Can we reopen the Meson discussion?

[Desdinova (OP)]

I was thinking about Mesons and how they've been reduced in power, and I decided to run some numbers to investigate whether they're as limited now as they seem.

I'm not sure there's really any use for them. Unfortunately, I don't have my own copy of Matlab, just spreadsheets, so I haven't done any serious number crunching. But here's a table I prepared of the chance of a meson armor penetration by armor depth:



The yellow-shaded area would take tens of shots to achieve a single point of internal damage. The orange-shaded area, hundreds or thousands.

Some observations:

Mesons are now the most hyper-specialized weapon in the game. They are only useful against an enemy that has incredibly high shield technology but doesn't back it up with any armor.

The problem with mesons is that they are a specialist weapon that requires intense specialization to get to a degree of usefulness: at 0.07 retardation they might be okay, except that once you get into the million-RP tech range, you have to assume that NPRs will be technically advanced as well - and if they scale the armor value of their ships along with that tech (for example, 30 armor thickness at the third-to-last tech level is equivalent to 5 thickness duranium armor by weight), mesons will never be good, and those points are wasted.

Because the probability of penetration decreases exponentially with each armor layer, and the penetration chance per layer starts so small, mesons are basically completely ineffective as weapons until the tens-of-thousands of RP point range, but remain of minimal use against highly armored targets. A 16,000 RP meson would need to fire about 10 times to score a single penetrating hit against a cruiser with 10 layers of armour; against a battleship with 20, almost 100.

One thing I'm noticing from my calculations is that the number of shots required to penetrate the armor initially isn't that different between mesons and lasers - for example, a 25cm laser has about a 12% chance of failing to penetrate roughly cruiser-size (depth 10 width 30 armor) in 10 shots; the difference is, the armor the laser hits is gone while the meson slowly sandblasts off one point at a time, which means the laser's actual damage potential exceeds the meson to a fantastic degree.

Mesons used to be my favorite beam weapon, but I'm switching to microwaves, as those have the anti-shield attribute of mesons, but can actually effect armored targets, and synergize with other weapons.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Like Microwave weapons they are not really intended as a main weapon anymore but as a complement to other weapons.

Messon weapons can still be quite effective as it would force the enemy to perhaps make design concessions they otherwise would not have to do.

If you have other weapons that erode the armour your meson will then have an easier time to penetrate it so you will start to do internal damage on the enemy earlier in that case.

So you only want a few Meson and some other primary weapon to combine the effects.

The game are not really that one dimensional. In most of the multi-faction games that I have played the factions that have been the most competitive in combat usually had about three different weapons system that they tried to stay competitive at so they could be more dynamic in their capabilities.

I would say that Measons and Rail-guns combines very well for example...

[Zincat]

I will start by saying that I absolutely DESPISED mesons in vb aurora and considered them grossly overpowered. I hate anything that can turn combat into a roulette and destroy my dreadnought with a single shot because of bad luck. I always tend to go into very big ships, so they are NOT easily disposable.

I will agree though that in this current iteration there's not much reason to use mesons at all. In Vb aurora mesons also had the advantage of being usable in PDCs, something that other beam weapons could not do. But now that's gone as well.
Do keep in mind what Jorgen cab posted though, you can pair mesons with other weapons that destroy armor.

Frankly at this point, I would rework mesons in a different way. I do not want to see something like the old mesons come back, I hated it.
Maaaaybe something like the Star Wars ion weapons? As in, mesons would have a chance to temporarily disable the components they hit? Useful in a complement with boarding or similar.

Just an idea thrown there.

[DFNewb]

I found meson fighters in VB to be kinda OP against the AI.

Haven't tried them yet in C but I don't think they are OP anymore either just from reading.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I will start by saying that I absolutely DESPISED mesons in vb aurora and considered them grossly overpowered. I hate anything that can turn combat into a roulette and destroy my dreadnought with a single shot because of bad luck. I always tend to go into very big ships, so they are NOT easily disposable.

I will agree though that in this current iteration there's not much reason to use mesons at all. In Vb aurora mesons also had the advantage of being usable in PDCs, something that other beam weapons could not do. But now that's gone as well.
Do keep in mind what Jorgen cab posted though, you can pair mesons with other weapons that destroy armor.

Frankly at this point, I would rework mesons in a different way. I do not want to see something like the old mesons come back, I hated it.
Maaaaybe something like the Star Wars ion weapons? As in, mesons would have a chance to temporarily disable the components they hit? Useful in a complement with boarding or similar.

Just an idea thrown there.

Temporarily disabling components seem more like what Microwaves should do...

I could see Meason killing crew or something like that as an additional effect to destroying components perhaps.

[Pedroig]

A thought on Mesons. 

Like Microwaves they should be highly specialized, but currently they fill the same basic roll as microwaves, just in reverse.  So why not make Mesons "shield killers"?  Leave their current armour mechanic alone, but have them be treated as *X more effective against shields.  This keeps them specialized as very effective against shield weapons, while still requiring them to pair up with better ant-armour weapons as well.  Just off the top of my head, have X be something like 1/(Retardation Factor)^2 against shields.  Since they only deal 1 damage ever, that means they will range from doing at minimum tech 4 points of shield damage to at max tech 204 points of shield damage.  This does nothing to affect the armour interaction, so the OP chart would remain the same.

What this does is makes Mesons a very space efficient option to take out shielded targets by quickly overloading their targets shield capacity, thus clearing the way for the other weapon packages to take out the armour.

[Jorgen_CAB]

A thought on Mesons. 

Like Microwaves they should be highly specialized, but currently they fill the same basic roll as microwaves, just in reverse.  So why not make Mesons "shield killers"?  Leave their current armour mechanic alone, but have them be treated as *X more effective against shields.  This keeps them specialized as very effective against shield weapons, while still requiring them to pair up with better ant-armour weapons as well.  Just off the top of my head, have X be something like 1/(Retardation Factor)^2 against shields.  Since they only deal 1 damage ever, that means they will range from doing at minimum tech 4 points of shield damage to at max tech 204 points of shield damage.  This does nothing to affect the armour interaction, so the OP chart would remain the same.

What this does is makes Mesons a very space efficient option to take out shielded targets by quickly overloading their targets shield capacity, thus clearing the way for the other weapon packages to take out the armour.

If the conclusion is that Meason is too weak it could be a potential advantage.

I'm not fully convinced that it it is too weak yet though.

One other thing I think is important to point out is that not all weapon need to be made to act as primary weapon class. Currently  we have Lasers, Particle Beams and Rail-guns that take the role of primary weapon technologies. In general you don't want to combine those types. You then have Gauss, Meson, Microwave and Carronades which all can be combined with the other to somehow make the whole more efficient than each individual weapon system.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

That chart seems fine to me.  Remember that penetration will accelerate as targets take damage.  If your conclusion was that mesons are only effective against no armor at all from that chart I think you are expecting way too much from them. A 10cm Meson Cannon does more dps/ton than a Particle Beam 2, even ignoring penetration.

If there is a problem, it may be on the other end of things, with it being a little too easy imo to slather on enough armor layers that weapon penetration capability becomes not that important vs raw damage for similar tech levels. 

[Thrake]

Any weapon should have some counter. A weapon that ignores both shields and armor has no counter and thus is not very interesting. You point out that Meson can not, out of the box, destroy an armored ship... But, same goes for all weapons. I think Jorgen has an interesting point and I wish that, ideally, no weapon used alone would be efficient in all situations, this is the ideal scenario that opens up strategic game and the perpetual need to rething one's strategy to counter the ennemy.

[xenoscepter]

I hated Mesons in VB6, it wasn't so much as "Cheating in Solitaire" as it was "Changing the Rules of Solitaire to 'I win.' and throwing out the rest of them." That said, in VB6 one part of mesons made sense, that they only did 1 point of damage regardless of size (10cm, 12cm, etc.) If for C3 they functioned like Microwaves, but different; in that they did damage to NON-electronics through the enemies armor, this would still make sense, but that is not how they work.

For what it's worth, I like how Mesons work in C#, at least mechanically. But I do not like how they do not scale with damage now. HPMs add range, so you can research focusing for range or just get a bigger gun, it makes a nice balance for them. However, now that Mesons work the way they do, they should add damage with size, so large Mesons can potentially punch through more layers than smaller ones. Their function, as I understand it now, could be easily coded for this... as far as I know at least. 10cm does 1 damage, 12cm does 2 damage, 15cm does 4 etc, with a base 50% chance that 10cm is stopped by the first layer, 12cm stopped by the first 2, 15cm by the first four layers etc.

This would make Mesons an excellent anti-shield weapon while retaining their balance.

[Pedroig]

A thought on Mesons. 

Like Microwaves they should be highly specialized, but currently they fill the same basic roll as microwaves, just in reverse.  So why not make Mesons "shield killers"?  Leave their current armour mechanic alone, but have them be treated as *X more effective against shields.  This keeps them specialized as very effective against shield weapons, while still requiring them to pair up with better ant-armour weapons as well.  Just off the top of my head, have X be something like 1/(Retardation Factor)^2 against shields.  Since they only deal 1 damage ever, that means they will range from doing at minimum tech 4 points of shield damage to at max tech 204 points of shield damage.  This does nothing to affect the armour interaction, so the OP chart would remain the same.

What this does is makes Mesons a very space efficient option to take out shielded targets by quickly overloading their targets shield capacity, thus clearing the way for the other weapon packages to take out the armour.

If the conclusion is that Meason is too weak it could be a potential advantage.

I'm not fully convinced that it it is too weak yet though.

One other thing I think is important to point out is that not all weapon need to be made to act as primary weapon class. Currently  we have Lasers, Particle Beams and Rail-guns that take the role of primary weapon technologies. In general you don't want to combine those types. You then have Gauss, Meson, Microwave and Carronades which all can be combined with the other to somehow make the whole more efficient than each individual weapon system.

I'd say we agree in premise.  Have a primary weapon system, and then a secondary/tertiary which either enhances or compliments the primary, whether for offensive or defensive.  By making them "shield busters" they stay situational.  Their current mechanic ends up with damage charts like below, which has no real benefit...

[xenoscepter]

I think they should become primary weapons if you focus enough tech into them.

[Desdinova (OP)]

Like Microwave weapons they are not really intended as a main weapon anymore but as a complement to other weapons.

Messon weapons can still be quite effective as it would force the enemy to perhaps make design concessions they otherwise would not have to do.

If you have other weapons that erode the armour your meson will then have an easier time to penetrate it so you will start to do internal damage on the enemy earlier in that case.

So you only want a few Meson and some other primary weapon to combine the effects.

The game are not really that one dimensional. In most of the multi-faction games that I have played the factions that have been the most competitive in combat usually had about three different weapons system that they tried to stay competitive at so they could be more dynamic in their capabilities.

I would say that Measons and Rail-guns combines very well for example...

The problem is they don't complement other weapons. There's really no reason to take a meson over a 10cm laser or some other beam weapon. Mesons don't complement any other weapon because, while their gimmick is that they ignore shields, they don't do any damage to them, which means to overcome a reasonable mix of shields & armor you need either concentrated lasers (or particle beams or whatever) to keep the shields down, or concentrated mesons to boost your chances of scoring internal damage. If you have a mix of both, your lasers will be deflected by the enemy's shields, and your mesons will be unable to penetrate the armor.

[Bremen]

Ideally I'd actually like to see a weapon that ignores shields, and a separate weapon that ignores armor. That way you have an incentive to mix both shields and armor on all of your warships. And then those two weapons would complement each other, since if you had a 50/50 split on your ships you could fire the shield penetrating weapons at one target and the armor penetrating weapons at another.

Mesons might still be a bit weak, admittedly. What about giving them damage that scales with size- IE, a 20cm meson does more than one damage (regardless of if it hits armor or internal systems). If a larger meson did 3 armor damage in a single column starting wherever the armor blocked it, that would be effectively letting it penetrate two extra layers of armor as well. And it deals with one of the larger concerns about mesons, which was that 10cm was all you ever needed to research.

[Pedroig]

Ideally I'd actually like to see a weapon that ignores shields, and a separate weapon that ignores armor. That way you have an incentive to mix both shields and armor on all of your warships. And then those two weapons would complement each other, since if you had a 50/50 split on your ships you could fire the shield penetrating weapons at one target and the armor penetrating weapons at another.

Mesons might still be a bit weak, admittedly. What about giving them damage that scales with size- IE, a 20cm meson does more than one damage (regardless of if it hits armor or internal systems). If a larger meson did 3 armor damage in a single column starting wherever the armor blocked it, that would be effectively letting it penetrate two extra layers of armor as well. And it deals with one of the larger concerns about mesons, which was that 10cm was all you ever needed to research.

Thought Microwaves ignored armour but were affected by shields.