What am I missing about the tachyon lances?

[RoyBaty]

It seems like in every category the giga cannon (or whatever it's called), is better.
More range, accuracy, rate of fire, damage, penetration.

They used to be amazing a million patches ago, but today?

[galadon3]

*sigh* yea, just look up the concept of the "naked corvette" and you'll see that balancing isn't really a thing in Stellaris.
And right now they declared that they want to start fidgeting with the number of habitable planets. Wich actually has a slider so players can set it to their liking but for WHATEVER reason that is the big concern the devs have at the moment....

[Miguel]

Tachyon lances look better.

[Raine]

Off the top of my head, don't Tachyon Lances ignore more armor than the Giga Cannon? The Giga Cannon is a good all purpose weapon but the Tachyon Lance is specialized for anti-armor.

Edit: That being said, XL weapons are pretty terrible in general as they have a hard time hitting anything smaller than a cruiser even without heavy investment in evasion.

[Helios]

Originally posted by RaineAmorie:

Off the top of my head, don't Tachyon Lances ignore more armor than the Giga Cannon? The Giga Cannon is a good all purpose weapon but the Tachyon Lance is specialized for anti-armor.

Edit: That being said, XL weapons are pretty terrible in general as they have a hard time hitting anything smaller than a cruiser even without heavy investment in evasion.

I use Arch emitter 100% shield/armor penetration 100% Hitchance problem with other weapons is if they focus on a target they cant hit they are useless.

[Raine]

Originally posted by Helios:

Originally posted by RaineAmorie:

Off the top of my head, don't Tachyon Lances ignore more armor than the Giga Cannon? The Giga Cannon is a good all purpose weapon but the Tachyon Lance is specialized for anti-armor.

Edit: That being said, XL weapons are pretty terrible in general as they have a hard time hitting anything smaller than a cruiser even without heavy investment in evasion.

I use Arch emitter 100% shield/armor penetration 100% Hitchance problem with other weapons is if they focus on a target they cant hit they are useless.

I always forget about the arc emitter, never really used it before over the Tachyon Lance since I mix fleets and my smaller ships usually have something to counter or deal with things that the lance can't hit. Plus with the way targeting seems to work, the Tach Lances usually only go after other Battleships or Cruisers, which they'll wreck with little problem. Assuming the rest of my fleet is doing its job then the destroyer and corvette ships should be handled.

Thats probably the biggest problem with a lot of these discussions about the XL weapons, they always play out in a vacuum where other weapons or ship types don't exist which can lead to some pretty inaccurate data about how something functions in a practical battle where fleets aren't just battleship-on-battleship action. In reference to weapons the OP brings up, the Giga Cannon seems better on paper but in a practical battle using at least a semi-decently designed fleet, the Giga Cannon isn't going to do nearly as well and ends up overlapping too much with Kinetic Artillary for anti-shield duties when you'd want a big scary anti-armor weapon to clean up from there.

[mcsproot]

On paper giga cannons are the best all around.

Lances decimate armour, but are hopeless against shields.

Arc emitters ignore shield and armour, but have a good chance to do pitiful damage, as their damage range is something like 1-350.

[Azunai]

lances have much better armor penetration. XL weapons target large ships first and large ships have lots of armor.

against AI empires, it doesn't matter that much since they use some random nonsense mix of components and ship sizes. i tend to prefer the giga cannon in a "balanced" design that isn't built to counter a specific weakness.

against endgame threats, it depends on who you're fighting right now. the unbidden don't have armor, so giga cannons win. fallen empires have huge armor, lances win. pretoryn don't have shields, lances win.