon's EMP which can do some additional damage, Rift Cascade's rift bursts, Paladin PD's bursts) are pretty difficult to model since they hit different locations, i.e. their damage isn't constant. So it's hard to account for them here.

Thanks - interesting stuff! Rift Cascade Emitter is obviously going to be a ton better once you factor in rift damage - in fact, most of its damage will be coming from rifts, not the beam itself. HIL is good for chewing through heavy armor, while Paladin PD does really well vs residual armor (thanks to frag damage). I think it shows that burst beams fare pretty decently vs armor without the specialization penalty from HIL, definitely more so compared to non-HIL continuous beams. Nice to see that all the different large beams have their specific use cases, with HIL/Paladin PD being more specialists (vs strong/weak armor respectively) and Tach/RCE being more generalists.

60

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: December 21, 2021, 02:49:09 AM »

What's the idea behind HSA, anyway? To make beams into hardflux weapons? Just use weapons that are already hard flux.

I can't speak for Alex's vision for HSA, but to my eyes HSA could be a way to turn 1000 range beams from long-range pressure weapons into proper hard flux support weapons for large energies, similar to Ballistic Rangefinder for small ballistics. The problem is that hard flux also makes short burst beams (Phase/Rift Lance) too much of generalist weapons.

The answer I think is to make HSA's penalty disproportionately impact short burst beams: flat -300 to base range, does not affect PD (similar to Ballistic Rangefinder). This way:

• Short burst beams: 300 base range w/ HSA, same as Light Machine Guns and used in similar way (for fast knife-fighting ships, such as SO frigates). Phase ships can't abuse this because they would be caught in ship explosion range.
• Long range beams: 700 base range w/ HSA, same as large energy weapons. Now you can for example pair HSA gravitons to support large energies, or provide new longer range, lower DPS, and OP-expensive alternatives for smaller ships. (Compare: Tac Laser vs IR Pulse Laser.) None of the small/medium 1000-range beams (Tac Laser, Grav Beam, Ion Beam) would be overtuned as 700 hard flux weapons on smaller ships due to their low DPS and poor hit strength against armor - 700-range small ballistics have way better stats than 700 range HSA small/medium beams, and Ballistic Rangefinder (and Ballistic Mastery) also extends their range beyond HSA beams. Large 1000-range beams already directly compete with other large energies at the same 700 range.

There'd need to be a minimum range that HSA could reduce to (say, 250 to match Vulcan) to not break weird mod beams, but other than that, this would let HSA turn existing beam weapons into hard flux weapons that fill some open niches.