Sounds great. Also it's not just a cosmetic change, slow rate of fire at same dps means much more of the damage gets delivered at once.
I noticed a row of battleships could often destroy several ship on their first shots, so that reduces enemy dps before they can respond, especially if the slow weapon had good range. Fairly minor advantage though, and faster weapons benefit from less damage getting spent on overkill shots.
Still, there can be quite the difference. It's one of the reasons missiles suck so much, because they are actually terribly slow weapons in that damage takes so long to get delivered that their targets might be dead by then, and that's before PD even enters the picture. It's why in vanilla missiles are outright horrible in most circumstances, while in this mod they are just kinda bad.
I intentionally picked missiles this game, figuring I'd take the extra challenge. I find them situationally useful, but overall still much worse than beams which I've switched to now that I researched them. They are a good deterrent against the AI though as it thinks they are much more powerful than they really are because of their high military score.
Yes fire-rate and damage do have a small positive or negative effect. Large damage can mean lots of overkill, especially on smaller ships while higher rate of fire can mean less wasted shots, especially on smaller vessels. So they do have their uses... that is why I want heavier weapons to fire slower but pack a heavier punch, they will be even more useless against small ships. And since most small ships such as corvettes and in some instances cruisers will duck and weave in coming versions fire rate will be more important to those ships.
Missiles are actually best in moderation in this game. When used in moderation with torpedos and strike crafts backed up by some beam ships you are force to screen your ships, if you don't you will get toast. In the next version I will make sure the AI favour certain types of weapons on some platform over other to you will see a more diverse AI fleet, especially large and advanced ones. You will definitely never see all AI missile fleets anymore. I will also increase the range of missiles somewhat more, torpedoes will become slightly faster but keep its range.
In a test game I had a bunch of torpedo corvettes actually destroyed an unprotected battleship, despite it being armed with both PD and Flak guns. The just went into strike range, retreated and got back in and fired their torpedoes in droves. I think there were 10 corvettes versus one battleship. From a resource perspective that battleship did cost like twenty times those destroyers. But of course it was a clinical test, I was expecting that result, the battleship didn't kill a single corvette the entire battle.
Yes missiles have a high military score, I think the formula for creating the military score need to down value the high damage and accuracy and tracking of missiles, they can be intercepted so should count much less than their raw damage potential.
I suppose you noticed that planetary stations have PD now, not sure I actually put that into the overall information. How do you feel station defensive power is working, balance wise that is. I sometimes wish there was a way to teach the AI to build more military station in important systems to. They are pretty cheap to build and maintain overall.
