Beam turrets too strong?

[ribbakylling]

Currently, beam turrets seems too strong. They have good range, "always" hits it's targets, decent damage output, the are continues, and they hit instantly.

Basically, they have no real weaknesses compared to the other types.

In my opinion, the energy requirements should be much higher, and the range should be shorter. This way you cannot "loiter" around at the far distance of your enemies guns, and you cannot have a continues beam that can go on through the whole game as you can today.

[Metalfusion]

I agree that they are unbalanced in large numbers, Extreme example of this is the "death ray" ship design you can get from the workshop.

Maybe best way to nerf them would be to increase the power use, since decent range is needed for the missile defence role, and just 1 or 2 of them should still have useful amount of damage output to keep small ships viable.

I'm currently working on a large rework of the damage system that will enable some new mechanics such as projectiles and beams passing through whole ship, projectiles that explode inside the ship, internal ricochets etc. This will require complete rebalance of the weapons, armor and shields so I'll consider nerfing the beam weapons as well.

[ribbakylling]

I can see the arguments for keeping the range, but hopefully you'll find a way to balance the different weapons systems.

But just another small question. Would it be easy to make different types of cores? For instantace a 4x1 or a 3x1+1 (three in a row, with the fourth off set forming a sort of T). Or maybe having different sizes of cores relative to the ship size. For instance a 1x1 core for tiny ships. 2x1 for small ship. 2x2 for a medium ship..... and so on.

[Metalfusion]

There is some special logic tied to the core module in several places so creating different cores would require somewhat significant refactoring but it is possible.

All modules must occupy a rectangular area in the ship's "part grid" and their collision shape has to be a convex polygon since these assumptions simplify many things.

Having a smaller 1x1 or 2x1 core could be useful for the very small ships but otherwise I don't see much benefit as you can pretty easily fit more than one 2x2 core in a medium and larger ships.

[The Fatal Quickscoper]

Originally posted by Metalfusion:

I agree that they are unbalanced in large numbers, Extreme example of this is the "death ray" ship design you can get from the workshop.

Maybe best way to nerf them would be to increase the power use, since decent range is needed for the missile defence role, and just 1 or 2 of them should still have useful amount of damage output to keep small ships viable.

I'm currently working on a large rework of the damage system that will enable some new mechanics such as projectiles and beams passing through whole ship, projectiles that explode inside the ship, internal ricochets etc. This will require complete rebalance of the weapons, armor and shields so I'll consider nerfing the beam weapons as well.

Uh oh, my ships are going to need MORE power?