Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Draba]

One place where this balance might break down, I think, is the following. When a High-Tech ship attacks a Low-Tech ship of similar strength, it often happens that the Low-Tech ship needs to drop its shields and take some armor/hull damage, while the High-Tech ship can usually retreat to safety before its shields need to be dropped, thanks to better mobility. The result is an asymmetric situation where High-Tech can steadily whittle away at Low-Tech's non-renewable hitpoints without receiving non-renewable damage in return.

To stop this being a problem, Low-Tech needs tools that help it mitigate High-Tech's ability to kite with superior mobility. Burn drive could be one such tool. Burst kinetic damage from Needlers/Sabots and the like could be another. As could generally longer range of ballistics compared to energy weapons. But I wonder if in the current state of the game these advantages are sufficient to level the playing field. They might not be.

Longer range means more ships can focus the one trying to jump in, it's just hard to make the ships form a line/not get in each other's way in battle.
Making the ships block each other less would help the side with the range advantage, but probably much easier said than done.

Missiles are also extremely good while they last, ECCM harpoons are great for supporting allies from ships further away (long range+fire over allies).
A common fire support S/M missile with lower damage and more ammo would be a nice addition IMO.
Would even take a harpoon pod with 2 shots/volley. Obviously not as powerful but much more consistent in longer battles.

Same for sabot pods, in some situations you only want them to be fired up close(and sparingly!).
When something gets up close 2x8 sabots to the face is generally overkill

[Amoebka]

Observation: Energy weapons are most effective against poorly shielded targets, as very few of them do kinetic damage but plenty of them are effective against armor.

Most energy weapons have very poor per-shot damage, making them horrible against armor. Large ones are fine, but not a lot of high-tech ships can even mount them - just Paragon, Odyssey and Apogee. The vast majority of high-tech battleships rely on medium energy for damage, and among those only the horribly inefficient heavy blasters and mining blasters are good against non-frigate armor. The only small energy that does anything against armor at all is antimatter blaster, which has tons of drawbacks to compensate for it.

[SCC]

Heavy Blasters are about the half of energy mediums in my fleet - the other half is Ion Pulsers.

[Amoebka]

Well, yeah, you pretty much have to use heavy blasters to do any hull damage at all. Doesn't mean the weapon is very good, just means there is no alternative.

[Lucky33]

AMB, Phase Lance, Mining Blaster.

[Amoebka]

AMB I mentioned in my post. It has many drawbacks and is extremely AI-unfriendly. Mining blaster is a strictly worse heavy blaster that exists for flavour reasons and shouldn't ever be used by players. Phase lance fails hard against anything that's not a frigate or a Sunder. Go into sim right now and try to kill an Enforcer using a phase lance.

[Arcagnello]

Phase lances are a very flux efficient method of punching through armor that either can be installed on frigates, phase ships thats to their great burst damage capabilities and some normal ships too, like the Brilliant for example:

Spoiler

[close]

Spoiler

[close]

The AI is suprisingly decent at handling them too. Their 600 weapon range also makes them perfect for installment on short range focused, non-SO cruisers like the Eagle, which can mount 3 Heavy machineguns at the front (hopefully with an officer having both Gunnery Implants and ELite Point Defence to extend their range) one Ion beam and two Phase lances.

[Amoebka]

The paladin Brilliant makes me doubt if you are being sarcasic. I case you aren't, both your examples (Brilliant and Eagle) would be much better if you used other slot types for anti-armor (large energy and medium ballistic, respectively) and medium energies for other roles (pd and long-range supression, in these cases). Even if you insist on wasting good slots on meme weapons, I'm still not convinced phase lances are worth using. Your HMG Eagle would be better off just using one heavy blaster instead of two lances.

[Draba]

The paladin Brilliant makes me doubt if you are being sarcasic. I case you aren't, both your examples (Brilliant and Eagle) would be much better if you used other slot types for anti-armor (large energy and medium ballistic, respectively) and medium energies for other roles (pd and long-range supression, in these cases). Even if you insist on wasting good slots on meme weapons, I'm still not convinced phase lances are worth using. Your HMG Eagle would be better off just using one heavy blaster instead of two lances.

It wasn't a joke, I also like phase lances a lot.
They are extremely good for phase ships and still nice for everything else IMO.

[Arcagnello]

The paladin Brilliant makes me doubt if you are being sarcasic. I case you aren't, both your examples (Brilliant and Eagle) would be much better if you used other slot types for anti-armor (large energy and medium ballistic, respectively) and medium energies for other roles (pd and long-range supression, in these cases). Even if you insist on wasting good slots on meme weapons, I'm still not convinced phase lances are worth using. Your HMG Eagle would be better off just using one heavy blaster instead of two lances.

It wasn't a joke, I also like phase lances a lot.
They are extremely good for phase ships and still nice for everything else IMO.

What he says.
The Heavy blaster is a better weapon overall, but it also consumes more flux per second than two Phase Lances combined AFAIK, not to mention Phase Lances work amazingly well when installed on hardpoints, while a  projectile based weapon like the Heavy Blaster might give whatever has it installed an existential crysis.

The Paladin PD system stopped being a joke after it got buffed in 0.95.
It's the best per-OP point defence weapon in the game (not to mention belonging to the Energy category of weapons, which has notoriously bad PD options to boot), does 200 soft flux energy damage per shot at incredible efficiency and even has a weapon AI that saves 10 charges no matter if enemy ships are in range just to shoot at missiles/fighters.

It's a great weapon really, especially on the Brilliant since having no incoming missiles (and detonating Sabots at a longer range than they activate) really helps the Fearless AI when it comes to actually being aggressive. Here's another example of a Brilliant massively benefitting from a Paladin PD:

Spoiler

[close]

Spoiler

[close]

I eventually swapped some things out but the Paladin on the Overdriven Brilliant remained, a weapon making sure even the Fearless AI won't back off from enemy fighters or missiles because there will be no such thing near it with a Paladin is quite the boon!

[Thaago]

Phase lances are great weapons and very efficient anti armor/hull, just soft flux so the usual considerations apply. I'm really fond of them on midline ships myself so that I can support them with kinetics (hmmm maybe I should try a lance medusa with needlers? Haven't played around with Medusa's in a while).

[SCC]

Medusa, I found, handles pretty well with two dual autocannons, two ion pulsers and two anti-matter blasters. You could use phase lances, of course, but that means one or two ion pulsers fewer, which doesn't seem to be a favourable trade.

[Yunru]

TIL the Paladin got buffed.

[intrinsic_parity]

I prefer am blaster over phase lance in most situations. Better hit strength, better efficiency, better burst, hard flux. I'll downsize mounts sometimes. The AI is just stupid with phase lances, it will waste tons of flux firing it into shields and then have it be on cooldown, or not have the capacity to fire it when there is an actual opportunity to deal hull/armor damage. At least it saves am blasters for decent moments.

Phase ships can use phase lance reasonably well, but for a player ship, the DPS is a bit low.

[Lucky33]

AMB I mentioned in my post. It has many drawbacks and is extremely AI-unfriendly. Mining blaster is a strictly worse heavy blaster that exists for flavour reasons and shouldn't ever be used by players. Phase lance fails hard against anything that's not a frigate or a Sunder. Go into sim right now and try to kill an Enforcer using a phase lance.

My very first playthrough was phase+frigates. It consisted mainly of AMBs and Phase Lances. Gazillions of Enforcers have felt to them.

MB is a lowest tier energy armor destroyer. It is doing its job.