Small/Medium ships weapons:
Pulse Laser - very good bullet speed making it very nice agains S-ships, but nothing else, additionally it's more expensive than normal Pulse.
Proton Barrage - good general purpose weapon, which good accuracy and effective against both S and M target, in numbers, also against larger ships. More expensive as well, but worth the price.
Meson Stream - first of all weapon is extremely expensive. While it provide wonderful DPS (like alpha strike Xenon P, while flying in Gladius), the weapon has very narrow gimbal which makes it extremely hard to hit anything, plus if you want to put them in NPC S/M ships you would need have them with 4/5 star pilots...otherwise you will mostly see them firing in the void, rather than into the target. The weapon would be a real fun...if would be able to reliably hit anything at all.
Give that Terran S/M ships have very limited weapon mounts (max 4), there is rarely any point in mounting anything else than Proton Barrage (you waste DPS mounting Pulse, and you waste DPS mounting Meson that rarely hit anything).
Missile launchers:
Terrans don't have access to Torpedo launchers (you can only buy blueprint and produce them from commonwealth). Therefore you're forced to use weaker missiles, or Meson Stream and both options are bad and micromanagement.
Overall Terran S/M ships are seems to be not made with missile compactibility in mind at all.
Medium Turrets:
Similary to S/M weapons, there is only a handfull of ships, that have enough medium turret mounts, to justify putting anything else than medium Bolt turrets - these are Jian, Osaka, Tokyo and Honshu.
Even then the all Medium Bolt turrets option seems to be the best one to choose. Terrans don't have medium Plasma turret analog.
Large Turrets:
Relatively best Terran category, providing most unique options and retaining most of other races analogues, with single exception - there is no analog to Large Plasma turret.
Deployables:
Terrans have absolutely nothing new in this regards
. Yaki gets the cluster mine, yet Terrans get nothing?Thus here are my suggestions, how to improve the situation:
1) Fix the Meson Stream - while overall ballance is OK, it's crucial that gimbal targetting angle must be wider, it's really unforgiving for player and near impossible for AI (BTW, same apply to Mass Driver and Boson Lance!).
2) Add unique Terran only S/M Torpedo Launcher that in incompactibile with vanilla Torpedo and can use two unique Light Terran torpedos:
- Light EMP torpedo - deals big dammage to shields, but nearly no dammage to hull.
- Light Singularity torpedo - deals big dammage to hull and surface elements, but struggle with shields.
3) Add Medium torpedo turret (compactibile with Terran ships only) that use above light torpedos to compensate the lack of Plasma analog.
- This would make Jian really fun and flexible ship with 6 customizable turrets and would provide additional options for Katana and Falx.
- Both Tokyo and Honshu could benefit even more as support torpedo ships as they have ample number of medium turret slots.
- the increase of firepower is compensated by the need to provide logistic, basically it would be like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLJTgvKFZoQ
4) Possibly fix Terran Medium Pulse turret, to have fast bullet. This would make it more competetive against Terran Medium Bolt.
5) Add Large torpedo turret (compactibile with Terran ships only), to compensate the lack of Plasma analog, this would be incombatibile with vanilla torpedo and use Terran specific Heavy torpedos:
- Heavy EMP torpedo - deals big dammage to shields, but nearly no dammage to hull.
- Heavy Singularity torpedo - deals big dammage to hull and surface elements, but struggle with shields.
- Heavy Black Hole torpedo - anti station torpedo with extended range, deals big dammage to both shields and hull, but is even slower than vanilla heavy torpedo - rather easy to intercept, so only use against target that has turrets destroyed or distracted.
This would allow Osaka, Syn and Asgard to get further into anti-ship specialisation, whiel sacrificing anti S/M capabilities. Would not be OP, cuz you need to provide logistic and heavy torpedos are expensive.
6) Add Large Flak turret (compactibile with Terran ships only):
Similar to unique Terran Large Bolt, this would increase options of Terran ships that are already Large Turret Heavy - like Asgards, Syn and Osaka.
Comparing to Argon Medium Flak, it would provide lower rate of fire, but longer range and damage per salvo.
This would especially boost Syn and Asgard that have many singular Large turrets.
7) Bring back Terran Orbital laser from X3 FL:
https://roguey.co.uk/x3fl/ships/ship-370/
Medium-size, anti-ship laser tower, that need to be deployed from M-size dock.
Above changes would make Terrans more flexible, without making them either carbon copy of rest of the races or straight OP.
