I purchased the game a few days ago and have had a blast with it, but i’m finding it hard to justify using anything other than the basic cruiser laser and some form of shield disable on my ship builds. It pretty much out dps almost all other weapons while still having an awesome refire rate, decent power cost, and decent crew cost. I can’t really see any advantage for the other beam weapons and only a slight use for the rapid fire weapons as a form of knocking down shields. I thought i’d check out a few challenges but it seems that in the end even there the laser(particularly the rebel) was seen as the absolute best form of DPS.
So am i totally missing something? Why would i ever bother with fusions or rapid fire lasers except to try and knock down costs for better campaign rewards(which i still find easier to do by just using less ships with the laser and pulse for shields combo)
The cruiser laser is indeed awesome (although relatively low accuracy, so not quite as epic dps as it looks.)
However… Check out the low low armour penetration value. And of course it’s (for a cruiser weapon) extremely short range.
If you come up against armoured ships, you’re going to need some high armour penetration weapons, to bring the armour down so the cruiser lasers can begin to do their job (raw dps.)
Fast, long range, ships can also be your downfall. Also, as one of the least accurate lasers/beams, don’t expect it to help vs fighters unless you’ve got tractor beams.
It’s great at bringing down shields, not sure why you’d need a seperate weapon for that… However the short range means you might want something, just to open up a gap a little sooner so your anti-armour weapons aren’t getting reflected for too long.
Indeed. Just try fighting a challenge against someone who uses fast moving long range missile ships, to see how the lasers can’t always win
Plus lasers use a lot of power, missiles do not, freeing up slots for more missiles…
Although I suspect I’m still the only person to have actually posted up a retreating missile fleet I’ll have to put that challenge up again, I removed it when it’s fighter wing became invalid
EDIT: done. Eji, check out my most recent challenge (the description calls it a cowardly fleet to see an example of a fleet that can chew up most short ranged fleets in an amusing way. It thrashes my most aggressive fleet (which is laser heavy,) which takes people a rather surprising average of 11 attempts to beat!?
Pretty please can we have a slider for ‘minimum range’? So retreating fleets don’t have to use range 2000, meaning they can’t actually approach the enemy without being in formation with ‘tug boats’… Which made my challenge far too easily defeated by ‘rolling up the flank’.
I’m at work right now so I can’t check, but I’m pretty sure I fought that challenge last night. I loved it, it’s great that you think you’ve seen everything this game offers and then someone comes up with a sneaky tactic like that one.
I’ll have to put that challenge up again, I removed it when it’s fighter wing became invalid 
to see an example of a fleet that can chew up most short ranged fleets in an amusing way. It thrashes my most aggressive fleet (which is laser heavy,) which takes people a rather surprising average of 11 attempts to beat!?