Rockets: wldly inaccurate, even with a target painter. And they don’t even do much damage. What’s the point?
Blasters: Seriously now, what do these do that everything else doesn’t do better?
Phasers: Why would you want these when Ion cannons do everything better?
Anti-jamming thingy: this might be nice if it prevented you from being jammed.
I’m sure there are more
Rockets are awesome when used by fighters (set to correct range) against frigates.
I can’t really say anything good about quantum blasters, except that their name sounds totally gratuitous.
Phasors might be used by more skilled admirals, I suppose. They have yet to see the light of day in my fleets though.
EMP shields come in somewhat handy. Every time they actually work means that many more chances to pulverize those emp shockers. That’s a good thing, yes?
What about the Alliance Lightning weapon? I’ve yet to see it do anything besides getting my cruisers horribly damaged before they get a shot off.
I definitely agree on the blaster thing. The Federation wolf cruiser also is inferior in nearly all aspects then the other fed cruisers.
Rockets use very little power and are very light and have reasonable penetration values. The DPS is low but you can end up with a ludicrously fast fighter that’s very hard to kill. The Rebel Icarus with a rocket launcher is particularly good. It doesn’t even need a power generator.
Blasters I basically agree with you. They use less crew and power than most other weapons but their stats are pretty terrible. Ditto for Phasers. They don’t seem to have a role that Ion Cannons don’t do better.
EMP shield could stand to be more generally useful. I don’t like fitting things to combat a fleet which aren’t going to be useful outside of fighting that one fleet.
The quantum blaster/rapid fire laser are roughly analogous to each other as some sort of budget close range gun. While the quantum blaster is truly terrible (five damage?!), the rapid fire laser has the odd distinction of a 65 min range which will probably get it inside large shields.
Phasors are low enough in shield pen to bounce off of reflective shields. This isn’t remotely useful, but hey, it looks cool.
Rockets (I think he meant cruiser rockets) don’t go flying around into the great void for 20 minutes after a missed shot, which allows for faster refires over other missiles in practice.
The Lightning Beam and Fusion torpedo are sort of short range plasma options that don’t exist for races not awesome enough to be Alliance.
I should have been more clear…
I was referring to cruiser rockets. Fighter rockets are fantastic.
I just did a test with cruiser rockets. Painted or not, they miss. Worse, they were actually outperformed by a pure blaster mounted cruiser. And that’s sad.
I’ll be taking a look at some issues like this for the next patch. There are some new options in the game that will allow me to tweak this sort of stuff in more interesting ways.
Ah. Yeah, those aren’t so good right now. They could be greatly improved if they launched in repeated salvos and travelled at least twice as fast.
That would make them much less likely to be shot down or scrambled and more of a threat to enemy vessels.
what about Turbo-Shield ? They are worse in every aspect: cost, weight, crew and energy requirements, hitpoints, resistance, recharge. Except for 7 aditional shield strenght points over frigate shield 2
Maybe the recharge rate is supposed to be 16. It could be as simple as a typo, or at least I hope it is.
hi,
i’m sure it isn’t a typo. 16 would be way too much.
but as we speak of useless modules…there are also some hulls that need balancing.
the wolf frigate for exapmple. also, some fighters provide power output boost, but in a fighter with 3 slots this doesn’t help much.
and what i find strange, is that sometimes fighters with fewer engines are faster because the weight of an additional engine overcomes the speed bonus.
but well, cliffski said he will look at it, so the game can only become better 
greetings
driver
Just played around with the lightning thing. The range restrictions are just too narrow to be useful.
how about the camo systems. You can’t fire, and people still attack you, and easily overwhelm your self repair systems and kill you. And turbo shields.
The camouflage shield isn’t entirely pointless. I’ve seen a few ships manage to use it to their benefit - usually when their weapons are mostly short-range and it does seem to allow them to move in fairly close without becoming a huge target.
But when the ship is in the middle of combat, there I would agree that camouflaging seems to make little difference. I can still see where the ship is - it’s in that empty space that, despite being empty, keeps exploding. Makes me wonder just how the module’s instructions tick.
max_cloak_power = 200Fiddling with this value might yield some results. Anyone know what it actually does?
Presumably it’s the buffer for a cloak charge. I remember seeing both a consumption and recharge rate somewhere.
I’ve got a thread in suggestions about the cloak. It could probably benefit from being simplified some.
Ran some tests and it seems to determine how long the cloaking effect lasts, though it also depends on consumption rate.
Still, my perma-invisible ships were targeted and destroyed though the attackers had a tough time consistently hitting them.
My guess is, it just removes the optimal range to-hit bonus.
With the Imperial Ballista fighter, I couldn’t find any scenerio where the 12% power boost will get you any special deal at all. Quantum Blaster or Phasor Cannons I just couldn’t find a use for (though I wanted to!). As far as the lightning beam goes, I couldn’t find use it efficiently but the AI used it to get the edge against my heavily shielded empire cruiser, so maybe I should experiment more.
Easily the worst weapon and module in the game is the Alliance Lightning Beam. A more bizzarly balanced weapon i cant imagine. Not great damage on any front, not great cost, but most of all, worst ranged in the game. Tineset window of oppertunity to use it. It would be more interesting if it did more damage the close you are to target, and there was no minimum range. Otherwise, why?
As for cloaking, it rocks. So many hitpoints, for so cheap! Awesome for my shieldless armourless cheap tribe cruisers.
Cloak power might be something to do with duration, or perhaps how hard it is to hit the ship using it?