Hello everyone!
While creating a
ground forces calculator to help me plan out a new army based on the quantities of enemies I was facing (and relative tech levels of the NPR), I discovered that auto cannons were always a bad choice to equip on troops, confirming general consensus I've seen on Discord and the forums. Columns L and M sort the weapons by their tonnage efficiency at killing the given chassis/armor combination.
You will need to make a copy of the sheet in order to use the drop downs to follow along with my findings, or play with relative weapon and armor techs.
Findings:
LAC is relatively okay vs. basic infantry and powered armor. It's feeling like where it should be (less efficient vs. lightly armored troops, but better when they're armoring up) but by the time you get to heavy power, it's better to use LAV vs. the troops than LAC. From a strictly fluff point of view, light, rapid fire field guns should be better at attacking them than shoulder mounted AV weaponry.
MAC and HAC, however, are terrible at their intended roles.
MAV weaponry is more efficient at destroying light vehicles than LAC, MAC or HAC, effectively obsoleting them.
Vs. Medium vehicles and all heavier ones, MAV, HAV, SHAV are better than any auto cannon, and LAV is better than all but HAC
Because of this distribution, where dedicated AVs are always a superior choice, and MACs and HACs are bad choices for anti infantry duty, I propose the following changes:
LAC: AP 2, Damage 2, Shots 2, Size 16
MAC: AP 3, Damage 2.5, Shots 2, Size 32
HAC: AP 5, Damage 3, Shots 2, Size 48
I have created these weapons as Test LAC, Test MAC and Test HAC respectively in my calculator. With this set of numbers, ACs are never better than the dedicated weaponry designed to defeat that armor. LAC becomes slightly better than PWI vs. powered-armor infantry, and equal to CAP against Heavy Powered Armor.
Vs. Light vehicles, LAC is still an inferior choice to LAV, but it is punching at its weight class, and not outperformed tonnage-wise compared to MAV and MAC vs. Light Vehicles.
MAC's changes make them better than MAV vs. light vehicles (which makes sense), but only half as effective as MAV vs. medium vehicles, and less effective than HAV; also in line with the weapon type.
HAC is better than MAV vs. light vehicles due to the extra shots (they're both overpenetrating the armor), and better than MAC vs. medium vehicles (they're having an easier time "punching down"). However, HAC is still an inferior choice to MAV vs. mediums
At the Heavy Vehicle tier and all higher tiers, HACs will be an inferior choice to HAV and SHAV, but will beat MAVs due to MAVs being out of their weight class.
With this setup, an ACs is typically the 2nd or 3rd best choice for defeating a given unit. However, there is one place they shine, and that's armored static units.
Currently, due to static emplacements having a worse armor progression than vehicles, bombardment is the best choice for defeating them, since their HP is larger than their armor.
With these changes, LACs are a bit less efficient than LAVs vs Light and Medium Statics, but ACs become on par with bombardment for defeating medium armored statics, and MACs and HACs pull into the lead for defeating heavy armored static defenses (with MACs being a better choice due to HACs overpenetrating).
Please make a copy of the spreadsheet and play around with it and give feedback. I feel as though my changes mean that auto cannons become useful, but since they're never "second best at everything", it never gets to the point where massed auto cannons become meta. Opinions, and suggestions for tweaking the stats of the ACs are more than welcome. One line I haven't explored is bringing their weight and shots back up to default (I gave them 2 shots for 2/3rds the weight).