Why would neutron launcher be the best exactly? I fill my ships up with shields every game I have played as far as i know. What if I spam corvettes? Or use cloud lighting + arc?
On paper they seem to have the same DPS as kinetic artillery so you might think they are equally powerful. What can be missed is that they have the highest damage per shot.
Every time a ship with less than half of hp gets hit they have a chance to disengage, so the less damage a weapon deals the more disengagement rolls are made. If a fleet with neutron launchers fights a fleet without neutron launchers they might be losing battles but enemy ships get destroyed (since launchers prevent disengaging) while your ships will be disengaging. Over time you can continue repairing your ships and win the attrition war.
Regarding corvettes, using them does not help, it is somewhat of a catch 22 situation. Indeed, corvettes will be winning battles due to their higher evasion but because of their low hp they all will be dying (in fact likely at the point someone gets launchers corvettes will get one-shot) so casualties are even higher. Using cruisers/battleships will increase disengagement chance but they have no evasion so more launchers will be hitting.
One thing not many people realise is upgrading armor/shields isn't very important (at least until cruisers/battleships). Upgrading hull/weapons/computers gives you much more bang for your back, many people would think a destroyer using neutron launchers and lvl1 armor/shields is a joke design, but it's probably the best design in terms of how early you can get and how efficient it is.
Basic corvette has 300 hul points, 150 armor+shields and costs 98 alloys. If you roughly measure combat efficiency to be dependent on Damage*Health/(Cost^2) [10% lower cost will let you build 10% more ships so have 10% more damage and 10% more health of the fleet, that's why cost in denominator is squared when we are measuring combat efficiency] then you can estimate the efficiency of researches.
Weapon research would increase weapon damage by 30% and cost of a corvette by 3 per weapon. If you use 2 weapons of the type you've researched, your ships got ~15% better.
Hull research increases health by 100 without changing the cost, so your ship gets ~22% better.
Computer research gives 5% fire rate and 10 tracking (10 tracking would increase chance to hit of a laser vs 70% evasion corvette from 70 to 80) and costs 5 alloys, your ship got ~9% better
Armor research (assuming you use 2 armor modules) gives your ship 30 extra hp and your ships will cost 6 alloys more, so your ships are getting 5% worse if you equip it.
Shield research (assuming you use 2 shield modules) gives your ship 30 extra hp and will cost 4 alloys more, so your ships are getting 1.5% worse if you equip them.
So when playing MP I am more than happy to see someone spamming high level armor/shields to combat launchers given that I know that likely that player didn't research something important I did. And if people aren't researching armor and shields (and prioritising hull researches) then extra hull damage from launchers is much more relevant than people would otherwise think.
