Cruiser Command

IMO kinetics are unbalanced right now. The problem comes from the tier 3 upgrade that gives kinetics homing projectiles.

There's two trees for kinetics, the damage one and the rapid fire one. I like to think of the first as a sniper rifle: extremely high (hull) damage, no projectile spread, accurate. Use it to snipe miners and corvettes from a distance. The rapid fire I like to think of as a chain gun: Spray a bunch of bullets, hit a ton of targets. Does a lot of damage at close range, but not accurate at long range.

Homing turns that around though. Now, all of a sudden, the chain gun is MORE accurate than the sniper rifle, because it aims itself. It does more damage by virtue of every projectile hitting. You don't even need someone to spot a target, you can just blind fire and the projectiles will hit. This makes destroyers completely worthless, you can't escape the barrage of kinetics no matter what you do, and it makes BC encounters unbalanced, since one BC can shoot the other without seeing them. You don't even need lasers anymore, you can just shoot kinetics from out of sight range until the enemy ship's shields crash or they run out of power, in either case they get chewed apart.

Basically, homing makes the kinetic weapons TOO good.

That is very interesting to hear because since kinetic weapons were released, people in Skype have been telling me how OP the "sniper" is compared to the chain gun.

I usually call them single and multi branches. Where single = sniper and multi = chain gun. The single branch does deal a lot more damage. I think it's almost 50% more and that's how it was intended. The single branch was made to be a weapon used against the BC while the chain gun is more balanced(it also deals more shield damage than the single branch) and it's intended more against enemy small ships. That's what I'd like to balance it around, although people are welcome to come with suggestions other ways to balance it.

Now the fact that people are arguing that both sides are OP feels to me like no one is that much better than the other one. However, I see the problem with just firing blindly without aiming and hitting/killing a lot of ships.

I think there are some things to consider when you're playing against a team with kinetic weapons, especially if they have multi. Your small ships have to stay far away from the enemy BC and when engaging in BCvBC combat, you should probably hide behind your own BC.

Now there's some things I can do to balance this. What I have in mind is reducing the homing(either the search radius or the turn rate) and/or reducing the range of the multi branch. To compensate, I might reduce the projectile speed pretty heavily on the single.

How does this sound?

Homing should not exist on any regular shot weapons that are not paid for. Half this game is dodging projectiles.

Give sniper incredibly long range and a decent projectile speed with a cooldown between each shot. If you can land a skill shot enough times a quarter of the way across the map you deserve to destroy that ship. While if the Battlecruiser gets close enough to actually see the other one the chain gun should then be more viable because no shot cooldown.

This way you avoid stupid shit like people's shots looping around asteroids to hit you and you maintain a high skill cap because you have to do so much mental math to snipe someone from so far away, especially because asteroids will get in the way while you try to long range snipe...

Homing rockets however can exist, you just shouldn't be able to home in on people with op small ship destroying weapons for free because it wrecks the small ship aspect of the game.

People on Skype aren't necessarily wrong about the single shot being powerful. However, compared to the multi-shot? The multishot does ~150 shield DPS. The single shot does ~120 shield DPS. The disparity gets even greater with hull DPS.(EDIT: Actually the single shot does do more hull DPS) This is not counting the fact that the gun aims itself. This extremely high DPS is because of the ridiculous number of projectiles fired per second. The fact that the projectiles spray everywhere is nullified by the homing.

I've tested things out, and it seems like the laser upgrades for the BC don't work. The lasers do the same DPS to shields no matter how many upgrades. ATM both kinetic trees do better than lasers against shields, so I can't disagree with them about single shot kinetics being OP. They outclass the lasers in every way possible.

As far as multi-shot goes, if the turn rate of the projectiles were significantly reduced it would cut down on the blind fire. I would rather tracking be removed entirely and replaced with some other mechanic though, if possible.

now no one uses kinetics, because homing is completely gone, oh and power users

from what i noticed, kinetics are often ignored because they are very expensive (and the only worthwhile use is to get to T3 which is 240/240/400) and is not much use in higher level games where a power user can keep sheilds up, kinetics compared to lasers do only about 20%-50% damage against sheilds and about 10-30% more damage (somewhere around there, i dont want to deal with numbers atm lol)
if kinetics did 125% against hull and 75% against shields, then the investment would be worth it, as kinetics are more energy efficient and tend to cause more debris. But for now, kinetics are useless against a good power player as the emergency shields can raise the Shields much more easily against kinetics then lasers

the new beta pretty much killed the new kinetic.

might want to look into that