It's HE damage, IIRC, so you don't even get that much. My experience with torpedoes is that they're utterly worthless vs. Frigates, and while they're potentially-useful as capship killers, their ROF and hit rates are so low that it's pretty iffy. Fighter swarms deploying them or bombs can be effective one-shot killers, though- I like the fighters with bombs, they're quite cost-efficient for single strikes, and my only complaint about them is that I want to keep them in safe holding patterns until it's time to direct a strike. Right now, given the way the AI works, that's hard.
I HATE the idea of your trump card AOE kill-all-the-things weapons, haha. Someone has probably modded them in. Or can.
I'll set one up and see how it goes. I think it's possible to have such a thing and have it be balanced; perhaps it's a special weapon that can literally only be carried by a special unit, or it's very slow and takes forever to arrive, giving players and the AI time to dodge, or maybe it's only able to kill a really specific target that it picks when it detonates, like a smart pop-up naval missile system IRL.
The point I'm making here is that there should be things in the game that even the capships fear and dread, not just niggling DPS weapons; a true tactical game with its roots in the space battles of Star Wars and anime should have a
Reflex Cannon or two :-) Weapons like that can have so many other disadvantages that using them is purely situational; if players routinely build a fleet around them, they're probably still OP. But it would be cool to see those kinds of things show up, as a nod to the sources.
Theres two sides to combat rewards: one is the standard video game side, where monsters carry tons of gold (or whatever) and the player is actively rewarded for being a murdering psychopath (I like these games Smiley). Then there is a more realistic approach: combat is incredibly dangerous, destructive, and expensive for everyone. People only fight for a reason - wars/skirmishes/contracts, self defense, and piracy come to mind - but no pirate/highwayman would ever fight an even fight - no profit Smiley. I hope that it is the second approach that Alex takes with the game considering its gritty story, but its his game.
I think that's a complex issue, in a game like this. On the one hand, if you make the game about trade and setting up economic situations, it'll go the way the X series did; dull, green-eyeshades accounting gaming, where it's all about opti-maxing for money and then just throwing out more stuff than any AI opponent can reasonably deal with. I don't like that very much; I prefer the mechanics of Escape Velocity, where you got rewarded for superior arcade play, capturing enemy ships you'd almost-but-not-quite destroyed. The ship AI is already superior to EV; I'd love to be able to build a "war band" of carefully-grown Captains that I level up, fleet buffs, etc., so that eventually I can fight battles at overwhelming odds.
Right now, it's the worst of both worlds. If I'm a superior player, I can't actually win in combat scenarios without it being at a severe economic loss unless I just stack everybody for long-range kiting, which is about as exciting as watching paint dry. It shouldn't work like that; if I manage to salvage a Cruiser, it should give me enough money that I'm able to replace my losses in lesser ships and buy new things.
This should not be a game where you just stack your ships for the longest range bands and occasionally make a tactical choice about who to convert into rubble; I'd really prefer the EV model, where you got into really high-end, maneuverable ships, kind of like Hyperions on steroids (minus their poorly-balanced teleport, lol), and your fleet was there to tank and add some DPS to the mix, but you, the player, were the primary agent, and you, the player, had to have the arcade skills to win. Right now, it's too much like just doing some numbers, avoiding all the weapons that obviously suck, and stacking your fleet correctly; none of that stuff is bad, per se, but it shouldn't be the core of gameplay, imo :-)
Anyhow, it sounds like I'm going to have to build a mod to demonstrate a lot of the modeling, so I'll just do it and see if people find it fun or not :-)