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[Megas]

I can make loadouts for all those ships (paragon, odyssey, sunder) that will win the flux war against a similar OP cost ship when they have 25 OP unspent and an empty large energy slot (they will get the enemy high on flux/venting before they flux out but not have as much killing power because the tach lance is missing). I actually think a paragon with only two hard flux large energy weapons is much better than one with that plus two tach lances as well because it never wastes flux on firing beams into shields (it performs a lot better).

I tried that, and Paragons with two lances plus whatever seem to work faster because things cannot flee so easily.  Lances will pop small ships, with or without shields.

I tried Sinigr's two plasma Paragon, and the biggest problem are enemies running away after they lose the flux war and wasting my ships' PPT.  With lances, things take damage or die as they flee.  (Small ships may get popped by two or more lances on their way in.)  On the other hand, two plasma on the sides means I do not need rear mounts because plasma cannons (with gyros) will spin and blast things behind Paragon.

[intrinsic_parity]

I mean they only die as they flee if the lances come off cool down at the right moment , but I get your point. I just want the AI to use them more intelligently, I think the ship is stronger with the lances, although worse at tanking.

[SCC]

Biggest issue is with how AI handles them. Always firing tactical lasers, graviton beams and ion beams is typically good in all situations, since they are pressure beams. HIL is somewhat similar, though firing it at ships that aren't getting fluxed out in a few seconds is a waste. A substitute of player planning would be AI firing HIL perfectly accurately when the target's shields are down, if the AI ship with HIL has other sources of hard flux. Tachyon Lance and Phase Lance are burst beams and should be fired only in two situations: when the enemy has no shields (anymore) or is at high flux already. The former is to break the target's armour, the latter is two force an overload and then fire at its armour. Currently, pressure beams are handled well enough, but AI makes no distinction at all for burst beams, even if it's a very substantial difference.

[Megas]

I usually fire tachyon lances at every opportunity like the AI.  Burst damage (especially against small ships) and shield pierce for significant damage and EMP are great.  If not for shield pierce, I probably would use HIL more.

I mean they only die as they flee if the lances come off cool down at the right moment , but I get your point. I just want the AI to use them more intelligently, I think the ship is stronger with the lances, although worse at tanking.

It takes a while for most ships to backpedal 300+ units to escape from both plasma and lance range, if they were within plasma range before they lost the flux war.  Even Radiants that can multi-jump sometimes get blasted by lances.  If I use only two plasma, then it does not take much for an enemy ship to backpedal from plasma range then dissipate flux safely.

[Plantissue]

It's fine to fire Tachyon lances at the start of battle, as long as your flux cool down by the time the enemy is in range of your ship.

[xenoargh]

This goes back to the problems with Beams in general.

1.  If the AI doesn't fire "unless it's smart", it will hardly ever fire, because there are almost zero times it's "smart" unless your opponent is facing away from you, conveniently located, etc.  The problem's not quite as bad as for Reapers, but it's bad; AI ships are generally trying to face the enemy, because that's smart, and there just aren't lots of opportunities. 

This is the same reason why Beam builds aren't generally great for player ships, either; unless it's something highly mobile, the poor efficiency and Soft Flux make Beams a terrible idea to shoot until it's smart.  These situations, while they do happen occasionally, usually happen for highly-mobile ships that can flank.

2.  Because there are only rare situations where it's "smart" to fire, the AI can either not fire much, meaning players will steer their builds towards Energy weapons that do actually fire (and do Hard Flux, etc.) or they're obviously wasting their OPs.  Against the AI... meh, imagine a Tritachyon fleet where the RNG autofit system decides to go super-heavy on Beams, but the enemy fleet hardly shoots because it's "not smart".  The player then proceeds to eat them for breakfast, using non-"smart" weapons.



...for goodness sakes, just make Beams Hard Flux and at a reasonable efficiency ratio. 


Rebal's out, you can see how it works in practice, not your endless theorycrafting.  Having Beams you actually want your fleet using is fun.

[bobucles]

]I don't have anything against the concept of weapons that deal strictly soft flux damage. The only real challenge with it deals with defense scaling. Ordinary ships tend to have shield ratios that hover nicely around 1.0, with few dipping below 0.7. Add in a good ship, stacked hull mods and captain talents, and it's possible to achieve absolutely amazing shield ratios of 0.5 or better. Weapon ratios don't change in the same way, and only a few special abilities can multiply damage in a meaningful way.

Defense ends up scaling very high, but damage does not scale in the same way. It's okay to have a bad flux ratio, as long as you keep stacking hard flux something will eventually break. But when a weapon deals soft flux damage, your ratio vs. their ratio matters. A ship can spend more flux attacking than the enemy takes in damage! That's a sobering trade to consider.

I dunno if hard flux is necessarily the best answer to the beam dilemma. It's easy to make a weapon stronger by copying a solution that already works, but it may be fun to try other things instead. For example, don't let the shield ratio become so much stronger than weapons in the first place. For example this bad boy from another thread has a 0.34 ratio and it's pretty crazy. It's very deceptive when smaller numbers are stronger, but a 0.34 shield ratio is nearly 300% shield efficiency! (if the math were in the ascending direction it'd look like 166% * 1.43 * 1.25, a multiplying bonus)  A 0.7 flux beam only has 140% damage efficiency, so you are clearly losing big time in the exchange:

Other options may include increasing weapon flux efficiency on larger ships, or letting beam weapons "warm up" and increase efficiency, or even destabilizing the shield to limit its own defense efficiency.

[Morgan Rue]

The AI always seems to put burst beams like the tach lance and phase lance on auto fire and then shoot them into shields at low flux which is the worst possible time to fire them. It makes those weapons much less useful on AI ships. Burst beams should definitely not be on auto fire, it would be nice if the AI only fired burst beams into hull/armor where they are actually effective, or at least saved them until the enemy was high on flux.

I prefer this behavior because of how Lances work. Lances are usually good for the ship firing them to fire. Ships which are mounting a lot of Lances are usually targeting stuff with lower flux capacity, and want to kill the thing as fast as possible. If Lances did not fire at ships with no flux, then they would not serve their role where they break smaller ships and serve as general assault weapons.

Currently you can quite reasonably equip a Sunder with a bunch of Lances and no other weapons and it breaks frigates and lighter destroyers just fine.

[bobucles]

Ships which are mounting a lot of Lances are usually targeting stuff with lower flux capacity, and want to kill the thing as fast as possible. If Lances did not fire at ships with no flux, then they would not serve their role where they break smaller ships and serve as general assault weapons.

This kind of role also means that the flux efficiency of the lances don't really matter. A large ship has such a huge reactor that it can completely crush a small ship, even with pure soft flux damage, and beam weapons have the range/accuracy/alpha to make it happen. Thus the role of the lance is more "high impact fly swatting" and less of a general purpose "suppression" where it loses in the flux war with larger targets.

[Megas]

If the ship has kinetics too (Sunder, Prometheus 2, Paragon), I use lances as a semi-unblockable weapon because the ship has means to put hard flux on shields to enable shield piercing.

If I pilot Sunder, 2x Railgun plus Tachyon Lance is easier to brawl with than a single plasma cannon.

Of course, if the enemy is a frigate or the like, the burst damage will harm or kill it anyway.

[MShadowy]

stuff

sighs

None of what you describe matches vanilla behavior; and while I obviously can't say for certain I'd be comfortable surmising you're running your custom AI. As such, and if so, it's almost certainly a result of whatever design decisions you made for that. And again, if so, vanilla beams not playing nice with your design decisions is not a reasonable basis for saying beams need to be changed.

[intrinsic_parity]

The AI always seems to put burst beams like the tach lance and phase lance on auto fire and then shoot them into shields at low flux which is the worst possible time to fire them. It makes those weapons much less useful on AI ships. Burst beams should definitely not be on auto fire, it would be nice if the AI only fired burst beams into hull/armor where they are actually effective, or at least saved them until the enemy was high on flux.

I prefer this behavior because of how Lances work. Lances are usually good for the ship firing them to fire. Ships which are mounting a lot of Lances are usually targeting stuff with lower flux capacity, and want to kill the thing as fast as possible. If Lances did not fire at ships with no flux, then they would not serve their role where they break smaller ships and serve as general assault weapons.

Currently you can quite reasonably equip a Sunder with a bunch of Lances and no other weapons and it breaks frigates and lighter destroyers just fine.

The AI doesn't target things with lower capacity based on what weapons it has like the player might. Auto fire will shoot at anything that comes in range. If firing the lances will build up enough flux that the ship might over load or take damage (including arcing/ion), then obviously the ship should fire them. In cases where you are smashing small ships, it is because one burst form the lance will cause them to drop shields and take damage, I'm not arguing against that behavior. The issue is that if firing the lances builds up 20% of their capacity and 30% of yours, you're actively hurting yourself, and that happens frequently since the lances all have pretty bad efficiency. Firing a phase lance or tach lance at anything with shields efficiency of 1 or better is worse for you than for them unless you have a major capacity advantage. Only a select few ships (mostly paragon) can assume that they will generally have a capacity advantage. This is why the behavior works fine on 4xTL paragon, it almost always has the capacity/shield efficiency advantage, but it could still improve performance a lot more by using the lances more intelligently (same reasons why player piloted 4xTL paragon is much much better than AI while for other load outs the gap between the player and AI is much smaller).

All I am saying is that the AI should not fire the lances when it is actively bad to fire the lances which requires not having them on auto fire. Maybe they should have somewhat different behavior than pure strike weapons, but auto firing them is actively terrible in a lot of situations. I'm not talking about the 4xTL paragon here, I'm more talking about ships like the eagle/falcon/medusa that can use phase lance effectively in player hands, but perform poorly in AI hands against ships of the same size.