Spoiler
After cooling down from my initial reaction, I'll try to explain why I'm surprised by this changes:
If anything I'd expected quite the opposite! It flatten the differences between ships and weapons slots making choices now more cosmetics rather than tactical.
Most of the weapons changes are "to remove useless mechanics". Well in my opinion they were not useless, just under-exploited.
You say the ammo limitation was not useful in most case, well that is true in the current vanilla balance. But what if suddenly we get to choose between a Hellbore with 50 ammo and less flux, or a Hephaistos with 1000 and highter flux? Suddenly one is the perfect short battle weapon, but quickly become useless in long engagement. There is now an interesting choice to make. In mods we could try even more radical changes that might not be fit for vanilla, like extreme range weapon extremely ammo limited that are only useful to apply pressure on a single ship and have to retreat afterward. To me unlimited ammo could only make sense for PD weapons.
With unlimited ammo, I don't see the point to buy high tech ships except maybe a frigate for player use, because low tech ships cost less, are more sturdy and can't run dry anymore. (yeah I'm over dramatizing but still...)
The beam range makes sense, they clearly needed an edge and a long range is definitively a strong one! (though now, you incentive players to get back to the "kite-for-hours-in-a-frigate" type of gameplay, switching ships when the CR counter run out) But then there is the removal of the flux boost, making them act closer to the ballistic. I agree with the fact that the bonus wasn't obvious enough to make a noticeable difference, but then why not push thing further instead of cutting it down? Like 25% damage at high flux, and 25%+ damage when the shields are not raised? (because of some sort of "energy interference" caused by the shield generator or some technobable) Suddenly, forcing a high-tech ship at high flux to drop it's shield makes it a much more dangerous enemy, even if it takes a beating doing so. It would help high-tech to clear some space before venting when now they are basically screwed if they have to drop shield.
Then there is the missile regen that really don't click for me. Missiles are already much more powerful now, but they get another boost? And one that take the opposite direction as how missile works in the game, in most other games and in reality (not in the "realism" sense, but in the sense you expect them to work). Except for the Pillum, missiles were like a poker game where you could count how many the enemy had left, and act accordingly. But now when you manage to run a Buffalo dry and vent before going in for the kill, suddenly it fire 4 missiles from his sleeve! And it's not cheating! If the goal was mainly to boost the Salamanders, why not make them a MIRV instead? And even better, the sub-missiles could spread and target random weapons in addition to the engines, meaning unless you have a bubble shield you will suffer some hits and get some weapons or engines disabled. If the regen is to stay, maybe consider reactivating the "CR cost per missile fired" in the settings?
And now almost all ships got CR timer. Okay fair enough, that's the new "ammo" mechanic replacement I suppose. But with so few battles lasting more than 5 minutes, I expect it will have exactly the same impact than ballistic ammo before: none except in a few cases. I'm very much in favor to limiting the deployment time, and CR is a great mechanic to do so, but the flat cost+timer implementation don't convince me yet. (why a ship deployed in pursuit a one tanker should loose 25% of CR after shooting only 2 missiles???) Instead, I would rather have all ships loosing CR as soon as they see an enemy, and only have different CR loss speed. That way it would make sense to take some risks to finish a battle more quickly, instead of taking the safe approach because you already "payed" for it the moment you deployed the ships. Deploying an overwhelming fleet would still cost a lot more than just what's necessary, and if needed maybe only add a minimum of 5% CR spent if the ship is deployed?
There are my thoughts, I feel like it's a lot of trimming the differences when I would have loved to see more of them. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though, and will try to test the future update with an open mind.
[PS] Okay I also don't like the changes because the ammo and missile regen was a huge balance factor in half of Scy weapons, now I have to find something else
I see what you're saying. The way I see what you're suggesting, though, is doubling down on mechanics that have some fundamental issues. Those would be major, AI-breaking changes, too, where these smooth out some AI issues instead.
As far as Salamanders specifically, my issue w/ them is they encourage a "boring" period of missile-baiting, and they're susceptible to it due to being medium-range support, so it's not something that can be resolved with AI or by making individual shots more powerful. Unlike a Sabot, for example, which is a short-range missile and the AI can make a decent evaluation about when to fire so that baiting it requires at least taking a significant risk by the baiting ship.
My concern is, I hope that the game will have some way of communicating how the missile ammo works in the refitting dialog. People who don't read the forums also need to know ahead of time how it works.
That's all in the weapon tooltip.
Also the way CR peak performance is going to increment or not increment based on the relative size, and the visibility radius and so on... it's very complicated and again, I hope the game can find some way to inform players of this ahead of time.
Yeah, that's a concern.
In this new version you could put an option to download from 64-bit to avoid those errors that have been reported in other posts in relation to saved games.
The need for that should be greatly reduced by the save file optimizations.
CR changes... not so keen on this; I've eschewed frigates since the CR timers went in in the first place, since my preferred play style is to pilot a single ship. Can we get at least a few specific vessels that - like the Brawler - don't have CR timers? Will wait to see how it plays out, but right now not a fan; yeah, I can swap to flying a Conquest or Onslaught or Paragon, but I'd like to have a few more options than just those three.
So now almost all ships will have a time limit in the game? The reason I am trying as fast as possible move from frigates to something else is because there is a timer.
This is really a big thing for me, when playing games. I am not interested in playing and fighting under time pressure. From this changes it looks like I will be forced to play under it for 75% of the game and even more until i get to battlecruisers now. This is a huge game breaker for me, and I hope you will change it until the game is released. The moment you start to balance the game around exploits and in that process remove the fun from people that dont abuse the exploits, you should stop for a sec and rethink it.
The only thing I can suggest is maybe make timer for ships that are fast and can kite, but for others please remove the timer, so I can at least play with some ships. So maybe a special mod for fast/high tech ship to have a timer, while others dont have it.
I am sorry that I sound this negative, but this is really a huge deal for me.
I get what you're saying. Unfortunately, I don't have a good answer for you. Personally, I see the time pressure as a positive thing for gameplay, though I feel like I can relate to your guys' mindset. All I can say is wait and see how big of a deal it actually is. With the length of the timer and the rules around when it actually ticks down (and possible with hardened subsystems), I think it's pretty likely that your playstyles won't be affected in practical terms.
I agree that the loss of ammunition from ballistic weapons is a big thematic hit - and also agree that they need to have ammunition that's not a long-term limit. Short term, however... I'd like to see ballistic weapons that have limited ammunition and ammunition regeneration, with the expanded magazines hull mod increasing both capacity and regen - some of the smaller ballistic weapons (and especially point defense weapons) with the hull mod should just never run out of ammunition, while weapons that are currently very ammo-limited (gauss cannon, for example) would still be able to run short for a bit in heavy combat.
I'd also like to see reloading for ballistics happening in chunks - this isn't the "clip reload" mechanic you (rightly) disapprove of, just a cosmetic thing: instead of regenerating one shot every second (for example), have it regenerate 10 shots all at once every 10 seconds - especially important for theme if you have, say, a light machine gun that (with the expanded magazines mod) literally can't run out of ammo; you'd see ammo decreasing until it hit its reload time and then jump back to full.
The loss of the flux boost is worrying because energy weapons won't have any mechanical differentiation other than the fact that they do energy damage. "Fixing" this by giving ballistic weapons magazines, reload timers, CR loss, or whatever is not correct; that would make ballistic weapons more mechanically complicated/significant than energy weapons as a whole. If you want to do a mechanical parity sort of thing, try having most ballistic weapons fire more quickly at the start and then slow down with sustained fire (this would decay in the same manner as reload). The opposite would apply to energy weapons; they would speed up with continuous fire.
If you decide that weapons should cause CR loss, it should make the CR timer tick down faster (rather than implementing some phantom CR loss thing).
This is really interesting. I'm liking the "reload in chunks" idea, if mainly for feel reasons, though it *is* an extra weapon stat.
Now, increasing/decreasing the rate of fire based on how long a weapon has been firing... hmm. Increasing the RoF seems potentially troublesome as it might encourage firing at nothing to build up the bonus. On the other hand, reducing the rate of fire for ballistics is an interesting idea, although thinking about it, it's overlapping with the "accuracy reduction for sustained fire" mechanic.