- Minimum range is a thing now on many large weapons.
- Don't mix weapons with different ranges on artillery ships, they'll try to stay at the max range of whichever one is longest and never get to use the others unless the enemy charges them. This also impacts ships using 'medium' (aka median) range if you have more longer range weapons than shorter range ones. The only combat computers that use 'get close enough to use all my weapons' behavior are swarm for corvettes and torpedo for frigates and cruisers. Don't use those with weapons that have a minimum range.
- Don't use the torpedo combat computer with energy torpedoes.
- Corvettes and frigates feel pretty fragile. Budget for reinforcements and try to make sure your admiral isn't assigned to one if the fleet has larger, safer hulls.
- With the slot forcing them to use missiles gone, starbases are much easier to avoid engaging. Don't use the torpedo battery module though, that mounts range 30 components. Getting at least one hangar module is a better way to force engagements.
- You might want to delay researching disruptors and autocannons if you think you'll be on the defensive and want to prevent your starbases from using very short range weapons and just durdling while they get picked apart by artillery.
- Armor hardening seems like a trap. Even if you're trying to counter disruptors, just use shield hardening instead since that also applies to missiles and strike craft.
- Don't research shield capacitors if you'd prefer your starbases to use a different aux component like regenerative hull tissue.
Something like 1/3 of these could be fixed by just letting players design their own starbase loadouts...
SIGH.
Something that's reasonably visible from the stats that you didn't mention though: Armor is now 33% more effective per module than Shield (shield modules got buffed 50%, armor 100%). This pushes the optimal build even harder in the direction of pure armor (which was already optimal in a lot of cases; the AI isn't always smart enough to go pure energy and even when they are, there are advantages to being armor-focused like just never caring much about power needs or missiles/strike craft).
Corvettes have absolute crap for hull HP. Base of 200 instead of 300, the techs that used to give +100 now only give +10% (so, 20) each, and the hull-boosting modules are weaker (or at least, weaker relative to other modules) than they used to be. On the flip side, there are now techs - late-game only though? - that give armor and shield
hardening modules, which are directly subtracted from a weapon's penetration rating (e.g. if you have 50% shield hardening, a missile or disruptor will do 50% damage to the shields and 50% damage to whatever layer it would normally have hit).
Armor (and hull) regen numbers look
insanely high right now, but they're kind of a lie; regen is nerfed to 1/5 while in battle. It looks like the modules were increased 5x to compensate, though?!? Still possible to make a massively regenerating battleship/titan, if you go with full armor and stack regen modules + regen aura. Similarly, leviathans with regen are still a pain unless you massively overpower them.
I am not convinced there's any point to carrier computers anymore. They will still combat-lock at longer range, but in every other way, artillery computers are better.
Frigates are not literally useless but they're very much a situational choice. They're only good against large targets, they do provide the max torpedoes per command point but in most other ways are really bad ships. Less durable
and less evasive than destroyers, very bad at fighting against anything in their own weight class, not actually fast enough to close against carrier battleships using artillery computer without heinous losses, suffer the old corvette problem of tending to lose more ships than the enemy even when you technically win the fight, slower and more expensive to build than Corvettes... in many cases, if you want a torpedo boat, you're better off with cruisers instead. Indeed, cruisers are really viable hulls for almost anything except artillery right now.
Missiles are in a weird, but mostly good, place. You can mount them on literally every warship except titans (OK, battleships and juggernauts can't go
pure missile and frigates arguably can't either since torpedoes are basically their own thing now), strike craft no longer hard-counter them (or counter them at all), flak is actually meaningfully worse against them so even having P slots doesn't guarantee the enemy counters them (though PD lasers are still quite effective), and they've kept their range (actually, Swarmers
gained range). Standard missiles are now exclusively S-slot weapons and have had their damage adjusted downward as expected, but are still competitive in DPS with most normal weapons and retain both their shield penetration and their small anti-hull bonus. Swarmers are actually outright good now; their damage got buffed to compete tolerably with other M-slot weapons on raw DPS (marginally better than lasers, meaningfully worse than railguns, vastly exceed disruptors) while taking half the power (not sure why, but their power usage was reduced to use S-slot power scaling while having M-slot damage), outrange everything except energy torpedoes, kinetic artillery, and X/T slots, and retain 30 tracking and shield penetration. They lost a little of their high-ish fire rate but gained a bit of total HP (40 HP to 30 HP + 15 armor, for Whirlwinds; which will mostly ignores flak but gets shredded by PD lasers), so although they're still much better than normal missiles against PD they no longer basically hard-counter it (of course, PD can't be mounted in anywhere near the same numbers). They out-damage two standard missiles except against hull, and aren't far behind there. With that said, they still only have two tiers, which is kind of weird, and of course like all missiles they are delayed time-to-hit.
Disruptors got slightly buffed, especially S ones. M disruptors lost some range and only gained a little damage to show for it, while S got almost strictly buffed... and that's before you consider that hulls are weaker than before. In the early game, disruptors will absolutely shred corvettes, frigates, and even destroyers; a significant departure from their prior status as almost exclusively late-game weapons (once top-tier defenses and especially repeatables entered the picture). Indeed, their effectiveness now falls off in the late game, due to the availability of armor or shield hardening (though they still aren't
bad unless the enemy goes all-in on hardening). Oddly, M-slot disruptors are significantly worse than a pair of S-slot; gaining a miserly 10 range (30 to 40) in exchange for more than twice the power usage, much worse tracking (60 to 35), and - weirdest of all - only 60-66% more damage. All this really adds up to making corvettes the lords of disruptor usage - they have the speed and evasion to reach knife range, and the best ratio of S slots to hull size - though of course with their tissue-paper hulls they will die extremely quickly to enemy disruptors too.
Autocannons are also in a weird but also
mostly good place. We now have M and L slot autocannons, though their range is very short (30/35/40 for S/M/L) and they do lose much of their tracking although still better than typical for their size tier (75/50/25). Their power demand is increased, even beyond the way nearly all M and L weapons' power requirement increased, but their damage is through the roof. Even taking into account their heinous -75% against armor, they out-DPS railguns against armor at S size, and are about 3/8 as good as lasers; against shields or hull, they are the undisputed best. Oddly, as with disruptors, you really don't want to mount the larger sizes; compared to S autocannons, L autocannons take 5x the power for 0.33x the tracking, 1.33x the range, and
only 3x the damage. No idea why PDX decided to do this. Anyhow, autocannons - especially on smaller ships - are ruthless anti-shield and anti-hull monsters and not even
that terrible against armor. Seriously, S autocannons easily out-DPS literally all
M-size weapons; it's insane. One interesting side effect of this is that it inflates fleet strength numbers through the roof; if you build a simple fleet of autocannon corvettes in the early game, many AIs will fall all over themselves asking to be subjugated.
Lasers are... not in a great place. They still do worse damage than rails (though this is now somewhat balanced by shields being less effective, for a given slot size and tech level, than armor) and have worse range. They retain literally just one notable advantage: they are the only standard L-slot weapon with more than 40 range and no
minimum range (all others can't hit anything inside range 45), which makes them viable if for some reason you're making mid-range battleships. Never do this, though; mid-range anything is a terrible idea.
Plasma is outright awful now. They didn't get the autocannon treatment, and thus are only a little stronger in baseline numbers than disruptors (in fact, while S plasma got lightly buffed, M and L actually got nerfed). They did get a marginal range boost allowing them to match lasers (40/60/80) but retain their inferior tracking (40/20/5 vs. 50/30/5) and L plasma additionally got slapped with a very cruel minimum range of 45, meaning their effective range window is only 35 units deep. They retain the damage modifiers they had before (-75%/+100%/+50%) but with their new damage, they are less than half as good against hull as autocannons - in fact, only about as good against hull as railguns - and only
trivially better (less than 10%) better than lasers against armor. This does technically make them the best choice for anti-pure-armor builds - they are (just barely) the best against armor, and significantly better than any other anti-armor weapon at dealing with hull - but against shields they're totally ineffective; an L plasma does less damage to shields than an M laser.
P-slots got an interesting treatment. Technically, we're back to the weird world where P-slot weapons are quite competitive with their non-P equivalents, at least in S class (still no forms of heavy PD). Each P weapon is now heavily optimized (+100% damage and 25% penetration) against either shields (flak) or armor (PD laser), while being terrible against the other (-75% damage). This makes sense given that strike craft now have tons of shields (and no armor) while missiles and torpedoes have moderate armor (and no shields), but they also have good damage (same as before for energy PD, with flak brought up to the same standard) and, in the case of flak, tracking. This has the interesting consequence of making flak highly viable against early corvettes, offering nearly twice the base damage against as any other S-equivalent starting weapon and being absolutely vicious against shields (although the shield-penetrating damage bleed actually a downside against targets with any amount of armor, as 25% of the damage is wasted against the armor instead of going to wiping the shield for the lasers you presumably have in the S slots to do their thing). Basically, flak is the autocannon for before you have autocannons. PD lasers, on the other hand, are easily the best anti-armor starting weapon; they not only do more base damage than any S weapon
and have a higher anti-armor multiplier, they are the only starting weapon in the game that can start punching a corvettes tissue-paper hull before getting all the way through its armor. Remember that hull damage decreases fire rate. As such, corvettes or destroyers with PD lasers are in fact the strongest option by far for anti-armor among all S-equivalent weapons, doing strictly more damage against shields, armor, and hull than S plasma weapons! Admittedly you give up a little range and good bit of tracking to get this (though Guardian PD has tracking 30, the tier-1 Sentinel PD still only has 10), but they're corvettes; you'll be at range 30 or less anyhow. Of course, P slot weapons can get distracted by missiles or strike craft, but for my early-game corvettes, the P slot consistently did more damage to hull than the two S slots combined, no matter what I slotted.
Artillery... what is there even to say. There is now only a single L-slot artillery weapon in the game, the kinetic artillery. It's as good as ever, except for losing the ability to hit targets at less than 45 range, and a viable pick for an artillery battleship. You'll really want a lance in the X slot though, or you want have a single anti-armor weapon. Titans are really rather sad right now.
Torpedoes are now specialized killers of large ships and highly-upgraded stations. Standard torpedoes continue to operate much like missiles - they create projectiles that can be shot down, and have HP and armor - but their launch range is a piddling 30. Their damage is bad but non-trivial against destroyers but outright awful against corvettes and frigates; against cruisers it's pretty good and against battleships it's great. Energy torpedoes (proton and neutron launchers) also now use the G slot, though they are not guided weapons; they are still instant-hit. They retain most of their old range (120 instead of 130, though also minimum 45), but of course can't be mounted on L slots anymore... no anti-armor weapon with more than 80 range can. Energy torpedoes do crap damage even after accounting for being re-scaled to M-slot equivalent; although they retain their old multipliers making them good against armor and great against hull, they underperform all other weapons in their size category against any target smaller than a cruiser, and are merely adequate against cruisers. They're still a solid pick against battleships... except that standard torpedoes are
MUCH better, if you can get into range (and aren't facing too much PD). That's especially true against shields, where standard torpedoes continue to penetrate and energy torpedoes continue to do halved damage. The one saving grace of energy torpedoes, IMO, is that they combine nicely with kinetic artillery in the two hulls that can mount both - cruisers and defense platforms - for a long-range big-ship-killer. They are strictly anti-synergistic in frigates and should probably never be used on that hull anyhow; frigates lack the evasion or durability to survive at artillery range.
Strike craft - despite losing the ability to kill missiles - are still some of the best all-around weapons in the game, and are also the best choice for anti-strike-craft. Flak works tolerably now - though PD lasers really really don't except against amoeba flagella, where they're merely inferior - but strike craft absolutely annihilate other strike craft; whoever brings more will completely cancel the enemy's DPS from them. As mentioned above, though, don't use carrier computer; artillery computer will generally do what you want, and gives better bonuses.
There's a weird thing where different rear sections now give different numbers of A slots. In particular, the destroyer's Intercepter stern (2xS) gets two A slots while the other sterns get only one; cruiser Gunship stern (2xS) gets three A slots while the other only gets two, and battleship Broadside stern (2xM) also gets three while the other only gets two. This is generally a buff to some less-used sections, but comes with some weirdness; fast battleships (and insanely fast cruisers or destroyers), or tons of regen, but you have to put missiles on your artillery battleship if you do (eh, you didn't need another kinetic artillery anyhow, right? At least swarmers don't have a nasty penalty to armor and can distract PD plus hit targets that get close besides... and they'll save you power without costing you range). Unfortunately, the destroyer's Picket Bow is still only 3xS-equivalent (2xS, 1xP) and hasn't gained anything in compensation (if not an A slot, give it an extra defensive S or two, or upgrade some of its defensive S to M?). Given how good P weapons are at anti-ship in the early game this isn't necessarily awful, but in the late game autocannons totally dominate flak for anti-ship roles, and the PD lasers are individually outright better than S plasma but a single PD is not better than 2x S plasma or 1xM plasma (or non-PD lasers in place of the plasmas).
I'm really happy that DDGs (guided missile destroyers) are not only a thing now, they're a legitimately viable design that retains some usefulness even after larger ships are unlocked, although cruisers are arguably the superior missile platform given how good swarmers are. Be very sure to select the artillery or at worst line computer on both.
