Energy Weapons

I'm not far enough in my first game but keep researching "High-Energy Discharge Weapons".
I used to love the "Wave Motion gun", take a look at them and see how all the weapons compare.
From the manual "Wave - Motion Gun" 100-100 damange out to range 80.
Baron Grazic

PS. Otherwise you could try the balanced mod, or create your own.

I am starting (slowly) to work on a spreadsheet that lists each weapon as Damage/Ton, Damage/Research point, etc.

So far I can catagorize the weapons in 3 ways:

Very useful

Useful in some circumstances

Useless

Only around 30% of the weapons are Very Useful. The Meson Blaster is king, by far. You could never use another weapon and not miss the others.

Some weapons Don't seem useful on the surface, but allow access to other weapons, or their Smaller version is useful for fighters/Sattelites, or they don't use ordinance, or they don't use Minerals (which means ships built with them may build almost twice as fast...). These are maybe 30% as well.

The other 40% of the weapons are nerfed in some way or another. They just don't hold up to scrutiny at all. They are too large, use too many resources, don't have any range, etc.

I want to finish the spreadsheet, hoping that I may be wrong, and some weapons have more use, and also give us some weapons we can mod into usefulness.

While I was waiting for the SE5 to come out, I took it upon myself to detemine the value of something in an effort to prove from a math perspective how useful something in the game is. After trudging across a few chalkboards I came out with a few basic variables that I am still fudging with to get an acceptable result.

For one you have damage/kton or HP/kT which I found to be an excellent measure of efficency. I also developed a probability based approach to it expanding HP to include max range and accuracy.

Basically you take the sum of damage as weighted by the probability of doing damage, e.g. If a weapon has a range of 2 and it's accuracy looks like this:
Damage 100 100 100
Accuracy 0 -10 -20
I took it statistically over the range, meaning if you have an accuracy of 100 and a damage of 100, you get 10000, add on 100 * 90 (at range 10) = 9000, then add 100 * 80 (range 2) =8000. Total added up would equal 27000 HP over a distance of 3. Div

Doing it this way allows for range and accuracy to take into account. A weapon with a range of 10 and losing accuracy of 10% per range unit with a damage of 50 would total to 27500 which encorporates the weight of range and accuracy into it very nicely.

Now take the damage sum over range and divide that by the resource cost times the structure. So if this theoretical weapon had a cost of 500M and took up 40kT of structure, 500*40 = 20000. 27500/20000 = 1.38. So I'd say the weapons value is 1.38.

The level one DUC would have a value of 2.67, and the level one meson blaster a value of 3.15 despite having less range than the DUC (cheaper, less space taken up). Let me know if you want to use it/need any help/etc. Eventually I'll incorporate research cost and reload time, but for now it's a good measure.

Dont forget that Phased Energy weapons goes right through shields, and that your opponent needs a level 20 in Shield Technology to get Phased Shields.

By that time, Phased Shields are level 1, and your phased weapons will probably be well above level 10, thus ripping those phased shields apart, and bypassing annoying normal shields.

My feelings on High-energy discharge weapons waslike my reaction to torpedoes..

"I researched this WHY?"

Anyone who wants power; by definition, cannot be trusted with it...

Don´t play stock. There are good mods out there that balance things.

What was that cartoon back in the early 80's that had a wave motion gun... If I remember it was japanise animation and the ship was shaped like a ocean born ship with a giant hole in the front that was the wave motion gun, Kind of like the "spinal mount" (I love the idea of a gigantic version of a weapon, with a ship built around it).

SEV, more than a feeling.

If we like uber weapons, why not go nuclear?

Oops, thats real life.

To me, it would be boring if every "weapon" was designed around some Vanilla equalized "scaleing". Its more fun to play a underpowered "other flavored" weapon. Of course, Most seem to enjoy Uber weapons, So they can keep thier meson blasters, etc.

Sure a phased energy weapon is great at shields. But agianst Organic armor, they suck. Then agian shard cannons are good agianst organic armor, after shield depleters are used.

Its just a stradegy game, its not supposed to be realistic. Where is my Steller plasma bomb in space? Is there some techno-babble about plasma needing "air" to expand? Why not use a steller Neutron Bomb instead? Of course, some techno-babble will explain that away as well.