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.
But I think it still matter. Does kinetic are still view as less efficient that the other types of weapons?
Nope. They got balanced out nicely. Even the devs admitted that they were a bit short.
Ok, thank you!
Eh, why not? The thread has been necroed anyway.
Kinetic Weapons are terrible and Armor is unnecessarily expensive compared to the other two defenses.
Being cheap and fast does not justify it in any way whatsoever. Why?
Kinetic Ships will be shred to pieces by missile ships long before they get close enough to attack and make use of that speed. Tactical engines do not help unless you stack a bunch of them, which just wastes capacity. This is especially true if you are going up against a fleet of well-built carriers whose fighters have a missile specialization. Kinetics never get a chance to fire. Also, armor is much easier to stack compared to kinetic weaponry.
Even worse, as you get closer, the beams are going to kick in, so you are going to be face-tanking 2/3 of a ships total potential firepower, and you still cannot use those kinetics. It is better to just stick to missile and beams, which usually decide a battle well before kinetics kick in. Kinetics are more of an auxiliary anti-fighter weapon, assuming your ship can even survive long enough to get close and use them.
Along the thought of stacking, I would much rather have kinetic modules cost twice as much with twice the attack than stack like 30 of them to get decent kinetic atk numbers. This is more of a quality of life issue because stacking a lot of modules does cause slow downs on weaker machines.
Kinetics would look better if the interface showed us damage-per-second rather than damage-per-shot. They're also horribly inaccurate, which eliminates the advantage of their rate of fire, meaning you take ages to get in range and then have very poor damage output once you finally arrive. I have no idea who thought it would be a good idea to have the closest-range weapon be the least accurate, but they really weren't thinking it through.
It's pretty straightforward; missiles are long range, medium accuracy, poor rate of fire; lasers are mid range, mid rate of fire and good accuracy, and kinetics are good rate of fire, poor range, poor accuracy. Lasers have 2 'mediums' and kinetics have 2 'poors'. Swap a laser 'medium' for a kinetic 'poor' (so either accuracy or range), and the three balance properly.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
