That’s far too short, unless the goal is to remove it from service.
Is the range really the problem on the CL? Dropping it to 350 is pretty drastic.
I mean most times my cruiser lasers are almost always placed on ships that can close the distance pretty quickly anyways.
They do have pretty low crew requirement and low cost .
It might be more reasonable to adjust there first so that you can’t quite stack a boatload of them on a ship without as much of a hit to your piggy bank or personnel.
I know some people feel like weight, cost, crew reqs etc don’t take that much of a toll but If you think about it increasing the cost on the CL 10-15% can lower the number you can bring to bear without having to adjust range (which i feel will really negate them entirely making missiles absolutely dominant) . A few tweaks will add up over the cost of a whole fleet.
I find that energy, crew cost, range, penetration and DPS are the key attributes. Weight on cruisers, and cost for anything, never influence my strategy.
/signed. same for me.
Dropping the range that much will make it completely worthless. First it will be unlikely to beat shields as not many ships will be able to shoot at a single target, that is if it shoots at all, take a good look at the defence laser. With it’s 300 range it can have 1000 fighters in range and will rarely shoot.
If you want just to remove an item from the game just say so 
Re: fighters
I have a few notions about fighter use:
-The weight and energy consumption of the fighter engine 3 is really punitive right now. I’ve had designs using engine 3 and generator 3 to power the engine 3, only to discover that I could get the same speed with generator 2 and engine 2 for slightly less cost. What if the weight for generator and engine 3 were dropped by 15%, but the cost were pushed up 30%? That way you could have high-performance fighter designs, but you would pay a premium for them.
-Could the attack range specification in orders be dropped a bit shorter perhaps? I really want to make sure my fighters are hitting from inside the shield bubble.
-Does the target painter accuracy bonus apply to other units attacking the painted target? If so, that would open up some interesting possibilities for a squadron of painter-equipped fighters to support missile-equipped frigates. Would help especially if there were a “fire on my mark” command. Maybe up the weight on it a bit and give a shield penetration bonus on painted targets. Not enough to turn fighters into shield-penetrating terrors (they can fly inside 'em anyway) but enough that a pathfinder squad of fighters could make frigate missiles dangerous. Alternatively they might be used to mark fighter targets for flak frigates and make them more effective.
-Would it be possible to add a damage bonus for fighters if more than X number of the squadron remains and a damage penalty if less than Y remain? That way anti-fighter defenses needn’t swat the entire squadron to mitigate the threat from fighters. Also would make carrier bays more valuable.
This is my suggestion list and one I was going to mod into my own game:
- Fighter rocket launcher: Min range 280->260; Max range 450->475
- Fighter torpedo weight: Max range 400->625; Cost 42->63; Weight 15->8
- Order fighter salvation: Speed bonus -0.16->-0.10;
- Fighter pulse laser: Tracking 2.9->3.1; Damage 6->3; Cost 22->28; Power 4.8->3.4
- Look at carrier bay…try to fix bug?
- Fighter tracking laser: Cost 55->59; Weight 3.1->2.8
- Frigate anti-fighter: Fire interval 1100->975; Tracking 12.5->12; Damage 19->15; Cost 61->48
- Federation Falcon fighter: Power 3->3.2
- Tribe sunset fighter: Cost 37->28; Power 2.3->2.1
- Tribe freedom cruiser: Power 10->12; Cost 180->185
- Frigate engine III: Crew 14->12
- Cruiser decoy missile launcher: Range 675->900
Maybe 350 range is too drastic on the Cruiser Laser. What if you left the range at 490, and instead raised the cost to say, 130 points?
It would be interesting to see the Alliance Lightning Beam with say, 800 range.
you can go into the modules txt file and edit that if you’d like!
yeah, you can also create an hack beam that kills anything on the field instantly…
- Quantum Blasters are not a good choice. I intend to rectify this by raising its armor penetration from 14 to 18, which raises it above the cruiser laser, and maybe slightly reducing the cost.
I think bumping the damage to 9 or 10 and/or slightly reducing cost would help more than an armor pen buff.
- Armor, in general, is not a good choice. Especially frigate armor. I intend to boost the strength of frigate armor, and to generally boost the strength of cruiser armor, but also increase the stacking penalty of armor so that ‘tanks’ are no more effective than currently.
I’m thinking a 25% boost in the absorbable damage for all frigate armor modules, and 15% boost to all cruiser armor modules.
frigate stacking effectiveness will drop to 0.95 from 0.98. Cruiser stacking from 0.98 to 0.97
This looks like a good boost for armor. The Advanced Armor Repair should have it’s repair rate bumped up to .12-.15 (Higher than Nanobot considering the specialization and higher armor amounts it will be fixing).
-
Disruptor missiles are not being used much, possibly because they are easily shot down. I am considering making them faster moving, and possibly faster firing. I propose increasing the speed from 0.31 to 0.41, and the fire interval from 1950 to 1800
The reason why Disruptor missiles don’t get used much is that they have several drawbacks and little to make up for it. Compared to the other frigate special effect weapon, the EMP Missile Launcher II, EMP wins in the following categories: Cost, Weight, Power, Crew, Max Range, Tracking Speed, and Min Range. Then there’s the special effect itself. An EMP weapon doesn’t care if the target has shields or not, and one hit = one EMP effect. A Disruptor does nothing vs a ship without shields, and one hit doesn’t equal shields are down, it requires multiple hits to achieve it’s effect. That means you have to spend more of your fleet budget to add in more frigates to spam the most expensive frigate weapon in the game which isn’t cost effective.
Possible improvements include adding a secondary effect vs targets with no shields up like disrupting engines, reducing ship speed by 20% or disrupting weapon reloading by 20% for example. The effective range of Disruptors is 300-650. That’s a small window and one that puts the frigate directly in harm’s way against the cruisers it’s trying to deshield. A longer max range would make them more attractive. Overall, the Disruptor Missile needs a lot of buffing to be considered worth it’s high price tag. -
The cruiser defence laser is expensive for what it does. I’m considering increasing it’s damage from 7 to 9 and cutting it’s cost from 114 to 96.
The cost reduction would help and a small bump in max range would be nice too.
Perhaps the simplest way to balance the Cruiser Laser is to just cut its Rate Of Fire in half.?
There are still modules and weapons that are never good choices regardless of what happens to cruiser lasers and if after they’ve been brought up the CL is still too good I think it should be looked at.
There are still quite a few good places things can be tweaked before CL’s get knocked down a peg imo.
(If we’re considering any changes to CL I think a drop in armor pen is the best place to start)
making the CL near useless against anything with armor would be pretty cool. making its armor pen something like 5 would work i think.
with so many variables available with each weapon (shield pen, armor pen, max range, min range, damage, tracking, crew, power, cost, weight, hit points, fuel for missiles, special effects) i think we have way too many systems that are way too similar. every weapon could have massive trade-offs with the next. like with the QB/CL problem. we could give the QB double the range of the CL or like above give the QB more armor pen and give the CL almost none. or maybe give the QB a ton of hit points, so it still sucks as a weapon, but can help make your ship a tank. or lower its min so it can get under shields of big ships. there is just so much stuff you can do to make them different weapons, instead of just having one inferior version of the same weapon.
i thinking the cruiser missile range should be bumped up to about 1250 and the multi dropped to around 1075.
make point defense with a lvl2 scanner+ guidance scramble near missile proof. three slots on your on a ship is a ton of space. on the same note, make point Def plus Scanner better than just a scrambler alone.
make limpets slow down fighters more or give each limpets launcher more than ten. and/or make them stack on a fighter to able to almost stop it complete would be pretty cool. a fighter with like 4 or 5 limpets all over it.
Sorry if someone already brought it up or if im mistaken… but as far as i can tell The Tribe has no bonuses other than the racial focus adjustments. Compared to the 3 “starter” races that all have ships with individual bonuses on them different per ship it seems weird.
Are the Tribe (and Order,i dont have the expansion “yet” so i cant see right now) having these bonuses included in some other way than in individual hull % bonuses?
Hope you know what i mean 
if i completely missed something obvious please just kick me in the face and shoot my knee 
P.S. dont you dare end the discount codes on monday,im getting my cash at monday 
oh and the Empire needs a little something. I was thinking a race wide shield bonus. somewhere in the 5-10% range. or maybe give all their weapons a 5-10% range increase. but they def need something to make them more competitive and give them a little more identity.
I don’t think it would. A cruiser with, say, 4 CLs and 2 CBLs (to punch through the armor) is still doing about 10 CBLs worth of damage.
Seconded - give the Empire a range bonus, please. Great idea.
Would have to agree with the previous posts about Rocket Fighters and Torpedoes.
Rocket Fighters are too good and they go too fast. Personally I think fighter speed should go, in general, Pulse —> Laser --> Rocket ----> Torpedo.
You don’t even need a challenge to see it, just go to Battle of Mexxalon II and try to take down the two groups of Rocket Fighters. A Fed Panther Cruiser with 2 tractors and 6 Defense Lasers can’t do it in any sort of time (which is possibly due to the Defense Laser problems). 3 Frigates with 2 Tractors and 2 Anti-Fighter Rockets each and >12 armour get killed due to critical hits before they kill them (due to Frigate Armour problems). 2 groups of the fastest Fed Pulse Fighters you can build can barely hit them. It is quite silly really.
In contrast, Torpedo Bombers get blown out of the sky by anything with no problems, due to how slow they go.
Those damn single rocket fighters have always been a problem.
Once you’re going faster than 2.9 speeds (fastest laser fighter is 2.65 IIRC), only four things have a greater than 2% chance of hitting:
Tractor beams
Frigate antifighter missiles
Cruiser Defense Laser
Painted weapons (like the fighter rocket)
Many of the designs are fast enough to be beyond the CDL’s tracking rate as well, so it’s really only three. They confound a host of normal AA in the 2.6-2.9 range (cruiser/frigate pulse, fighter laser/pulse), often leaving your fighters uselessly chasing them around the map once the pilots lock on to them.
I’ve found the most effective platform to combat them is armored frigate AA launchers orbited by small groups of painter fighters. The sad thing is that I’ve inadvertently destroyed entire airforces with those - the painters go nearly as fast as the rocket fighters do and serve as a lengthy distraction for anything with high fighter attack priorities.
To be honest, the fighter rocket isn’t even that good to be worth all this trouble. Since you’re loading single low-dps weapons onto fighters, they don’t become useful until you blow half your pilot count on swarms of the stupid things. Individually or in small groups the fighters have poor dps and have trouble with stacked frigate shields, and they’re virtually useless against cruisers. I don’t use them that often anymore.