GalCiv3 Forums
So after the end of the beta my kinetic weapons seam to do next to no damage. first lvl kinetic wep do 1 dmg while pulse canons do 2 dmg compared to laser and missiles with 6 dmg... am i the only one who have this issue?
You need to consider weapon range, accuracy, rate of fire, cost, and mass. Not just the damage.
I am very disappointed with Kinetic also. Lower damage, range, and accuracy than lasers.
Paul was talking about them on the stream today. He was proping them for rapid fire and techs that extend range to more than any of the lasers. Also says the are low mass and can be piled on to increase damage. He seems to consider them to be a large or huge hull weapon.
Durantium is easy to mine and I have a Tie fighter that has a Durantium Driver with 9 damage and I put a lot of thrusters on it. What do you know, he said they have nerfed thrusters. I haven't tested it in battle yet.
Wish they had a feature where you could set up a test before building a bunch and see them get slaughtered
On that list of things you mentioned, the only area Kinetics excel in is cost. Cost is meaningless because of how much production everything makes. Even Kinetics' Rate of Fire is pretty pitiful now, almost as slow as Lasers by default, unless you use Rapid Reload, which makes their accuracy even worse.
Kinetics are worse than Lasers in almost every other way:
It should be noted that Durantium weapons were not nerfed at the end of beta, except in Rate of Fire, so those are still worth building. Unfortunately, this means if you want Kinetics, you better have lots of Durantium, because that's the only way you're getting anything out of them until you reach the last tech. Singularity Drivers are the same power as a Durantium Driver, but is heavier. The final level in Lasers and Missiles are each twice as powerful as their best Resource weapon, but at the very least Kinetics finally catches up to them in total DPS per weapon, even if they're still much heavier, less accurate, and shorter ranged.
Kinetics were heavily over-nerfed. They probably were overpowered, but now? Let's just say there's a serious Durantium shortage in the galaxy due to this. I keep saying this, but Kinetics need to be buffed slightly to be competitive again. Something like:
Railguns: DMG 2
Pulse Cannons: DMG 4
Graviton Thrower: DMG 6
Quantum Driver: DMG 10
Singularity Driver: DMG 14
This would make them good again. Fair, but still weaker in damage-per-shot, range, accuracy, and weight. No more having to jump through hoops just to make them usable. Durantium becomes an option rather than a necessity. As they are now, a tier 1 Frigate, a Medium ship, only has enough room to increase its Kinetic Attack to 2 and have an Armor of 8. No room for shields, point defense, life support, or engines. Not even enough room for Rapid Reload to make that 2 Kinetic Attack usable. Pathetic. Even the AI won't use default kinetics on their ships anymore, and they still build Thulium Research Archives on squares with nothing next to them. Oh sure, they'll still research Kinetics, but they won't use them outside of Durantium Drivers or ships that come with all 3 weapon types by default.
Well Paul is wrong about one thing, they certainly aren't low Mass, or I'd agree with him. They're low cost, as in they take less Manufacturing to build, but they have almost double the Mass requirements of Lasers. They're actually the highest mass weapons in the game by far, even moreso than Missiles, so you can't pile them on, in fact you can barely fit one onto a Tiny ship. I would love to pile them on to make up for their lack of damage per shot. If you could actually do that, all my complaints would go away.
These stats reflect my race and tech preferences but it does give you a good side by side of each of the low level weapons.
|
Laser |
Particle Beam | Rail Gun | |
| Attack | 2 | 3 | 1 |
| Range | 800 | 800 | 600 |
| Cool Down | 5 | 5 | 4 |
| Accuracy | 125% | 125% | 105% |
| Mass | 10.8 | 12.6 | 21.6 |
| Cost | 19.8 | 28.8 | 6.3 |
| Maintenance | .2 | .2 | .4 |
That's a great post on Kinetics, right there Vid.
I hope Paul reads it, It more or less shoots holes in what he was saying. At the end of bragging about them he might have said that buffing them a little was not out of the question, but I am not 100% sure he said it. It might be wishful thinking on my part.
Edit: I am sure I misquoted Paul on the mass of K weapons. What he said was that you can reduce the mass with shrinking tech. Later he said they might reduce the mass a little bit.
Considering how massive they are raise the damage to 2 and lower the cool down to 2.
Oh hell no, that would be extremely overpowered. Keep in mind that Rapid Reload doubles its Rate of Fire, so you'd get 8 shots for every missile -- lower damage per shot, but nearly twice as much DPS even with their low accuracy factored in! Plus, that also breaks Armor extremely fast, so you wouldn't even need Armor Piercing.
Also, my custom race has +30% accuracy, so if I trade an AI for Targeting, I can use rapid reload kinetics with 100% accuracy.
Imagine this, though: before the nerf, Railguns had a RoF of 3 and a damage of 4. Holy crap, right? They needed a nerf, but the nerf was too much, and probably based on incorrect assumptions (i.e. that they are low mass instead of high mass).
I wonder how can a pack of High Explosive Missles be lighter than a mag of Dense Core Light Cover Bullets (for bullets the important part is the speed you shoot it, not the mass as for the missle explosives). I really think they are swaped, and that unswaping them would make kinectics way more attractive while not actually making missles unatractive, considering their massive firepower (you only need to hit once, and the damage will cover for it's low RoF and weight)
It's been "fixed" since this post was made. Standard Kinetics now have a flat mass cost of 18 across all tiers, which is equal to missiles at the outset, and equal to lasers at the finish. I still think the first two tiers need a slight buff (reduce their mass slightly more), but at least now the later tiers are balanced.
It depends a lot on what you consider the mass requirement of the weapons to represent. Just the gun or (for self-propelled missiles) the launch unit? The guns on the Iowa-class battleships are 66'8" (20.32m) long for a shell ~2'6" (76.2cm) long, whereas missile racks tend to be only about as long as the missiles are (so ~18'3" (5.56m) for a Tomahawk or ~15' (4.6m) for a Harpoon). If it's just the mass of the gun or launch system, then missiles probably take the 'lower mass' prize easily, even before you get into the turret machinery which is required to aim guns but is less necessary for weapons which can change their course significantly from the original launch direction (although aiming the missile racks probably wouldn't hurt, especially if you're making use of assisted-launch to make the self-propelled missiles reach higher speeds sooner). If you're looking at the ammunition mass, we really don't have enough information to make a good estimate of the relative size of the two systems; judging by the battle viewer, the missiles fired by the guns are roughly the same size as the self-propelled missiles, but I'm not sure that the apparent scale in the battle viewer is necessarily a good indicator of actual sizes. Plus, if you're going to assume that weapon mass requirements are in some way reflective of ammunition capacity, you start needing to make assumptions about ammunition storage requirements; the shells might perhaps be less massive than the missiles, but it won't matter if you have to store a lot more shells than missiles.
Furthermore, it's not necessarily the case that the self-propelled missiles will mass more than the shells; going back to the Iowa-class battleships, the 16" guns fired shells which massed 1900-2700lbm (860-1220kg), whereas a Harpoon missile masses 1523lbm (691kg) and a Tomahawk 2900lbm (1300kg), at least according to Wikipedia's pages on the matter (I'm not sure that the missile figures include the warhead; if they don't, then it's 2011lbm (912kg) for the Harpoon and 3900lbm (1750kg) for the Tomahawk). The Harpoons and Tomahawks take up more space, it's true, but as far as mass goes? It would appear that 1 16" shell masses roughly as much as 1 Harpoon or Tomahawk, suggesting that the mass savings for switching from self-propelled missiles to 16" shells would be at best negligible, and most likely would result in an increase in total mass spent on ammunition once you account for the increased ammunition requirements due to reduced expected hit rates.
Oh hell no, that would be extremely overpowered. Keep in mind that Rapid Reload doubles its Rate of Fire, so you'd get 8 shots for every missile -- lower damage per shot, but nearly twice as much DPS even with their low accuracy factored in! Plus, that also breaks Armor extremely fast, because each point of Defense blocks one shot, so you wouldn't even need Armor Piercing.
Also, my custom race has +30% accuracy, so if I trade an AI for Targeting, I can use rapid reload kinetics with 100% accuracy.
Imagine this, though: before the nerf, Railguns had a RoF of 3 and a damage of 4. Holy crap, right? They needed a nerf, but the nerf was too much, and probably based on incorrect assumptions (i.e. that they are low mass instead of high mass).
Could you go into more detail here please? How exactly does armor work, and what is the salvage ratio I saw in the xml file? If a target has say 10 kinetic armor and I hit it for 1 damage does it go down by 1? Do I need to do 11+ damage to 'break' the armor? There is no information in the tooltips or tutorial about how these numbers actually work.
For each gun you have, you roll a die with as many sides as that gun has damage. For defense, you roll a die with as many sides as your current single strongest defense mod. The attacker will always do at least 1 damage to the defenses, but if the attacker rolls a higher number than the defender, they deal as much damage as the difference between the attack and defense.
So, not only does a faster RoF pelt the defenses with lots of guaranteed 1s, it offers more chances for the attacker to get a good roll on the defense.
If the attacker is using an "Armor Piercing" mod, the game treats the rolls as if the attacker always rolls the maximum, and the defender always rolls a 0.
For each gun you have, you roll a die with as many sides as that gun has damage. For defense, you roll a die with as many sides as your current single strongest defense mod. The attacker will always do at least 1 damage to the defenses, but if the attacker rolls a higher number than the defender, they deal as much damage as the difference between the attack and defense.
So, not only does a faster RoF pelt the defenses with lots of guaranteed 1s, it offers more chances for the attacker to get a good roll on the defense.
If the attacker is using an "Armor Piercing" mod, the game treats the rolls as if the attacker always rolls the maximum, and the defender always rolls a 0.
So let me make sure I get this straight, lets assume very early game ships, 1 kinetic weapon and 1 set of kinetic defense. (I don't actually remember how much a unit of kinetic defense provides, so we'll assume 5).
If two of these ships fight each other, the offensive roll can only be 1, and will always be 1, because the roll is 1-1. The defense roll is 1-5. Since the defense roll can never be lower than 1 either, every successful attack (as in a non-miss) should reduce armor by 1. After the armor hits 0, it will just always do 1 damage. Is this correct so far?
How do multiple weapons work, does the sum of their values get 'rolled', or do they roll independently? What about fleets? Sums, or independent? And you said "Current single strongest defense mod", are you saying that shields can reduce damage taken from kinetics? or chaff? Why would that be the case?
Also, how do you know this information, where is it available for reading?
Weapons all roll independently. Fleets are just a collection of ships, so the weapons are also rolled independently. No, shields and chaff do not reduce damage taken from kinetics, they do absolutely nothing to kinetics. I mean that if you have two armor mods, one that has 8 Defense, and one that has 32 defense, the one with 32 defense is the one that rolls first every time, until it drops below 8, then the other mod rolls.
Got this because I've seen the info scattered about from the devs and others, and put two and two together.
So two armor mods that add up to 10 wouldn't be as good as a single mod that provides 10 damage, simply because you can't roll as high on the two smaller rolls?
Answer this one for me please
On ship attacks with 4 weapons attack value 8 for a total attack rating of 32
The ship defending has 3 armor each with a defense of 5 for a total defense rating of 15
Do the extra armor points do any good for the ship defense?
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