My weapon Analysis for SPAZ 2 as of .61

[WWDragon]

The TL:DR is... the game is HEAVILY biased towards cannons.

Bit longer intro:
For late game, mount Sniper Cannons all round or a combination of Range Beams + Gauss.
Never use a full carrier setup; only put one of these on the back as an alternative to point defence guns.
Missiles and warheads are mostly useless; you won't even notice getting hit by these in late game, unless it's a zombie one and shields are down.


Type Breakdowns:

Cannons start off being short range and modest damage at the low tiers, then very quickly gain heavy damage and long range.
They are the only way to build a viable single weapon type sniper ship for late game.

Lasers start off short range and modest damage, but never scale anywhere near as well as the cannons do.
In the end game, you either have to take extremely short range and heavy damage beams or long range beams with crap damage.
Range Lasers are good in combo with Gauss for late game build; they are worth very little by themselves.

Fighter/Bombers have about equal damage for both shield and armour, based on the type you choose to mount.
Regardless of which one you choose they do much lower damage then even basic cannons or lasers.
Another disadvantage is that they spread their damage out across the hull while attacking, so it will take two to five times longer to kill any mothership or base with them.
On the upside, they use no energy, respawn indeffinitly and have essentially infinite range.
These are best used as missile defence instead of point defences, due to their greater all-around coverage of your ship.

Missiles are low damage, long range and do crap damage to shields and armour.
It gets worse from there, as the warheads from last game now have crap range and do NOT speed up over distance.
The warheads are also severely underpowered compared to the ones in SPAZ 1 because they lack a slow effect and have fairly low damage compared to late game cannons.
Another problem with all self guided projectiles is that they are SLOW; from the normal 900 range missile, to the warhead counterpart, they all move slowly, very slowly or extremely slowly depending on their size.



One last thing to add... why does ANYTHING not do full damage to hull?
It's just internal components and structures.
ALL weapons should do bonus or reduced damage to shields or armour, but hull should take full damage, no matter the source.

[alveolate]

i wonder if large wings with dual snipers/plasmas will now rule with the synergy boost.

[AlmaShade]

I use warheads all the time. Take out the engines and let a corrosive warhead fly and then watch all the parts break off.

You just need a way to slow ships, and sometimes you don't even need that.
Gravity missiles appear to have also been silently buffed, they actually slow me down now. So maybe you can use them with those.

[Marneus]

I use carriers a lot, mainly laser fighter and ion bomber to take out shields from afar.
They perform amazingly as defense versus bombs, missiles, and pesky ships and are okay on shields.

Then i use Mass drivers, okay, but still. Carriers.

[WWDragon]

Originally posted by AlmaShade:

I use warheads all the time. Take out the engines and let a corrosive warhead fly and then watch all the parts break off.

You just need a way to slow ships, and sometimes you don't even need that.
Gravity missiles appear to have also been silently buffed, they actually slow me down now. So maybe you can use them with those.

Warheads ALWAYS get shot down if there are any point defences pointing in their direction or if the enemy has figheters.

I checked out slow beams, but they seem to do very little.
I didnt' try gravity missiles since game release; I'll have to try them again.


Before I ever tried this, someone in the forums said it'd suck to do full missile... he was right. :-s

[erikem]

Some notes here:
- Strongest weapon = pulsars not snipers
- Long range beams also make a good combo with kruls
- Ion bombers actually break down enemy shields quite fast

[Nightstrasza]

Best build is to either go ion missiles and like 2 mass drivers (why not fighters?, because 1-2 mass bombs will suck them in and destroy while enemy will boost, needed once with full carrier ship 2+ hours to take down starbase shields but they didn't take these shields down, we had to almost sacriface our life ramming heavly armed starbase with very slow carrier ship while thye had emp bomb, 2 mass bombs, 4 long range beams, fighters and the worst, 2 chainsaw beams, even boosting didn't help, carriers are support, not offense, ion missiles can be sent after the mass bomb is destroyed and effect is gone or just in perfect time sending all at once that even boosting won't save him then mass drivers to finish him off.

About missile build, someone don't know how to play, missiles are powerfull, boring but powerfull, had full ship of missiles, take Sun Hunters build, not need being tanky with long range salf-targeting projectiles, just fly faster than enemy, stay in range of 600-1000 from enemy and fire, fire and fire, ion missiles will take down shields, normal standard missiles will keep shields down after and torpedos will eat away the hull, if feeling brave enough, equip corrosive or explosive bomb, if they won't be shoot by enemy fighters in front of thy eyes, they will destroy enemy once his shields are down into pieces. If care about enemy fighters, get 1 mass bomb if want to stop them and 2 if want to destroy them (1 is not 100% chance that "explosion" of that void will will kill all of them so to be sure, use 2, that's 100% death for fighters how strong they are)

[chuckberts]

agree w/ OP. All weapons work, but cannons are clearly favored.

Missles have obvious counter of drones and miniguns that can potentially reduce damage to 0. Missles can work, but only because of defects in enemy ship designs.

Lasers are my primary weapon but they are too heavily dependent on you having superior speed than the enemy. In most cases our enemies are too dumb to out-range us if we use chainsaws so we can win by default due to AI being unable to adapt to our ships.

Cannons on the other hand are universal. They function well at all ranges and have high dps leaving them w/ very little weakness. Their intended weakness appears to have been higher energy usage (especially mass drivers) and ability for projectiles to miss. Energy usage and reloading is solved by lvl up perks and your parts boosting the stats so that issue only exists in early game. Projectiles missing... well its possible but doesn't actually happen aside from strikecraft. Sniper and mass drivers projectiles are too fast to dodge and while a human can manipulate boosts to dodge pulsars the AI has no chance of doing it.

[WWDragon]

Originally posted by erikem:

Some notes here:
- Strongest weapon = pulsars not snipers

Pulsars have a chance to miss, even when the enemy is sitting still; I call it auto anti aim.
So, no. Lower dps on those then snipers, cause the snipers never miss.

[alveolate]

technically, snipers can also miss: just less often due to higher projectile speed. even the super-fast mass driver can miss.

missiles are directly countered by miniguns, at something like a 2:1 ratio. only the ion swarms have some purpose; then again they do zero dmg to hull, which is terrible if you have no consistent hull-hitting weapons. this weakness applies to ion bombers as well.

the way i use warheads is to fly straight into the enemy, dump on their shields, then drop the warhead as i turn to fly away. essentially, you want to get as close as possible to your target before dropping off the warheads, so they have less time to shoot it down. you can also use ion missiles and/or fighters to "give cover" to your warheads, since they can soak up minigun fire. of course, if your target is already engrossed with some other ship, you could try a long-range warhead from the rear. but if the target is moving forward, they might outrun the warhead and poke it down.

i think lasers are very underpowered, mainly due to their range. the good lasers require you to sit right next to your target for quite a good period of time since the constant damage takes time to become significant.

as for the leech and gravity missiles, the reason they're not used much is because the enemies rarely need to be slowed. only in early game you might face small fast ships that head for the failgate and might get out before you reach them. eventually with more firepower, you can simply destroy the failgate.

[Nightstrasza]

The mission of every player for entire game: destroy that darn fail gate..., that's the most annoying object in game.

[WWDragon]

Originally posted by Nightmare Moon:

The mission of every player for entire game: destroy that darn fail gate..., that's the most annoying object in game.

Depends how powerful you are.
In early to mid game, it's good to take down one enemy and let the other run, while losing parts.

Late game, yeah just blow it up to keep them there.

[Nightstrasza]

In early game blow one and let leave another one?, why not just push them away.., that's the most annoying actualy, because they hug so much that gate that pushing them away is sometimes hard, especialy when they are fat and RNG didn't give boost capacity upgrades in perks, that's so annoying..., okay, we gonna explode if we start thinking about fail gate with rage so let's just keep thy version, we hate fail gate...

[WWDragon]

Originally posted by Nightmare Moon:

In early game blow one and let leave another one?, why not just push them away.., that's the most annoying actualy, because they hug so much that gate that pushing them away is sometimes hard, especialy when they are fat and RNG didn't give boost capacity upgrades in perks, that's so annoying..., okay, we gonna explode if we start thinking about fail gate with rage so let's just keep thy version, we hate fail gate...

No no. You misunderstand.
I'm saying kill one enemy in the battle and let the other use the fail gate to warp out.
They weaken themselves by warping out, because they have to leave behind parts and such.

So after you take down the one, you can chase the other one who warped out and they'll be less powerful then when they were in the first battle.
They are easier to kill.

[Nightstrasza]

Nope, they does not lose parts on ship, players too, the only lost stuff is % of inventory, so parts that are not equiped and resources. Also if we let 50 threat enemy escape from our ally that have 70 threat lvl and hate that threat 50, then if we will chase that 50 threat while we are 20 threat, he will surely even without strike craft smash us without even blinking and we are not 100% sure that our "ally" from previous battle will help, that's just AI not another player, they don't feel debt to help or just simple feeling of helping each other, that's why we want to keep every posible escaping captain in battle.

[WWDragon]

Originally posted by Nightmare Moon:

Nope, they does not lose parts on ship, players too, the only lost stuff is % of inventory, so parts that are not equiped and resources. Also if we let 50 threat enemy escape from our ally that have 70 threat lvl and hate that threat 50, then if we will chase that 50 threat while we are 20 threat, he will surely even without strike craft smash us without even blinking and we are not 100% sure that our "ally" from previous battle will help, that's just AI not another player, they don't feel debt to help or just simple feeling of helping each other, that's why we want to keep every posible escaping captain in battle.

It's strange you think that, cause I've seen enemies escape from my battles and they've gone down by 10 or more threat level each time.