hi there!
i was wondering why kinetic weapons seem to be so much weaker then the other two types now. i started playing the game in the last ~2 weeks of the beta and if i remember correctly, they used to be more powerful not too long ago. the first time I played the tutorial, the starting frigate you get had (i think) 32 kinetic damage or something. it seems the damage of kinetic weapons was nerfed with one of the latest patches, the ship from the tutorial now only has 8 kinetic damage and can't even kill the space pirate base (which i think is the main reason why you get that ship in the tutorial, so you learn how the combat works).
that's not restricted to this single ship, though. kinetics in general seem much weaker than beam and missile weapons. the first tier of kinetic weapons (rail gun) has 1 damage with cooldown 4 and 80% accuracy, the stinger missile which is also a tier one weapon has 6 damage, 90% accuracy and 8 cooldown, the particle beam has 3 damage, 5 cooldown and 100% accuracy (the laser is sort of "tier 0", so i think it makes more sense to compare the particle beam). on top of that, the kinetic weapons are also the largest module (t1 kinetic is size 24, t1 missile is size 18 and t1 beam is size 14). the only advantage seems to be that they are significantly cheaper, but i don't think that's a big enough advantage to make them a useful alternative.
higher tier versions of the weapn types follow the same trend more or less - kinetics are big, cheap, low cooldown, low range, very low damage - beams are small, expensive, mid cooldown, mid range and decent damage and missiles are mid sized, expensive, slow cooldown. high damage.
that balance seems to work for beams and missiles, but even if kinetics are supposed to be the "cheap and weak option", it doesn't really add up since they are also fairly bulky, so you basically have to make a battleship full of mass drivers to match the firepower of small missile boat.
am i missing something here? mass drivers really don't seem like a viable choice at the moment.
Two things about Kinetic weapons:
They're super cheap and they have twice the rate of fire.
ah thanks for the reply wouldn't it make sense to display the double fire rate as double damage, then? or possibly redo the whole display and show more like a "dps" value that factors in the cooldown / fire rate?
Given how much less efficient kinetic weapons are, I'm doubtful that it matters.
In yesterdays dev stream Paul mentioned they are reducing the mass a little bit. But don't miss out the the modules that increase rate of fire and range.
I hope you revise Kinetic Damage since the Prototype Rail gun retains its original 8 damage stat - I think it appropriate to follow the advice of this post and increase the damage of rail guns from 1 to 2 so it is half what it was originally at 4 - I know on very large ships it is cheap weapon but uses a lot of space for the damage it gives at the start of the game. I am not sure of decreasing the cool down time he mentioned is appropriate but bumping the damage applied to half what it was originally seems warranted.
Kinetic weapon damage
https://forums.galciv3.com/465452/page/1/
and are short range and require far too much mass
Duranthium is much easier to come by than elerium or antimatter so whenever I get war declared on me at turn 40 or whatever, that war is always fought and won with prototype kinetics.
Missiles are good for long game wars.
Beams suck.
Instead if guessing it is pretty easy to take a look at the file and do the numbers and then judge...
The basic truth is this... where Value is taking DPS, range and mass into consideration
Beam weapon Tier 1 (not the tier 0 one)
Cost 32, Accuracy 100%, Damage 3, Cool down 5, Range 800, Mass 14 DPS 0.6, Value 13.68
Kinetic weapon Tier 1
Cost 7, Accuracy 80%, Damage 1, Cool down 4, Range 600, Mass 24 DPS 0.2, Value 2
Durantium Driver
Cost 23, Accuracy 80%, Damage 8, Cool down 4, Range 600, Mass 24 DPS 1.6, Value 16
Missile weapon Tier 1
Cost 30, Accuracy 90%, Damage 6, Cool down 8, Range 1100, Mass 18 DPS 0.68, Value 16.8
Please make your own judgement...
Adding modules that make any type better is not worth considering since they all get those modules in some way and they are not really balanced well either. There is a significant different in cost between the weapons but it is very hard to believe this will make much impact, you are still in most cases going to pay for defensive components, engines and so on anyway so the cost can still be relatively close.
DPS is nice, but what is probably even better is DPSM (Damage per Second per Mass)
I'm actually going to show DPSM X100 (damage per second per mass times 100) just because its easier to see visually.
Beam 1: DPSM 4.29
Kinetic 1: DPSM .83
Missle 1: DPSM 3.78
Durantium: DPSM 8.9
The numbers I think are telling, kinetics cost too much mass.
Now you could argue the cost point, but right now I feel that cost is a very weak factor for overall military strength. A few reasons:
1) Military Manufacturing is easy to get high. It is not difficult at all to get 1 good manu planet to crank out a ship every turn. Since I can never make more than 1 ship before starport, might as well make them as good as I can.
2) Fleet Logistics cap the power of multiple ships. While a kinetic player can make more ships than a beam player, ultimately they can make the same size fleets, and a beam fleet will trounce a kinetic fleet. Because defense reset each fight, a stronger fleet can normally take out 2-3 times lesser fleets...so ultimately the stronger fleets actually save you money in the long run.
I have to say, Kinetic weapons, especially Durantium-based ones, can be a whole lot of fun. Use the cooldown reduction component and they'll tear through anything. Two 0/0/24 ships firing once every 2 seconds will take down a starbase in a hilariously short time. That requires 4 Durantium, (using non-prototype Durantium drivers) but it's the easy one to find.
As for the regular Kinetic weapons, I usually avoid them for a military campaign. But why's that a bad thing? Missiles and beams are good choices for waging war, Kinetic however can be a fine choice for defensive ships. You don't have to worry about other components, so fill them up with weapons - cheap weapons. They can be replaced quickly - unlike fleets fighting dozens of tiles away.
I've noticed people posting a lot of numbers. But those numbers don't apply the cost difference. When the cost difference is applied, Kinetic falls into line with the others. I know Kinetic isn't a good choice for those times we are sending fleets off the conquer distant planets, but does it need to be? Can Kinetic fill a role as a good defensive weapon for those empires who aren't focused on conquering the galaxy by force?
I think I'm going to try this. I'm now very curious to see what I can do with Kinetic weapons.
Why do these threads never look at defense...
Deflectors cost 22, take 7 mass, and have a strength of 4.
Chaff costs 30, takes 9 mass, and has a strength of 8.
Hull Plating costs 29, takes 12 mass, and has a strength of 8.
Armor used to be good, just not good for kinetic and more all around good. Now it's only giving kinetic protection, and almost as much as you can get for PD. It used to be the strongest damage type, from the perspective of your ability to defend against it. If you took one of every reduction type, you'd have excellent PD, good shields, and weak armor.
Kinetic weapons needed a major buff when this change was made, but they weren't given one. I found the change quite disappointing to start with, armor's behavior being unique was nice.
I think part of the reason is that defense is not well understood yet. Its clear that defense decays over the battle, but the decay rate is not been posted. I agree that the extra fire of kinetics should wear down the expensive armor defense quicker...and might make it more competitive.
Kinetics will need a slight boost in its efficiency. The fact they are very cheap do have their uses I will agree to that, especially the fact you can churn weak ships in great numbers fast even at low manufacturing worlds can be important, but at the current state of kinetics they are just too weak and amour too easy to get to counter them.
Yeah, playing with Kinetics I can't help but feel I would be much better off with Missiles.
I just can't understand how a huge missle capable of exploding a space ship occupy less space/mass than the bullets from kcinectic weapons. Every time I look at it all I can conclude is that kinectic and missle mass are swapped in all tiers. If it is, than kinectic would be a good choice once it's fixed (once again, supposing it actually is swapped)
None of the above takes into consideration range. You could have a billion point Kinetic, but if it won't fire until its in short range, and its going against an enemy with strong missiles, you'll never get to fire that billion point Kinetic gun because you'll get taken out by their long range weapons.
I don't think nerfing missiles to be nigh-useless is the answer, though -- maybe reduce their damage a hefty amount, but let missiles do other things other than pure damage, such as perhaps an EMP that damages the target's targetting computers and thus their accuracy in lieu of lots of raw damage, or somesuch.
If you check out the mass drivers that the military is developing now, they are not small, nor is the ammunition anything like a bullet. It is more or less a ballistic missile system that works with magnetism instead of rocket fuel. Still, they shouldn't be bigger than missiles and they need to be fixed.
How many of you use Carriers? they seem pretty strong and my main ships dont get hit. I havent really tested but the small ships that come out seem to be replenished each fight so these fleets never wear down form multiple battles.
Missiles get more powerful the larger two fleets are since range get more important and it becomes easier to focus fire on a single target so you can take out an enemy ship faster, this is a relatively big drawback to a weapon with short range even with the rudimentary tactical maneuvering in the battle viewer.
Not twice -- their default rate of fire is only 20% less than lasers. Their boosted rate of fire certainly is twice, but that comes at a cost of them now having 40% less accuracy than lasers.
Also, the AI and the default schematics don't use Rapid Reload, so when the AI uses kinetics, or you decide to use a kinetics ship that you didn't personally design, it universally sucks.
ah ok. so that "twice the fire rate" comment isn't some sort of hidden feature but actually refers to the (slightly) faster cooldown and the upgrade module that doubles the fire rate but reduces the hit chance?
well in that case i stand by my former analysis. they are underpowered. i thought the double fire rate was some sort of hidden feature, not the effect of that extra module. imo, modules that are not used in automatic ship designs should NOT be taken into account for balancing the weapons. make them balanced at the baseline without factoring in bonuses from (essentially) "human player only" modules - then adjust those fluff modules accordingly if one of them makes a weapon too powerful.
as a practial suggestion, double the fire rate of the base weapons (i.e. change cooldown from 4 to 2) and tone down the double fire rate module to 50% faster with 20% less accuracy. making the guns a bit smaller would also help - the cheap price is not enough of an incentive to use those weapons.
Agree completely. Mass Drivers got hit too hard with nerf bat.
I hope we get some more insight into defenses soon. Then we can compare a ship with missiles and armor vs a ship with kinetics and chaff. That is ultimately a more well rounded review to tell us how they compare to each other.
If armor's defense against kinetics is weaker than chaff's defense against missiles...kinetics may not be as weak as they first appear.
Carriers and small ship fleets tactics notwithstanding the abundance Durantium can be a bit of an equalizer in standard gunship fights. It’s easy to put a support ship in every fleet with an Accelerator Field and an Internal Field Projector, as well as field a fair number of gunships with Rapid Reload, Armor Pricing and Kinetic Accelerators.
The ability to field significant numbers of armor piercing gunships is the key. I’ve found that ships with good defenses and fully augmented and supported Kinetics rip through other ships because your heavy hitters are largely ignoring enemy defenses, and most opposing ships still have to dig through yours. There simply isn’t enough Antimatter and Elerium to field a significant number of support ships and defense penetrating gunships simultaneously. I usually have one extremely defended spearhead fleet with all armor penetrating ships that often takes no damage at all in a fight.
I’m no expert but my mid and endgame Kinetic fleets typically have the following kinetic specific buffs:
Throw in targeting and defensive support and you have a mean fleet.
I don't find mass to be an issue mid to late game because I play dense use a lot of miniaturization, and you don't want so much firepower that you overkill every volley.
man... look at the date of the previous entry...
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