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[AxleMC131]

This is another one of those miscellaneous questions I'm sure many players have considered while playing Starsector, and I thought I might go ahead and ask this of the developers, purely out of curiosity:

When you create a new weapon, how do you decide how many Ordnance Points it costs to fit on a ship?

Is it a simple balancing act between the big stats like DPS, flux efficiency, range, ammo, etc... Or are there less fundamental reasons to make a weapon cost X amount of OP? Does the weapon's accessibility/rarity within the campaign come into play? How about lore-related factors, such as ease of fitting, tech level? Do you have a set-in-stone procedure that decides all this when you create something new, or does it differ?

How about hullmods? Do similar rules apply?

And - screw it! - while we're on the topic, is there any advice you'd like to give to modders about balancing the ordnance point cost of their content?

[Alex]

Start with a 5/10/20 base OP cost based on weapon size, and then adjust depending on how its stats are relative to other weapons. Then play with 'em and see how it feels, and tweak accordingly. Then listen to player feedback and tweak some more

Rarity or other non-balance factors don't come into play - unless indirectly, if they're reflected by the weapon's stats. Would be a bad idea, that'd basically just make them unbalanced for no good reason.

... while we're on the topic, is there any advice you'd like to give to modders about balancing the ordnance point cost of their content?

You know, nothing comes to mind. It's a fairly straightforward process. Not necessarily quick or easy, but not too complicated for all that. Getting a weapon to work right and feel good and fill a niche properly is more the challenge. (See: Sabot.)

[AxleMC131]

Awesome, thanks for filling me in on that. It's nice to know it's fairly straightforward - makes me feel a lot better about balancing weapons for my own mod.

[Cycerin]

OP is also a way to give a weapon a niche in itself; eg. a complete garbage weapon could cost very little OP, such as the vanilla Light Mortar or the Reliant HMG in SWP, so it becomes more powerful on ships with lots of disposable slots, or a very powerful weapon could cost enough OP to warrant building the loadout around it, or be better on ships with few weapons but lots of OP and good flux stats.

[FooF]

You also tend to pay a premium in flux cost or OP for other effects such as EMP, bypassing shields, or superior tracking (for missiles).

In vanilla, there are quite a few weapons with roughly equivalent stats that I think are the standard which others are measured by. Take small mounts for instance. The LAG, Dual Autocannon, and IR Pulse are all roughly equivalent with ~150 Flux/DPS, ~500 range, and 5 OP. There are slight differences between them but they're all in the same ballpark.

Medium mounts get more specialized but the Heavy Autocannon is about as "in the middle" as you can get with ~215 DPS/Flux, 800 range and 10 OP. The Pulse Laser is the energy weapon equivalent with much higher flux/dps but less range. In the case of the Assault Chaingun, you get twice the DPS & Flux cost but half the range.

The further away from "standard" you get, the more trade-offs there are but in the case of flat-out better stats (like the Heavy Needler), you're paying a huge OP tax.

[Megas]

Heavy Needler is overpriced.  It used to be worth its OP cost when ballistics had ammo and Heavy Needler had much more ammo than other ballistics.  Now, it just has better turn rate (irrelevant for hardpoints), better accuracy (the only worthwhile reason to take it over Heavy AC and need more DPS than HVD), and cheaper flux cost (not enough if your ship does not have OP to burn, better to max vents than get flux-efficient weapons).

The one weapon that is underpriced is current Hellbore Cannon.  If not for Mjolnir, Hellbore would be best-in-class (for now), and it is obscenely cheap at 16 OP.