The recent update to plasmas increased electricity per shot from 1000 to 2500. This is a welcome balance. But this is a fairly significant nerf to plasmas. I propose an increase in ammo count that will balance out the current weapon tree. The key metric I am going by is the projectile energy formula supplied by the wiki as well as the values. This projectile energy divided by electricity per round gives a nice decrease in efficiency as you move to more powerful weapons. But where it doesn't make sense is in total projectile energy per magazine. The autocannon, laser, and rail cannon all have a total projectile energy/mag between 1500-2000. But the plasma is significantly lower at less than half that of the rail cannon at 750. This puts it at a significant disadvantage and makes it only good for short engagements as you will soon run out of ammo in long engagements. Increasing plasma ammo to 200 will bring it to a minimum of 1500, but I think the sweet spot is at 250 ammo, which is a round number and puts it right in the middle of the other weapons. Let me know your thoughts on this.
Increase plasma ammo to 200-250.
- Thread starter Naija
- Start date
- Tags plasma ship design weapons
Another option would be to increase plasma ammo to 200 and decrease railgun ammo to 50. In my opinion this would give the best overall balance where you are trading off energy efficiency and total possible damage(by mag size) for greater damage per round if it hits. Thus laser and autocannon are fairly even. But plasma starts that trade off of more damage for more electricity but less ammo. And that trend continues even further with the railgun.
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As Ville mentioned in DIscord, the values on wiki are outdated (i.e. railgun is ~65/1400, not 31/1000). So I'd wait with those calculations until he updates them.
May be worth reminding him tomorrow in his work-hours wit a ping.
Anther thing is often ignored (due to current fighter meta) that reloading guns is a thing. And plasma, as anti-slow ship weapon, may be dedicated for multi-crew ships that can reload in fight.
Which doesn't work right now, because grabbing stuff at full speed will pull them out of your hand. And turrets are too slow, laggy and brittle to give those other crew-members anything to do in-between reloading.
Either way, reducing RC ammo seems like a good idea. That thing never runs out.
Also in the topic of ammo, would be nice to have 144x144x144 ammo box, that has 2 slots for ship weapon mags and can reload them. I don't like wasting 499 bullets just to reload that single one.
It need auto-snapping, just like ammo bodies.
Aaaaand give as "hand" ship tool that can grab and snap objects. That's all we need to make our own autoloaders.
May be worth reminding him tomorrow in his work-hours wit a ping.
Anther thing is often ignored (due to current fighter meta) that reloading guns is a thing. And plasma, as anti-slow ship weapon, may be dedicated for multi-crew ships that can reload in fight.
Which doesn't work right now, because grabbing stuff at full speed will pull them out of your hand. And turrets are too slow, laggy and brittle to give those other crew-members anything to do in-between reloading.
Either way, reducing RC ammo seems like a good idea. That thing never runs out.
Also in the topic of ammo, would be nice to have 144x144x144 ammo box, that has 2 slots for ship weapon mags and can reload them. I don't like wasting 499 bullets just to reload that single one.
It need auto-snapping, just like ammo bodies.
Aaaaand give as "hand" ship tool that can grab and snap objects. That's all we need to make our own autoloaders.
yeah ill definitely ping ville about updating those values on the wiki. Ive had these calculations for a while. So just plugging in new values will immediately update everything.
I can see plasmas as needing to be reloaded more often, but that logic just doesn't make sense with how much ammo the railgun has.
An ammo box that makes it easier to refill ammo without wasting ammo thats left in a mag would be nice. As well as performance improvements to make reloading and repairing on the go more viable. On another note as far as ammo goes, they need to fix the laser mag bug where it spawns in empty.
I can see plasmas as needing to be reloaded more often, but that logic just doesn't make sense with how much ammo the railgun has.
An ammo box that makes it easier to refill ammo without wasting ammo thats left in a mag would be nice. As well as performance improvements to make reloading and repairing on the go more viable. On another note as far as ammo goes, they need to fix the laser mag bug where it spawns in empty.
ship durability needs to go up before support ships become viable. Decreasing ammo count will not create a need for support ships because you can just bolt extra magazines inside your ship. And ships are so fragile at the moment that your ship is more likely to be destroyed before you run out of ammo in guns or extra mags stored inside your ship.