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Suggestions / Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
« on: June 04, 2021, 08:53:33 PM »Railguns and Needlers are very good small ballistic kinetics which pair well with HE missiles and low-ish end HE medium ballistics. Vulcans are excellent cheap general PD weapons, it only needs a few to make a firing arc extremely resilient to missile threats without dedicating valuable Medium or Large slots to the task. Light Mortars are already cheap and flux efficient HE guns you can just plop on when there's more mounts available than your flux or OP can feasibly support (Lasher, Mora). LMGs & DLMGs are excellent compliments to ACGs in SO builds.Changing the cost of small PD guns to 0 OP basically removes any choice involved in making builds. Why would you ever leave mounts empty in that scenario? There's no trade-off.Quite the opposite, right now there is no choice, every small weapon is a pure negative on a ship, making them cost as much as they are worth (zero) will give you the choice between adding them, or not adding them to save more flux.
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while high tech ships often have great range (specially the paragon)Mostly false.
High tech ships are reliant on energy weapons. Their long-range options are the following:
Small
Tactical Laser: 1000 range, Soft flux, low damage, fairly poor efficiency for its size. It's far easier to find threads with people saying it's too weak than it is to find people saying it's too strong, not used terribly frequently (sometimes for IPDAI shenanigans).
LR PD Laser: By technicality (800 range). Soft flux, not suited to anti-ship roles due to poor hitting power.
Medium
Graviton Beam: 1000 range, Soft flux, kinetic but still low damage, fairly good flux efficiency (especially vs shields). Like the Tactical Laser, it also tends to spawn the "This Gun Sucks" sort of thread.
Large
High Intensity Laser: 1000 range, Soft flux, lots of HE damage. Nice vs armor and hull but needs help to get through shields
Tachyon Lance: 1000 range, Soft flux, lots of burst energy damage with an EMP component and arcing if target has high flux. While good, it's not terribly high raw DPS and the arcing effect needs hard flux to work at all, so again, needs help to get through shields.
Important to note that energy (and High Tech as such) has no long-range hard flux options whatsoever. By contrast, though Small Ballistics lack 1000-range hardflux guns in Vanilla (and thank god for that), 2 good hard flux Medium Ballistics at the 1000 range bracket in the form of HVDs and Heavy Maulers, 1 hard flux Large Ballistic that still holds the record of longest base range in the game (Gauss Cannon, 1200), and a smattering of 900-range hard flux Large Ballistics that outrange vanilla energy's hard flux options.
The only high-tech warship that can compete in the Range game is the Paragon, specifically due to its built-in Targeting Core Mod giving a +100% range bonus over DTC's +50% and ITU's +60%. Without that hullmod the Paragon's just a big, annoying shield brick that any other cap specced for range can blow over (with time).
So no, high tech does not have a general range advantage over Lowtech or Midline, in fact the exact opposite is true.
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low tech ships are often best built sacrificing most of their weapon slotsSort of covered in the first reply, but Lowtech (and often Midline) ships do not gain anything by sacrificing most of their weapon slots. Very few even downsize their weapon slots, though it's not unheard of. Most of the consistently best performing low-tech builds neither downsize mounts nor remove them entirely.
In fact, it's often high tech ships (and occasionally Midline) that benefit from forgoing mounts. Energy PD is often ineffectual overall, often placed in poor positions and poor quality arcs, and expensive for its DP cost. No point putting in 12 OP for rear PD lasers on your Medusa if they won't even stop a Salamander, might as well use your integrated Omni-shielding to stop them anyways and use the OP to bolster the rest of the ship. Apogee is another high-tech ship that suffers from this problem, many of the turret mounts are of poor quality, so most of the best Apogee builds neglect those and double down on enhancing what the large energy hardpoint and the large missile slot can do.
Again, the reverse is more true than your initial claim.
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the high tech wants to be as far away as possible so they can vent flux and tank stuff using their shieldsI can't very well benefit from the Energy Weapon Mastery skill if I'm as far away as possible, now can I?
Heck, I can't very well use my hard flux energy weapons at all if I'm as far away as possible, because as previously shown High Tech does not have a hard-flux range advantage.
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In fact frigates only really got more decent recently because they got some proper slots.The number of frigates which have had slot improvements in Star Sector patch 0.95 is 1. 0 if neglecting ships that have been rehauled into a completely different ship (which is to say, Hyperion).
The improvement Frigates received in 0.95 is slightly tied to improvements to some key small weapons (IR Pulse Laser, notably), and primarily tied to the reworked Skill system which enabled several strong frigate-specific (and CQC specific in the case of hightech & midline frigates) buffs to both raw firepower and PPT. Hyperion was a complete rework, other than that mount changes had nothing to do with it (and didn't happen as you describe).
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Make small slot PD weapons cost 0 OP (yes, zero)Ah, right, the suggestion itself.
Make some small slot weapons cost a little bit of OP, like 1 or 2 for stuff like raiguns.
Greatly decrease flux generation for small slot weapons, specially ballistics
Considering the obvious that all ships are currently designed with certain factors in mind (notably: that weapons are not free), this would quite obviously break the shipbuilding portion of the game and require, at minimum, an Ordnance Point shift for every ship in the game (yes, all of them).
One of the more amusing ways it would break things is by making the downsizing of medium mounts with what used to be premium weaponry far more fashionable. For a tangible example, the Railgun already makes the Arbalest Autocannon's life quite hard, and they're the same cost. At 2 OP it's a blatant no brainer to take a Railgun over that, and with an extra flux efficiency buff for smalls like you've suggested they can also easily replace masses of not just low-end mediums or even high-end mediums with downsized Smalls, using OP saved to easily compensate the slight theoretical DPS and range losses through caps, vents, and a shipload of hullmods.
Anyways, most of what's being stated is flat-out incorrect, and these assumptions appear to be at least partially based on poor loadout designs. I, and plenty of people more experienced in Star Sector than me, would be curious to see your designs over at General, so we can critique the ships and find out precisely why you believe small weapons are so, uh, bad.
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