Can we reopen the Meson discussion?

[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.

Thought Microwaves ignored armour but were affected by shields.

They do, though they're more of a specialist weapon since they just disable. Though there might be synergy between a Meson/Microwave armament; if they go too heavy on the shields, you can meson through their armor, and if they go too heavy on the armor, the microwaves will disable them.

[Scorchicus]

Clearly, your pen numbers are backwards (easier to penetrate as tech goes up?) but yes, mesons are awful right now. 

The problem is that unlike HPMs, which actually have a role as a secondary weapon, albeit an expensive one (knock out shields with big damage weapon, break enemy fire controls with microwaves before breaching enemy armour), mesons have such a ridiculously niche role as to be totally irrelevant in almost all cases.

If they have almost any armour, mesons do basically nothing.  It only deal with one thing: All in shields, to the exclusion of any reasonable armour.
The problem: Building this way would be an intentional design flaw.

If shields were substantially (at least 3x) better per ton than armour, then they'd have a role.  A 10cm laser does 3x the damage, and a 10cm railgun, 4x the damage.  Unless shields can make up the difference, mesons will always be worse.  This problem only get more pronounced with larger weapons which do more damage per ton than a meson could ever hope to.

Just to throw out 2 ideas:
Keep their shield penetrating ability, but then have their damage scale with some fraction of the target's hull size.  That way, oversized ships (the ones most likely to have massive shields) have a countermeasure, while making them horribly impractical as a primary weapon.

Or else have mesons always target at or around the weakest point on a ship's armour, but give them a higher recharge rate.

[Desdinova (OP)]

Clearly, your pen numbers are backwards (easier to penetrate as tech goes up?) but yes, mesons are awful right now. 

Huh? The armour retardation tech represents the chance for a armor layer to block a meson shot. So the chance to penetrate X layers of armor is (1 - R)^A where R is the stopping probability depending on tech level and A is the number of layers.

[Ametsala]

Don't know how much others use mesons, but I do.  They work well enough against NPRs and swarm as the only weapon.  Didn't get close enough to precursors to test, because I didn't have enough PD to handle their AMM swarm.

The armor retardation tech is maybe best thought of as the percentage of armor that needs to be chipped away before it's possible to start dealing internal damage.

Mesons can be turreted like lasers and gauss, which makes them an ok early game weapon that can be used against both ships and missiles, although lasers would be better against ships and gauss against missiles.  Against shielded enemies, they are effective even in late game, when shield regeneration rate can outpace laser's dps.

Wondering, what would be a good damage dealer to got with mesons, I ended up comparing dps of max tech weapons at different ranges:

Weapon	ROF	100 000 km	200 000 km	300 000 km	400 000 km	1 000 000 km	1 200 000 km	1 400 000 km
Railgun 50 cm	15	4. 80	2. 40	1. 60	1. 07	0. 27	0. 27	0. 27
Particle beam 50	25	2. 00	2. 00	2. 00	2. 00	2. 00	2. 00	0. 00
Particle lance 100	65	1. 54	1. 54	1. 54	1. 54	1. 54	1. 54	0. 00
Laser 80 cm	35	4. 80	2. 86	1. 91	1. 43	0. 57	0. 46	0. 40
Laser 100 cm (spinal)	55	4. 76	2. 85	1. 89	1. 42	0. 56	0. 47	0. 40
Laser 120 cm (adv.  spinal)	80	4. 71	2. 83	1. 88	1. 41	0. 56	0. 46	0. 40

The particle lance is supposed to have similar damage profile to a laser, and the 120 cm, 100 cm and 80 cm lasers match the 100 damage at 450k km, 312k km and 200k km respectively.

Based on these, against unshielded enemies, at long range the particle lance probably owns, as it can punch through armor and there's enough damage left to blast most of what's underneath.  Against shielded enemies, at medium to long range, particle beams are best.  At short ranges lasers are best against both shielded and unshielded enemies.

So, lasers for jump point defense, particle beams for long range combat against enemy beam ships and enemies that are hard to catch up with.

Also, shields regenerating 5 strength per second are recharging faster than any beam weapon's dps.

IMO, the biggest problem with beam weapons right now is that the fire control range doesn't keep up with the weapon range.  E. g.  20 cm UV laser on spinal mount has max range of 640 000 km, but you need fire control range tech 150 000 km to get even 600 000 km max range.  Maximum range for beam fire control is 1 400 000 km, but max tech mesons have range of 10 080 000 km, and you can have 30 cm mesons firing every 5 seconds at range of 1 440 000 km.  I. e.  meson focal size tech after 30 are redundant (unless you want mesons that don't fire every 5 seconds, but what's the point of that?).  A max tech laser in advanced spinal mount has range of 45 240 000 km, over 30 times more than max fire control range.

[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...

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.

In my opinion Meson work great with weapons such as Rail-guns... I also have been in no fight where shields completely was able to deflect incoming fire unless the combat was stupidly one sided as there is something called concentration of fire. I also fail to see what a 10cm laser have to do with Mesons in general... why would you use such short ranged weapons if you fight on really long distances?!?

1. Meson will force an enemy to use allot of armour. If they also want strong shields they will have to use ALLOT of space for both.

2. Rail-guns have good DPS and will chip away against aromour in a way that make Meson very effective.

You could try it out as see how it goes in a real fight in the game one with a mixed fleet of rail-gun and meson and one with only rail-guns for example.

In some cases the Meson will probably be very effective... sometimes they will need the rail-gun to thin out the armour.

I have done allot of actual in game tests how things work out and sometimes there are factors you don't count on. For example heavy spinal and heavy lasers are way more effective when combined with high DPS weapons... either smaller lasers or rail-guns. It is all about penetration power, the one that start to penetrate the enemy armour first tend to win. That is the reason why high DPS on it's own is not the only thing that counts. In a fight where one is all high DPS while the other is a combination of high penetration and high DSP the second side wins every time... I have done many simulation with this.
Meson would have the exact same effect as a high penetration laser and a smaller high DPS weapon. Meson also have the effect of being effective against someone that never experienced them before and even after that they put limitation on enemy ship designs to a rather extreme degree and that is quite important from a strategic consideration.

Just because Meson can be countered effectively as a single weapon does not mean it is weak because at the other end of the spectrum it can be a devastatingly effective weapon. Not every weapon system need to be a good primary weapon, neither Gauss, Microwave or Carronades are good primary beam weapons either.

I have not seen any really good evidence that the current implementation of Meson make them a bad weapon choice yet.

[SpikeTheHobbitMage]

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.

Any sane warship design has both shields and armour, so if the shield penetrator is stopped by armour and the armour penetrator is stopped by shields then using both gains you exactly nothing.  Under the current system, any weapon capable of draining the shields and then the ablating armour enough for the mesons to matter is fully capable of downing the target by itself, and a player would be better served by replacing the meson with another of that other weapon.  The meson has been reduced to very expensive deadweight.

If mesons ignored armour but were blocked by shields, then pairing them with microwaves which IIRC drain shields would be a sound strategy.  Being short range weapons, the counter is to kite with longer range weapons.

[Jorgen_CAB]

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.

Any sane warship design has both shields and armour, so if the shield penetrator is stopped by armour and the armour penetrator is stopped by shields then using both gains you exactly nothing.  Under the current system, any weapon capable of draining the shields and then the ablating armour enough for the mesons to matter is fully capable of downing the target by itself, and a player would be better served by replacing the meson with another of that other weapon.  The meson has been reduced to very expensive deadweight.

If mesons ignored armour but were blocked by shields, then pairing them with microwaves which IIRC drain shields would be a sound strategy.  Being short range weapons, the counter is to kite with longer range weapons.

The problem is that if you are forced to use both strong armour and strong shields there will not be allot of tonnage over for weapons and engines. The enemy don't need allot of Meson weapons to force that design decisions either. It is the same with say Microwave weapons that will force you to use strong shields and hardened electronics.

This reasoning is flawed as it is all about who get the first penetration in. A combination of weapons is generally better than raw DPS... if you also force the enemy to use way too much defensive space you might get your meson cannons in for free in a sense. 

I think there are too much theorising and less actual testing... i'm sure you can come up with some scenario where the Meson is worse of than something else, but that is probably as it should be. That means there is options for different combinations of weapons in different situations.

I have actually spent some time doing some basic testing with combined and none combined weapons, including with meson. I found that Meson is VERY effective with rail-guns... I have not tested it in every considered situation, but in quite many cases Meson is very effective when combined with other weapons even when shield are involved.

[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.

Any sane warship design has both shields and armour, so if the shield penetrator is stopped by armour and the armour penetrator is stopped by shields then using both gains you exactly nothing.  Under the current system, any weapon capable of draining the shields and then the ablating armour enough for the mesons to matter is fully capable of downing the target by itself, and a player would be better served by replacing the meson with another of that other weapon.  The meson has been reduced to very expensive deadweight.

If mesons ignored armour but were blocked by shields, then pairing them with microwaves which IIRC drain shields would be a sound strategy.  Being short range weapons, the counter is to kite with longer range weapons.

Microwaves aren't any more effective against shields than a conventional laser, they just skip armor. And if you have both shield and armor penetrating weapons, then the obvious counter to enemies with both is to just fire the armor penetrating weapons at one enemy ship and the shield penetrating weapons at another.

[Ametsala]

Microwaves have a damage of 1, and, AFAIK, they do triple damage against shields. So, not that useful when dealing with shields. Maybe if they'd affect the target's shield recharge rate as well.

[SpikeTheHobbitMage]

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.

Any sane warship design has both shields and armour, so if the shield penetrator is stopped by armour and the armour penetrator is stopped by shields then using both gains you exactly nothing.  Under the current system, any weapon capable of draining the shields and then the ablating armour enough for the mesons to matter is fully capable of downing the target by itself, and a player would be better served by replacing the meson with another of that other weapon.  The meson has been reduced to very expensive deadweight.

If mesons ignored armour but were blocked by shields, then pairing them with microwaves which IIRC drain shields would be a sound strategy.  Being short range weapons, the counter is to kite with longer range weapons.

Microwaves aren't any more effective against shields than a conventional laser, they just skip armor. And if you have both shield and armor penetrating weapons, then the obvious counter to enemies with both is to just fire the armor penetrating weapons at one enemy ship and the shield penetrating weapons at another.

Unless something has changed, HPMs do extra damage against shields but can only damage sensors.

If a weapon ignores shields but is blocked by armour then firing it at an armoured target is pointless.  If a weapon ignores armour but is blocked by shields then firing it at a shielded target is also pointless.  If the enemy ships have both shields and armour then it makes no difference whether you shoot at the same target or different ones, the guns are equally ineffective.

The problem with current meson cannons is that while they ignore shields they are both blocked by armour and don't do enough damage to meaningfully damage it.  Any weapon capable of damaging the armour enough to make the mesons work a) already drained the shields so the meson's sole advantage is nullified, and b) does significantly more damage than the meson so it will fully penetrate the armour and destroy the target by itself before the meson can meaningfully contribute.

Edit:

Microwaves have a damage of 1, and, AFAIK, they do triple damage against shields. So, not that useful when dealing with shields. Maybe if they'd affect the target's shield recharge rate as well.

Thank you, I couldn't quite remember.  Mesons also have a fixed damage of 1.  In both cases armour penetration was their primary advantage over other weapons.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Unless something has changed, HPMs do extra damage against shields but can only damage sensors.

If a weapon ignores shields but is blocked by armour then firing it at an armoured target is pointless.  If a weapon ignores armour but is blocked by shields then firing it at a shielded target is also pointless.  If the enemy ships have both shields and armour then it makes no difference whether you shoot at the same target or different ones, the guns are equally ineffective.

The problem with current meson cannons is that while they ignore shields they are both blocked by armour and don't do enough damage to meaningfully damage it.  Any weapon capable of damaging the armour enough to make the mesons work a) already drained the shields so the meson's sole advantage is nullified, and b) does significantly more damage than the meson so it will fully penetrate the armour and destroy the target by itself before the meson can meaningfully contribute.

Why not do the test instead of using theory...

I did a test of this a while ago... one fleet with only rail-guns and one with a combination of meson and rail-guns... there were about 10-15% meson only. I chose dummy ships with enough armour AND strong shields (not the best combination in real practice in general).

The fleet with combined meson and rail-gun managed to disable or destroy the enemy faster than the one with only rail-guns.

The point is that the meson guns start to do internal hits allot earlier despite the other fleet having a slightly higher dps, that means the enemy will get disabled earlier and start loosing effective combat power, this matter ALLOT in real practical terms. Throw in a few microwaves, just a 5% and you have an even greater winner. Let's say you got the HPM from some salvage operations or capturing an enemy ship

[Father Tim]

Sadly, someone suggested the perfect solution to Meson weaponry a day or two after Steve had already changed them.  The solution was to keep the old "one point of armour-ignoring damage" and reverse the meson size chart.  Start at 75 or 80 centimeter weapons for 1000 RP and slowly decrease the size.

Practically everyone agreed that meson fighters were ridiculously over-powered.  However, since the AI didn't build them and players could choose not to they were only a problem if you made them one.

As to superdreadnoughts blowing up to a single shot, that required a complete lack of shields (not entirely unknown, as there is supposed to be some sort of 'space terrain' that makes shields inoperable) and a fairly high explosion chance on your components.  Personally, I think the chance was reasonable and that if your empire was that concerned about it they should be building less-explosive large ships.

- - - - -

The 'large calibre first' approach to mesons means that not only do they take up huge tonnage, they fire glacially slowly as they require large amounts of power and presumably your empire has small capacitors.  Something like power requirements of 24-1 and therefore RoF 120 seconds.  It also means that meson-armed fighters are now end-game tech, and thus NPRs can safely be trusted to build them.  Whether or not your empire does so is still your choice.

Possibly the only other change that would need to be made is the 'increased range with larger barrels' effect that mesons copied from lasers and railguns.  I'm not sure if it's better to make this a separate tech line, to leave it as is (on the theory that low beam fire control tech makes it largely irrelevent), to reverese the current (so that as mesons get smaller they get longer ranged, which seems weird but maintains existing balance) or even to give all sizes the same fixed range.  Probably not that last, as it would be the only weapon to work that way, and with no lore justification for why.

[xenoscepter]

I liked the "Large Caliber First" fix.

However, I think Jorgen_CAB is onto something here... it occurs to me that mesons can do damage to the inside of enemy armor. That's... really powerful actually. 4 Mesons firing @ 5 second intervals could become a very scary threat indeed. Every time one of those armor chunks is removed, that is one less layer of armor that the mesons have to deal with on that column. 4 Lasers with the same RoF would out dps the mesons, but only gun for gun, not ton for ton... as the 10cm laser versus the 10cm Meson weigh the same, but that penetration will add up.

But, the caveat is that this advantage ads up ONLY against shielded foes, since the lasers will have to burn through those first, while the mesons will be hammering your armor before that. It's definitely nuanced, but if what Jorgen_CAB said is to be believed, then Mesons might not be so nerfed after all.

This warrants further testing.

[Steve Walmsley]

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.

Mesons are balanced for player vs NPR and are therefore scaled for expected NPR armour levels. They are under powered in human vs human combat (because humans adapt far better than AIs), but that wasn't a design consideration.

[Migi]

Practically everyone agreed that meson fighters were ridiculously over-powered.  However, since the AI didn't build them and players could choose not to they were only a problem if you made them one.

I encountered a squadron of meson fighters in VB. They blew up my bombers after a failed strike on what I thought was a slow beam armed ship.