I know this has been suggested for a while but… is cliff going 2 fix the laser deal? right now the laser spam is just getting a bit too deadly
just stay away from laser range?
Or get decent armor on your ships, and maybe a repair system or two.
Are we talking cruiser lasers? If yes, they can do a lot of damage but they have an extremely short range. Use that to your advantage. Short range, high damage weapon? Seems balanced to me. All weapons need to have tradeoffs.
Beam weapons? Reflective shields nullify them completely but no armor can hope to stop them.
range-keeping is barely possible with the current orders
EMPs, Armor, long range weapons. Pick any or all of them. I like to back up my tanking cruisers with frigates packing 2- 3 Plasmas, I dont seem to have much trouble with the laser rush any more. Also, I’ve found that having an EMP cannon on your tanking Cruisers is very useful against a laser rush, just make sure they aren’t on Cooperative or they will just shoot the same target with EMPs, and ignore the other ships.
Cruiser EMP beams have a 0.5 tracking value. They are (at best) inconsistent against fast approaching craft. Use frigate EMP instead, if he doesn’t have scramblers.
If you’d rather slug it out, well disciplined pulse fighter usage can quickly burn down cruisers stripped of defenses.
Or just make the same ships than the enemy, but replacing engines with armor/shields.