Weapons don't hit much

[bitsbytes]

Hi,

its sometimes really ridiculous watching how bad weapons hit.

On the Nemesis I only trust Pulse and Railgun.
Also turrets could hit better.

I think in the Beta 3 the turrets with pulse or railgun became a little better.

But I have still the impression when fighting i.e. multiple targets, than the turrets should be able to perform better
and also hit other targets when passing by, when the main target is out of range.

[taztaz502]

Guns like plasma etc are really only any good for stations or capital ships or getting up close and personal with frigates, but i prefer to just use bolt guns for fighters they tend to be the most accurate and can sustain damage enough to hit the hull before shields regenerate.

For turrets i tend to use bolt and missiles because of the longer range, i don't feel beam weapons do enough damage or are accurate enough but i do equip them on my traders as i feel they perform better OOS vs smaller ships, for large turrets i use plasma to attack capital ships and stations,

Recently been playing with flak turrets and they are great sadly nothing ever remains close enough to take damage before it's shields regen 1km range? seriously...

This is the main reason capital ships are so underwhelming they are so slow and have such poor range

Also probably worth mentioning i've not really played around with the other weapons like shard,ion ,pulse etc so don't know how well they actually perform.

[Imperial Good]

and Railgun

This is not a released weapon. Like all WIP weapons in the 3.00 beta, they are heavily over tuned.

but i prefer to just use bolt guns for fighters they tend to be the most accurate and can sustain damage enough to hit the hull before shields regenerate.

Actually Pulse Laser does all that better than bolt. Longer range, better heat management, faster rotation and a lot faster projectile speed. Sure they only deal 2/3 of the damage, but a Nemesis has enough of that anyway.

For turrets i tend to use bolt and missiles because of the longer range

Pulse turrets have longer range than bolt and are a ton more accurate.

Recently been playing with flak turrets and they are great sadly nothing ever remains close enough to take damage before it's shields regen 1km range? seriously...

Clearly intended for use on gunships and other M ships which can close distance on S ships before they regen. For L and XL ships Pulse still performs the best of the ammo-less turret solutions as it has good range and accuracy.

This is the main reason capital ships are so underwhelming they are so slow and have such poor range

Except the main batteries which are stupidly long ranged. With exceptional mods one can get them to nearly 11km range, at which they can kill engines very efficiently.

Also probably worth mentioning i've not really played around with the other weapons like shard,ion ,pulse etc so don't know how well they actually perform.

Shard is too low range and damage. In practice they have worse damage than pulse laser while having a fraction of the range and worse heat management.

Ion is pretty good. Fantastic for getting enemy ships to bail due to its low hull damage. Works pretty well with chain against M targets which need that extra umpf to kill efficiently..

[taztaz502]

Pulse turrets are only better range than bolt on large turrets, which i reserve for plasma which have even more range, going to try swapping out the flak/bolt for pulse tomorrow on my behemoth flak is pretty but you have to be right up a ships ass to use it lol.

And yeah capital ship main weapons are long range i just wish turrets were 2x the range they are now and they would be great.

[Imperial Good]

Pulse turrets are only better range than bolt on large turrets

There are no large Bolt turrets. There is data for them, but they are not implemented.

M Pulse Laser Turret
bullet speed="3525" lifetime="0.8"
This works out at a range of 2,820m

M Chain Bolt Turret
bullet speed="2040" lifetime="1.3"
This works out at a range of 2,652m

Hence M Pulse Laser Turrets are longer range than M Chain Bolt Turrets. The exception being if the ship is flying with the speed of at least 336m/s in which case chain bolt turrets will start to have longer range due to inheriting the ship flight speed.

[Waltz99]

I mostly prefere pulse weapons.
They hit faster and can shoot a long time before needing to cooldown.
They seem to do the job pretty well for me.

I do hate the automatic targeting for the normal weapons though because the targeting seems to have a life on its own. Very hard if you want to hit a certain ship module from a blindspot.

The difference I noticed is with Seta.
When you see a fight and turn Seta on you can watch a very long time without a single kill.
Turn seta off and suddenly all weapons seem to hit its target.

[GCU Grey Area]

Shard is too low range and damage. In practice they have worse damage than pulse laser while having a fraction of the range and worse heat management.

Rather like Shard myself, at least in it's M2 fixed mount variant (not used the others nearly as much). Damage is good as long as Shard is fired at an appropriate range, which is (more often than not) rather shorter than the 3km range listed in the encyclopedia & varies depending on target size. At an appropriate range however ALL shots can hit a single target & then it's pretty bloody devastating - does not take too many to rip apart S & M size targets, or subsystems on capital ships. Also has a very high projectile speed. Agree on heat management though. Do need to hold fire until you can be sure most/all shots will hit the target - blazing away a soon as a target enters maximum range achieves very little.

[Imperial Good]

The difference I noticed is with Seta.
When you see a fight and turn Seta on you can watch a very long time without a single kill.
Turn seta off and suddenly all weapons seem to hit its target.

Possibly the result of the lower update frequency due to the simulation having to be run faster. This is a fairly common problem with video games.

For example in Elder Scrolls Oblivion if one purposely caused a CPU bottleneck one could start to clip through walls and doors that were closed due to how far the player character moved between updates.

at least in it's M2 fixed mount variant (not used the others nearly as much)

M2 fixed mount variant? I am not sure what you mean by this.

Damage is good as long as Shard is fired at an appropriate range, which is (more often than not) rather shorter than the 3km range listed in the encyclopedia & varies depending on target size. At an appropriate range however ALL shots can hit a single target & then it's pretty bloody devastating - does not take too many to rip apart S & M size targets, or subsystems on capital ships.

The issue with this is that the damage is at best about as devastating as chain bolt. It does have better accuracy at the operational range, but one could just use Pulse Laser and blow up the S or M target from 6km away at around 2/3 of the speed. 2/3 of the speed on the Nemesis is still very fast. For civilian weapons with no licence requirements those Pulse Lasers are a tad too effective.

Let us not forget that the ricochet from Shard is prone to hurting nearby stations or allied ships. This was a large problem with the weapon concept in XR as well.

[skyneedler9]

I'd say weapons could use a revision. (I know this will be huge, and I'm not the greatest wordsmith.)

-Large turrets need more range to compensate with the main cannon batteries, why put large guns on a destroyer if they can't... Well be used for fighting other ships at the range of the fixed batteries? It does make the cap ships underwhelming when LARGE turrets don't act big and bad as they should. Oh boy though xenon L turrets actually act like Large turrets should... take a lesson from the xenon Turrets to help make Cap ships better than they are right now.

-Pulse lasers have the best, balanced DPS in terms of cooling the weapon after heating to a point and Time it takes to kill the target. Though you will be sitting for a long time shooting a xenon K, unless you put an Ion blaster or two.

-Ion Blasters-I think is the second-best, it can be used in conjunction with other weapons quite well, does its job, has, in my opinion, a balance of heating issues and Shield ripping DPS.

-Bolt- CAN outperform pulse lasers, no denying... I just really, really, REALLY hate the wait time to cool weapons, and the fact it's a frikkin burst fire weapon. You'd think we would've got something like the xenon's actual full-auto pulse turrets on their shit, but nope... no full auto, just frikkin burst fire. If I recall its bullet speed is also lesser than pulse laser, yeah pulse lasers have more hit success, but bolts still hit enough and damage enough to be better. \o/ I would trade some damage rate, with increased bullet speed and full auto, not that fire burst, pause, fire burst again, pause... UGGHHK you give a damn chain gun and don't give the person the satisfaction of being that full-auto machine gun mowing down a target.

-Shard Battery-Shotgun in space, not much to say. Get up on their ass and blastem, it does its job. I can't complain about this cuz it's what it is. Some people like to go up in your ship's face and pepper your cockpit nice, others prefer something else xD.

-Beam- I hate beams, I absolutely hate them with a passion, sometimes they seem to be good, other times I watch a station fire like 20 large beams and a paranid odysseus glitches at 99% shield and never goes down, but it damages the station turrets. The wait time for a charge, the heating and cooling issues, you hitting the fire button and you not holding it can cancel a beam but still suffer heat and charge waiting penalty. In the hands of an NPC it's great, it seems sometimes they got longer charge more damage success and you know NPCs don't have a charge and heat wait time issue, they just have this calculated firing interval that gives them so much more usage of their weapons.

-Tacking and Torpedoes-I avoid at all cost, pointless in my opinion unless it's used in cap ship on cap ship fights. I get the limited space for ammo, but then the auxiliary ship unless it has it's own tracking turrets can't store but 40 ammo which is ungodly stupid, it's an auxiliary SHIP... it should have massive missile-carrying capacity regardless! If you want to unleash some frustration on the paranid, 6 torpedo launchers on a pulsar... you just do some boost bomb runs, nothing like boosting a straight line at an odysseus at 1,800 m/s and launching them high-speed into their hull!... two full salvos and like one or two spares to finish it off, sometimes you get lucky and it's just two runs of 6 torpedoes, 12 and BAM.

-Plasma-Hate the heat buildup, hate the limit of like 4 or 5 salvos before waiting on cooling. Absolutely hate the atrocious bullet speed. You'd think plasma would fire quicker, this is no cannon... it's like a frikkin Plasma Catapult, cuz that's what you're damn well doing, just catapulting it gently into space. Great for OOS combat from what I hear, but it's garbage.

(YEAH I know, AI with their cheating frikkin Fire intervals and no heat issues, can just mass fire plasma, and anything like they're just some ungodly... Don't remind me, it's frustrating to watch, but that's the compensation I guess is what they need for a human player who can fly circles and strategize how to take them down without needing a crutch \o/)

(AS FOR THE WIP weapons... I know it's WIP, but just to add them for the sake of adding them.)

-Mass Driver-Garbage in player's hands unless it's the M-Class variant, it has a better cooling rate, Small fighters it's garbage, don't try. In the hands of an NPC you will never feel safe in hostile paranid space, at any moment something kilometers out of your sight will just snipe you unfairly and with no mercy. I've even been killed instantly before I loaded completely through a gate... I recommend this seriously get rectified,
1-80 kilometers... really? not 20, or 15... everything had been at the max even with cap ships, 8-11 km engagement and you think 80 kilometer is just "YEAH!" XD.. what the hell I know it's WIP but WOW! just wow...
2-100,000 m/s ...... also REALLY? A pulse laser, which is supposed to be a photon-based weapon it's a LASER... but that doesn't go beyond 3,000 m/s but a physical projectile fired from an electromagnetic rail system can go faster and further than a laser XD. Nevermind the science that's just... just the fact it's called a Pulse... 'LASER' -facepalm- but that's just me being a Lil finicky about specs. the truth is basically gameplay-wise it is just OUT of the ballpark with the general mechanics of everything else.

-flak Cannon- could do with some more range. I have no qualms with it other than just the range could do better. It seems the flak cannon turrets definitely had more investment in balancing XD. I personally would prefer 2km-2.5 km range, and instead of a burst of like 7 rounds and a wait time, have it more like the shard battery's firing intervals, but as far as it stands I'd still take it the way it is. Just a little reluctantly cuz it could definitely use some more distance.

-Blast Mortar- Melts the shit out of a lot of things, especially the surface elements... MY GAWD this thing just Tears the surface on cap ships like you just unleashed wolverine on their ass XD. I kinda like to think it's the Argon's equivalent answer from using the plasma cannon, instead of more precise damage based artillery, it's a higher DPS surface tearing artillery system. Love the sound, love it all around. Could use a tweak to not make it absolutely Cataclysmic, but if it was made to give small ships a surface element destroying advantage, YOU hit the hammer on the nail there. Also, the bullet speed feels like such satisfaction, but aside from the 100,000 m/s railgun, it's 10,000 m/s so yeah. I guess it could definitely use some dial back.

****Muon Charger-YEAhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh..... I hate charge weapons, beam weapons are annoying enough for me, I hate these. but ... oh my... EFFING GOD this thing is wayyyy out of hand! I now see what people were saying when they used the term "MELT..." two small one on a small ship yeah, ehh... whatever... STICK 5 of these monsters on a nemesis, just rapid tap your fire button don't even charge it, it will burn a xenon K in less than a minute... it "MELTS!" anything unfortunate enough to be in your sights. I can't even tell you how to change it, or what I completely think about it, cuz it's on the level of an ADMIN GUN, it doesn't have at least some flaw or grounded stats. I can tell you if I fired it naturally and avoided the rapid tap cheat, it performs I guess as it should. If you use it as intended and "CHARGE." the gun, it feels like it should work as intended, but when you hold the charge it will continue to build heat, so I don't know the true stats of a full charge shot, or how this thing functions cuz it's too broken.


(If anybody has any objections or their own idea of revisions... by all means I welcome a weapons debate.) XD

[GCU Grey Area]

M2 fixed mount variant? I am not sure what you mean by this.

Sorry for confusion. M2 is abbreviation for M class gun mk 2, fixed mount = not a turret

The issue with this is that the damage is at best about as devastating as chain bolt. It does have better accuracy at the operational range, but one could just use Pulse Laser and blow up the S or M target from 6km away at around 2/3 of the speed. 2/3 of the speed on the Nemesis is still very fast. For civilian weapons with no licence requirements those Pulse Lasers are a tad too effective.

Yeah, wasn't claiming Shard was an unbalanced weapon far superior to anything else, just that it was a good gun if used right. In particular have a strong preference to it over Bolt due to accuracy (i.e. projectile speed). Also doesn't have that pause every few seconds while Bolt loads fresh ammo. As for Pulse - certainly not a terrible weapon, just damage is a little on the low side & for my purposes not worth the trade off just to get extra range.

Let us not forget that the ricochet from Shard is prone to hurting nearby stations or allied ships. This was a large problem with the weapon concept in XR as well.

Large problem? Not really. The ricochet shots just don't go that far. Handy for inflicting a bit of extra damage when, for example, shooting subsystems on a capital, but would have to be really unlucky to hit a passing friendly ship (don't recall it ever happening to me). Even stations aren't too much of a problem if you simply pick your shots carefully with awareness of what's around your ship (though that applies to pretty much any gun in the game when fighting in close proximity to a station) - find turrets, of any sort, are much more of an issue in this regard & frequently have to disarm them when near stations.

[taztaz502]

I tried out pulse yeah they do seem a lot similar to bolt guns i've also just tested out the muon charger from teladi and man those things are OP. Equipped it on a peregrine with flak turrets and it's an absolute beast. i didn't expect it to be accurate against fighters but man was i wrong this thing is ultra accurate and ultra long range so you can basically almost destroy any target before you get close to it and then if you get close the flaks just finish it off.

Also upgraded the mass and engines of the peregrine with mods so it almost does 500 speed.

[taztaz502]

****Muon Charger-YEAhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh..... I hate charge weapons, beam weapons are annoying enough for me, I hate these. but ... oh my... EFFING GOD this thing is wayyyy out of hand! I now see what people were saying when they used the term "MELT..." two small one on a small ship yeah, ehh... whatever... STICK 5 of these monsters on a nemesis, just rapid tap your fire button don't even charge it, it will burn a xenon K in less than a minute... it "MELTS!" anything unfortunate enough to be in your sights. I can't even tell you how to change it, or what I completely think about it, cuz it's on the level of an ADMIN GUN, it doesn't have at least some flaw or grounded stats. I can tell you if I fired it naturally and avoided the rapid tap cheat, it performs I guess as it should. If you use it as intended and "CHARGE." the gun, it feels like it should work as intended, but when you hold the charge it will continue to build heat, so I don't know the true stats of a full charge shot, or how this thing functions cuz it's too broken.


(If anybody has any objections or their own idea of revisions... by all means I welcome a weapons debate.) XD

Just started testing that and my god i didnt even realise these were in game they are super overpowered, I think they should be reserved for large turrets on capital ships, throw out more damage more have much longer cooldown give cap ships some nice long range railguns.

ATM i love them though, i think they should add more useful weapons with some flavour, and change bolt guns to do minor hull damage but do major crew damage have pulse for 50/50 hull/shield just to differentiate between the two be nice to make modules and ship performance rely more on the whole crew too rather than just the pilot so when they get low on crew they perform a lot worse.

I do wish egosoft would make a lot more fuss over weapons though in their live stream they were just like "yeah we added a few weapons to the beta" then moved on and didn't explain what they added despite this being one of the best things in 3.0.

[Imperial Good]

i've also just tested out the muon charger from teladi and man those things are OP. Equipped it on a peregrine with flak turrets and it's an absolute beast. i didn't expect it to be accurate against fighters but man was i wrong this thing is ultra accurate and ultra long range so you can basically almost destroy any target before you get close to it and then if you get close the flaks just finish it off.

The gun is a WIP. The Argon S cannon is equally OP since it is effectively flak in gun form.

Also upgraded the mass and engines of the peregrine with mods so it almost does 500 speed.

Still has nothing on the Nemesis. 5 guns vs 2 and the Nemesis is faster. 2 fewer turrets for 3 more guns is well worth the trade.

Just started testing that and my god i didnt even realise these were in game they are super overpowered, I think they should be reserved for large turrets on capital ships, throw out more damage more have much longer cooldown give cap ships some nice long range railguns.

They are not officially in X4. They are WIP guns that are available in the beta. They are clearly not balanced at the moment and still very much WIP since they do not even have blueprints for the player to buy and build them.

The Flak Turrets is the closest to a finished weapon of all of them. Hence why flak turrets are not overpowered and a blueprint is available for them.

[taztaz502]

Nemesis is too OP though even with bolt guns and i don't really like the look of paranid ships.

As far as weapons go i just hope they balance them in a good way, rather than make them like every other weapon in game, weapons need more variation.

But above all i think they really need to increase the range of capital ship turrets, At the minute this is why they are so weak they can literally be outranged by fighters which makes no sense whatsoever they have a lot of balancing to do when it comes to combat and a lot of work with combat ai i just hope these are priorities.

Then once they have those sorted they can rename destroyers to frigates and give us some real destroyers.

[NightmareNight91]

I do sincerely hope that rebalances to weapon ranges and damage on ''capital'' ships will be done, they are so sad to watch and fight against.

[chew-ie]

I do sincerely hope that rebalances to weapon ranges and damage on ''capital'' ships will be done, they are so sad to watch and fight against.

At least in 3.0 beta capital ship combat looks awesome. Fighters, corvettes and gunships have no chance against good turret weapon choices (equipping every slot with shotgun turrets doesn't help to win a fight).

Weapon range can always be modded by the player - even in M turrets now.

What needs a serious rebalance are missiles - those shred every ship within seconds - if they hit. Missiles even manage to destroy whole turret groups with one hit and thus strip a L or XL ship of all it's advantages. The damage dealt is extrem - even a behemoth with 3 L shields has it's defense cut in half after ONE missile hit. (which is totally ridiculous)

[taztaz502]

I do sincerely hope that rebalances to weapon ranges and damage on ''capital'' ships will be done, they are so sad to watch and fight against.

At least in 3.0 beta capital ship combat looks awesome. Fighters, corvettes and gunships have no chance against good turret weapon choices (equipping every slot with shotgun turrets doesn't help to win a fight).

Weapon range can always be modded by the player - even in M turrets now.

What needs a serious rebalance are missiles - those shred every ship within seconds - if they hit. Missiles even manage to destroy whole turret groups with one hit and thus strip a L or XL ship of all it's advantages. The damage dealt is extrem - even a behemoth with 3 L shields has it's defense cut in half after ONE missile hit. (which is totally ridiculous)

I was soaking up missiles in my behemoth yesterday... i find missiles so bad i don't even bother to use them.

Only really found them useful for taking out capital ship components/turrets.

I think destroyers need their range hugely buffed to be honest, make their combat effectiveness for main and large turrets about 7-10km, medium turrets effectiveness at about 4-5km and anything within those ranges of capital ships should be dealt with by missiles and fighter escorts.

At the moment fighters out range capital ships, you can just snipe their engines with a behemoth and have 4-5 fighters just nibble away at any capital ship even xenon i's your fighters will get hit every once in awhile but rarely do hull damage and very rarely lose a ship never lose a ship if you spend the 5 minutes to kill the turrets.

Capital ships should be scary beasts that you don't want to fight without a real fleet, i also hate the way capitals don't dock their escorts. When ever you approach an enemy capital ship it should start spitting out it's fighters instead of its fighters flying all over the sector getting killed 1 by 1 by traders.

[chew-ie]

I was soaking up missiles in my behemoth yesterday... i find missiles so bad i don't even bother to use them.

Just mentioning it again my findings are from the 3.0 beta / for the upcoming 3.0. Missile turrets are the only ones which can scratch my Behemoth shields. Even the M versions are my priority one target. All other weapons fire a Behemoth can shrug of - especially with the new shield recharge rates. But missiles do way too much damage. If I ignore e.g. 4 M missile turrets for just 2-3 salvos each, my shields are just gone. Bad sideeffect - your turret groups start dying and you are dead in the water.

And there is this one missile which cuts a behemoth shield in half. Even if these were torpedos (couldn't tell as we can't target them anymore) - their damage is just way to high.

At least I had to use counter measures for the very first time (and boy is the default hotkey clunky...). Hopefully there will be a software for auto counter measures

[taztaz502]

I was soaking up missiles in my behemoth yesterday... i find missiles so bad i don't even bother to use them.

Just mentioning it again my findings are from the 3.0 beta / for the upcoming 3.0. Missile turrets are the only ones which can scratch my Behemoth shields. Even the M versions are my priority one target. All other weapons fire a Behemoth can shrug of - especially with the new shield recharge rates. But missiles do way too much damage. If I ignore e.g. 4 M missile turrets for just 2-3 salvos each, my shields are just gone. Bad sideeffect - your turret groups start dying and you are dead in the water.

And there is this one missile which cuts a behemoth shield in half. Even if these were torpedos (couldn't tell as we can't target them anymore) - their damage is just way to high.

At least I had to use counter measures for the very first time (and boy is the default hotkey clunky...). Hopefully there will be a software for auto counter measures

You must be sitting right in their sweetspot, i'm playing 3.0 beta atm and the missiles seem really poor range at which they shoot although they're quite good vs fighters and smaller ships, and pulse turrets suck vs missiles i think i might try bolt or maybe flak. but if you put all your medium turrets on missile defence they do get quite a few and if you use chaff most missiles will miss anyway.

and in a behemoth vs capital ships you should be targeting main systems first e.g. engines, shields, and turrets the main battery is quite accurate and long range.