Posted by: nuclearslurpee
« on: March 02, 2024, 01:23:07 PM »Is there any reason that (assuming the tech prices indicate a "tier" of technology) particle beams and carronades give less ground unit damage than the rest? Even meson focal size has a better tech cost return on ground damage than carronades, which seems absurd.
All of plasma, laser, railgun, meson*, and particle beam tech lines give the same benefit to ground units at each level of the relevant caliber tech. This does mean that plasma and particle beams are less effective per caliber tech for improving ground units (plasma used to be far cheaper but was revamped in the most recent versions), but this is not something intrinsic to those weapon types and is simply a consequence of how the ground unit attack is tied to beam weapon tech levels (and tech levels, in turn, are not explicitly related to the tech costs).
*Is this new in 2.5? I don't recall mesons giving any ground unit benefits in earlier C# versions...
Note that plasma is still cost-effective, since the caliber tech costs 2x as much as the laser or meson caliber tech but there is no companion focusing tech for plasma, so the net cost per "tier" of weapon is the same. This does leave particle beams in a somewhat awkward spot - which IMO is yet another argument in favor of changing ground units to have the attack (and armor?) techs separated from the beam weapon types - this is also a huge problem for missile-centric races as the missile warhead tech gives no benefit for ground units (very silly given how missile-centric modern ground warfare is!).