I was reading the
fleet doctrine for a new guy topic and I noticed how several recommended missile boats and/or talked about the severe range limitation of beam weapons:
...The biggest problem with beam weapons is your enemy WILL have greater range than you, there is no way to change that. So to even have a chance you must either surprise him, take away his range, or be able to close to the range in which your weapons work without dying...
Beam only fleets are feasible for fleet combat, but require overkill point defenses. If you can shoot down every missile your enemy fires you can tank missile waves all day until their magazines run dry.
To me, this suggests a flaw in the game design of beam weapons. If the strategy involved with beam ships
always relies on quote "overkill" point defenses in order to either outlast the enemy's supply of missiles or before being able to close the distance for beams... IMO, that's a bit predictable and restrictive.
But, there seems an even worse problem:
...The biggest problem with beam fleets appears when you attempt to assault an NPR homeworld. Short ranged anti-missile fire will still outrange your weapons by several orders of magnitude, and NPRs often have orbital defenses that fire stupidly large quantities of little missiles backed by massive planetary stockpiles. Assaulting homeworlds almost always requires missiles, and while you could use specialty bombardment cruisers for the job it is usually simpler and safer to just arm your primary warships with missiles in the first place.
So, even if a player wants a doctrine of strictly beam weapon ships, they
must still sink significant research into missiles just to overcome the defenses on NPR worlds. What can one do if range is always king?
Also, I was very surprised to read the wiki on
Spinal Mount Weapons how they do
not seem to have
increased range!
What's the point of having a massive superlaser on a ship if it does not have any more range than a standard weapon? Sure, the thing does massive damage. But it also
costs a lot more, you can't mount it on a turret, and your restricted to
one per ship.
For the cost of that superlaser, you may be better off using the space and resources to add smaller weapons, particularly if they can serve as
both offensive and point defense.
Further, you're
still stuck having to either outlast the enemy's supply of missiles or surviving long enough to close the distance before you can fire. Also, they sound a bit like one-shot wonders. If your single superlaser gets broken, your ship is just SOL.
I'm just saying that if the rules for Spinal Mount were balanced, then we'd see more designs use them.
Unfortunately, designs in Aurora that feature a spinal mount weapon seem unheard of. I did find
one example in the
Ships topic. That's
one among
countless dozens of other designs. To me, this suggests that if anyone designs a ship with a Spinal weapon, then it's most likely due to the coolness factor or role-playing reasons, rather than a perceived tactical advantage.
Speaking of range and beam weapons in general, I'm also concerned about this page:
Beam Weapon RangeIn particular, I noticed how most tables make note of this:
* Beam Fire Controls only have a max range of 1,400,000 km
At high tech levels and large sizes, weapons like Lasers, High Power Microwave, and the Meson Cannon have the
potential range of several
millions of km. But what's the point of that range if Beam Fire Controls are stuck at 1.4 million km? Suddenly, I'm beginning to understand why so many recommend Gauss Cannons (or Railguns) as their weapon of choice...
I'm suggesting that:
a) Beam Fire Controls: For
late game, Why can't there be higher tiers of Beam Fire Controls to allow ranges
beyond 1,400,000 km?
b) Spinal Mount Weapons: For all the restrictions and extra cost, they should have more range. At
the least, they should have 50% more range than normal. Perhaps even more.
c) Spinal Mount Weapons: Why restrict them to
just one per ship? What's the harm in allowing two, or even three or four to a ship? Regardless of the number, they have the other restrictions: They cannot be mounted in turrets and they cost a lot more. And like any ship design, one still has to balance
component design ratios. There's only so much room for Weaponry before one sacrifices Engines, Fuel, Engineering, Defenses, etc. And if most of their weapons are Spinal Mount, if the enemy maneuvers to their rear or side they're
sitting ducks.
d) Spinal Mount Weapons: (Assuming the wiki page isn't outdated) Why are Spinal Mount weapons limited to Lasers? Why can't we have Spinal Mount Mesons or Spinal Mount Microwaves?
Finally, I want to point out the
Anyone ever built a Deathstar? Can it be done? thread over on Reddit in the Aurora discussion area.
Basically, this
can't be done. Despite how Aurora actually has Spinal Mount superlasers, the best "Death Star" possible is an
approximation, using a
giant missile of all things.
You can't use lasers to hit stuff within an atmosphere and you can't actually blow up planets.
However, you could build a giant space station with engines and huge hangers for Tie Fighters, and then have it launch a giant size-100 enhanced-radiation missile at the planet.
Or you can just use SpaceMaster mode - build whatever you want to be your Planet-Killer/Death Star, and then decide that if it can spend X minutes in orbit of a planet without getting it's armor penetrated you're going to go into SpaceMaster mode and delete the colony...