Shield piercing weapons overpowered?

[Kerensky]

I have to say I really hate shield piercing weapons in this game the more I play. How many times have you got your power cut from the first shot an enemy takes at you because they shield pierced you right into your best power generating module?

And as my ship progresses, I always feel I need to throw out my non-shield piercing weapons, because lasers just take too long to cut through enemy shields before they start doing damage and destroying guns while I am getting pummeled by shield piercing shots from the very start of the battle.

It feels like shield piercing weapons lack a proper counter.

Shields block energy weapons. You can stack multiple shield modules to really get crazy powerful shield capacity and generation.
Point defense intercepts missile types AND nukes. A ship with 3 or 4 PD is really almost immune to missiles and nukes and really puts the serious hurt on boarders as a bonus.
Shield pierce cannons... just don't care. It's going to smack you and there's nothing you can do about it.

And on the other side on the equation, sure you can use you own shield piercing weapons, but the best ones of course drain crazy amounts of resources to fire. Something the enemy you encounter in a single battle never cares about, because their lifespan is just a single battle, where you have to think about the rest of the game to manage your resources.

I think shield piercing weapons should be much, much more rare, especially when enemies have them to use against you. Or there needs to be some kind of module or something to defend yourself against shield piercing attacks.

How about a proper armor module? Not that useless extra HP thing(that can KILL YOUR OWN SHIP), but a module that absorbs X amount of shield piercing shots before collasping. Call it reactive armor. Or something, just anything to stop these crazy shield piercing shots.

[Tinsoldier]

100% agree. Even the cheap-to-fire shield piercing guns feel stronger than the lasers.

[kasnavada]

100% agree.

[prodigalmaster]

I think the problem is that there's just 1 type of energy weapons but multiple projectile types, some of which can't even be blocked by point defence. So a shield is the solution to all lasers but PD isn't even a solution to all projectiles.

[Joeyh92989]

i like the idea that some shots deflect and some don't, but the shield piercing weapons can get little dings all over your ship in un-repairable shots slowly wittilng you down without an easy way to repair. I have had tons of runs where i'm getting dinged by the these shield piercing weapons doing tons of 1-2 damage shots all over the hull i can't reach.

They need to be reviewed i like the idea of Armor maybe stopping them from damaging modules or just only allowing them to pierce on ship where you can repair.

[Grognerd]

Maybe the solution is to buff lasers, perhaps make them deflect immune?

[Kerensky]

Originally posted by jimwinsor:

Maybe the solution is to buff lasers, perhaps make them deflect immune?

I think lasers should be buffed to ignore half or all deflect to help them out.

But that doesn't solve or address the shield pene problem, it's just something lasers need regardless.

[Greep]

IMO Evasion should fully affect all non-lasers only and evasion should be a function of how small (# of modules) your ship is.

Example:

(current)

Currently all ships have evasion < 5

(after)

Nuke runner: 70% evasion
Bio ship: 50% evasion
That awesome ship #5: 20% evasion
Blue star: 10% evasion

ECM modules would add 5-10+ rather than 10-20+, being virtually useless on big ships and very powerful on small ones.

This would on the flip side make your own explosives much more useful against giant bosses.

[Rogue Ambassador]

Hey everyone, thank you for voicing these thoughts!

Regarding everything that feels OP, please be advised that the overall difficulty in Shortest Trip will be harder during Early Access than in the Final Release.

All weapons will undergo many cycles of balancing which may still change everything.
There are also unannounced features which will give a new twist on things (no use for asking about any unannounced stuff - such questions cannot be answered).

For now, try destroying enemy projectile weapons with your own weapons first, acquire more integrity modules (which way also increase deflection) and most of all, make sure you have people and drones ready to repair anything that gets hit.
Using lasers can be very effective if they're used effectively (for example 3 lasers and a sniper to take out enemy shields, or 4 lasers).

You can always attempt escaping if the enemy seems too strong. Regarding escpaing, we see many beginners losing from greed, saying to themselves "I can't escape now, I need this loot" (while they actually don't need that loot) and then thinking that the enemy is OP x)

The main answer to take away from here is that we will be working with balance issues throughout the Early Access, and that includes projectiles :)