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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Author Topic: New [Redacted] weapons thoughts (contains spoilers, you have been warned)  (Read 16246 times)

Wyvern

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"80 DPS" is rather severely under-selling the Resonator.

How much DPS do you get from a sabot pod across a whole battle? That's 12,000 kinetic damage worth of missiles. If you can end the battle in 60 seconds? Then yeah, for that, case, you're looking at 400 DPS out of the thing, and should use it over the Resonator.

A battle that drags out to five minutes? Well hey, you're back down to 80 DPS - and, critically, that "DPS" is going to be heavily front-loaded onto whatever random thing your AI-controlled ships happen to focus on first. While, meanwhile, the Resonator is just consistently useful across the whole battle.

Missile Spec and EMR - as I said in the original post - do tilt things somewhat towards the sabot pod, making its ammunition limits less of a concern. On the other hand, even there, I think you're underestimating the Resonator; it regenerates pretty quickly, so you can easily have a two-or-three salvo burst ready to go if you had to back off a bit.

In general, a player can probably get better use out of a regular bursty ammo-limited missile weapon, picking the right times to use it. For the AI, though, ammo regeneration is really nice - it means that you don't need to care about whether the AI wasted its ammunition on some random frigate, it'll have more later.
« Last Edit: April 25, 2021, 09:06:42 AM by Wyvern »
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Wyvern is 100% correct about the math.

Embolism

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A major benefit of sabots is that they are a flux-free way to drive up your opponent's flux. Resonator unfortunately uses flux itself, has a significantly smaller burst and costs a extra chunk of OP.

I think Resonators are best used like Pilums, on support ships that don't have to worry about the flux war. It's considerably weaker than sabots when trading flux with an enemy ship.
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intrinsic_parity

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Yeah resonator was super underwhelming for the OP cost. If I pay 15 OP for a kinetic missile, I expect it to contribute heavily to winning the flux war, but it feels like light pressure instead.
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Ishman

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"80 DPS" is rather severely under-selling the Resonator.

How much DPS do you get from a sabot pod across a whole battle? That's 12,000 kinetic damage worth of missiles. If you can end the battle in 60 seconds? Then yeah, for that, case, you're looking at 400 DPS out of the thing, and should use it over the Resonator.

A battle that drags out to five minutes? Well hey, you're back down to 80 DPS - and, critically, that "DPS" is going to be heavily front-loaded onto whatever random thing your AI-controlled ships happen to focus on first. While, meanwhile, the Resonator is just consistently useful across the whole battle.

Missile Spec and EMR - as I said in the original post - do tilt things somewhat towards the sabot pod, making its ammunition limits less of a concern. On the other hand, even there, I think you're underestimating the Resonator; it regenerates pretty quickly, so you can easily have a two-or-three salvo burst ready to go if you had to back off a bit.

In general, a player can probably get better use out of a regular bursty ammo-limited missile weapon, picking the right times to use it. For the AI, though, ammo regeneration is really nice - it means that you don't need to care about whether the AI wasted its ammunition on some random frigate, it'll have more later.

It's a light needler in a medium missile slot. With a 1.0 flux efficiency. That you can fit on very few things, and only acquire a limited number of them in any run. So sure, I guess you can bring a few gemini along, or one hyperion, but using 32 op for this on a conquest, dominator, aurora, or whatever - ehhhh.

A falcon P could utilize the infinite missiles, I guess - but if your battle has hypothetically gone on for 5 minutes and you've got a falcon P out, I feel like there's a fleet composition issue here.

Halfway through my finished vanilla run, once I got the gist of the new balance paradigm, every battle was already won or lost in one and a half SO hyperion PPT.

Also, it's 444 kinetic dps over 81 seconds at maximum flush rate for your sabots, if you don't conserve them at all - and ignoring the 888 emp dps.

Resonator's just really bad, except as an EXTREMELY expensive support weapon on a ship that isn't directly fighting anything.

And as a final note - I really wish my ships WOULD use sabots to force overloads and delete frigates, too often they don't use them till they get to panic-fire flux levels, shooting them at the cruiser/capital they're engaged with, where they immediately get hit by already on the way projectiles, and eat missiles from the frigate.
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Retry

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I found a Resonator from a hidden cache.  The Resonators would have been C-tier weapons at best if they were standard-issue Persean Sector equipment.  As something we're supposed to see as ultra high tech rewards from an incomprehensible foe it's F-tier.  In fact, Sabots would have made for a more convincing Omega weapon, had they not already been standard-issue missiles.

Resonators lack the EMP component that makes Sabots rough to take whether shields are on or off, they're much easier to knock out with flak than Sabots (or torpedos like Hammers, for that matter), their ammunition system is designed in such a way that they get the least amount of benefit from both FMR and Missile Autoforge (Sabot Pods can get some mileage out of either), they're exceptionally premium priced, and they produce flux at an unimpressive 1:1 efficiency on top of possessing interceptible projectiles.  Their sole advantage is technically-higher range (which almost never matters) and infinite ammunition, which is not nearly as an impressive trait as it used to be given that one can casually stack +200% ammunition through officers and SP before spending a single OP.

(many of those points are true for the other Omega missiles, but those compensate by otherwise being amazing with no real near-peer alternatives)

The Resonator wasn't good, either in theory or in practice.  I swapped that out for a real missile quite quickly.

I also received 2 Shock Repeaters from that same pod.  While they weren't great and have room for improvements, I found them fairly useful.

Shock Repeaters are energy small PD, in a world where all the energy small PD options are not actually very good.  Against missiles, they disable the engines (I kinda thought they were intended to disable the warheads entirely, but that doesn't seem to be the case), so they can be used to negate Salamanders or disable guided missile engines such as Harpoons and then move out of the way; functionally a mission kill.  They're significantly more useful alleviating fighter attacks, where one hit is sufficient to knock out their engines and leave them aimlessly drifting in the void; the other small energy weapons can't really do that well.  I used 2 of those on a mod Vale super destroyer, because those 2 small turrets were the only options, and that was the best method I had to make the most of an extremely limited PD grid.  They'd probably be decent enough on a vanilla Medusa's 2 front small energy turrets for similar reasons.

Shock Repeaters aren't fantastic, they could be better, but they have a decent niche, and they definitely don't deserve to be singled out as the ugly duckling when Resonator MRMs exist.

Also, Cryoblasters are S-tier.  No explanation needed.
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Wyvern

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Functionally, I found shock repeaters to be 100% useless against fighter attacks, because flares; if you want EMP to disable fighter engines, use ion cannons. And if you want anti-missile point defense, you're better off with burst PD or LRPD or, for a more mobile ship such as you've described, even just leaving the turrets empty would be an upgrade - spend those 14 ordnance points on something more useful than little zappy things that push your flux up more than the missiles they hit would have.
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Wyvern is 100% correct about the math.

Harmful Mechanic

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Charge-based, rapid-fire Shock Repeaters would be something to see, especially if they were timed so they appeared to arc to multiple missiles simultaneously.

From the standpoint of designing an NPC faction as a cohesive whole, I think 'has bad PD' is a good place to put a design weakness; the player can spend missiles to deal with tougher-than-expected enemies, and it's intuitive and satisfying to do so. but I think Shock Repeaters need a little love to bring them up to the level of Burst PD, which feels about right - 'weirdo Burst PD sidegrade' is a good niche.
« Last Edit: April 25, 2021, 01:10:52 PM by Harmful Mechanic »
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BGrey

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Rift torpedo is an overrated meme weapon. It costs far too much flux to fire and is easy to shoot down. I can't name a single situation where I would want it over a hurricane.

Cant put a hurricane in an energy slot, I've rather liked it stuck in one of the Odysseys side energy slots that I had been leaving empty.
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Goumindong

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"80 DPS" is rather severely under-selling the Resonator.

How much DPS do you get from a sabot pod across a whole battle? That's 12,000 kinetic damage worth of missiles. If you can end the battle in 60 seconds? Then yeah, for that, case, you're looking at 400 DPS out of the thing, and should use it over the Resonator.

A battle that drags out to five minutes? Well hey, you're back down to 80 DPS - and, critically, that "DPS" is going to be heavily front-loaded onto whatever random thing your AI-controlled ships happen to focus on first. While, meanwhile, the Resonator is just consistently useful across the whole battle.

Missile Spec and EMR - as I said in the original post - do tilt things somewhat towards the sabot pod, making its ammunition limits less of a concern. On the other hand, even there, I think you're underestimating the Resonator; it regenerates pretty quickly, so you can easily have a two-or-three salvo burst ready to go if you had to back off a bit.

In general, a player can probably get better use out of a regular bursty ammo-limited missile weapon, picking the right times to use it. For the AI, though, ammo regeneration is really nice - it means that you don't need to care about whether the AI wasted its ammunition on some random frigate, it'll have more later.

This is not good logic. The issue is that you do not do DPS over an entire battle. You only do DPS when firing your weapons. So if you’re constantly firing that resonator for 5 full minutes you come out ahead.

But you won’t and don’t need to fire your resonator for 5 full minutes. Just like you don’t dump all your sabot all the time. You only dump sabot into shields in general. And then you can flux dump your high damage guns into their hull while they’re flux high.

With resonators you spend flux, efficiently sure, but you’re still spending it. And the damage rate is lower. So... you have less flux to dump into hull after you win the flux battle and take more incoming damage as the battle goes on.
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prav

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I stuck a Resonator on my Aurora and very quickly started considering swapping back to a Sabot Pod. Rift Torpedo kicks a lot of ass when I put it on my battleships, on the other hand.

I find the smalls pretty hard to use since they're so OP-intensive.
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Embolism

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The Rift Lance is basically an alternative to the Antimatter Blaster. Better range, better sustain, and don't have to worry about running out of charges in long fights (I can never decide if Expanded Magazines is actually worth using on AMB-using frigates). With that in mind its OP cost is very reasonable (especially since it's, for all intents and purposes, a Phase Lance in a small slot).

The Minipulser is a Light Needler in an energy slot (ignore the Hybrid designation), but a bit worse. It's a great boon for high tech ships that can't mount conventional kinetics.

The Shock Repeater is a weird combination of Burst PD and Ion Cannon but really doesn't excel at either. I think it is generally outshined by Burst PD in most cases unless you're facing a constant flood of fighters and missiles.

Overall though I don't think the Omega smalls are particularly OP-intensive, they have the same OP cost as the conventional weapons they're meant to be counterparts to. The Antimatter SRM is the only one without a counterpart.
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SCC

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The greatest tragedy in Starsector is that high tech gets all the interesting ships and all the interesting weapons.

Aratoop

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Shock repeaters are shockingly good PD if several can be together, I find. I managed to snag 3 of them to put on the left side of my odyssey and I can turn off my shields when someone fires several reaper torpedos at me, which is suicide to do at anything less than long range for an entire bank of LRPDs or for burst PD when it's out of charges. Maybe I stumbled upon the best use of it somehow.

I think similar to the super redacted ships themselves, these weapons excel at being completely unlike any of the normal weapons, both visually and in terms of what they do. The rift beam could definitely do with some tweaking though because it's not very impressive to fight against at the moment.
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Embolism

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The greatest tragedy in Starsector is that high tech gets all the interesting ships and all the interesting weapons.

I mean most of the weapons are Hybrid/Synergy so technically low tech can use them too.

Shock repeaters are shockingly good PD if several can be together, I find. I managed to snag 3 of them to put on the left side of my odyssey and I can turn off my shields when someone fires several reaper torpedos at me, which is suicide to do at anything less than long range for an entire bank of LRPDs or for burst PD when it's out of charges. Maybe I stumbled upon the best use of it somehow.

That's 21 OP you've paid for PD however. Having said that Shock Repeaters are particularly good against torpedoes I think.
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Draba

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It's a light needler in a medium missile slot. With a 1.0 flux efficiency. That you can fit on very few things, and only acquire a limited number of them in any run. So sure, I guess you can bring a few gemini along, or one hyperion, but using 32 op for this on a conquest, dominator, aurora, or whatever - ehhhh.
It's a 2500 range light needler that very rarely misses and isn't blocked by allies.
Damage isn't that high, but most of your fleet can focus on any given target nearby with no downtime.
Most other missiles need ECCM and racks+skill to really shine, resonator can possibly get away with none of them (ECCM and at least skill for 1 reload buffer is always nice though).
Awesome for HIL range spec Apogees, they have extra flux and even if the resonators by themselves wouldn't be that hot enemies love to drop shields against them so HIL can go to town.
Conquest also has the flux for it and resonator is much more reliable at long range than sabots.
Pirate Falcon can spam them all day from behind the front.

Obviously not as good for brawling as sabot, a pain to get in good numbers and not as over-the-top as the other Omega weapons.
Still, I like it quite a bit. As Wyvern mentioned, it's a missile the AI can't waste and IMO squall sucks hard so there was no long range kinetic pressure option.
« Last Edit: May 27, 2021, 06:39:22 PM by Draba »
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