Those are some nice charts and all that you've made, but let me ask you this:

What do you think of the actual gameplay?

Unless you can tell me how this is having a negative effect upon the game experience, I don't see what the problem is.

Regardless of that, though, you very well can't reach a real conclusion until you factor in all the factors; the cost to build the weapons on a ship, sizemods, the nano-ripper, psionic weapons, as well as how all of it compares to the same characteristics of the defenses...

You've got a good start here, though. If you care to continue making all these graphs and such, you'll at least end up with a very thorough reference that a lot of people would find very useful.

That is a bit strange.

I wonder how it would stack up against the defenses for each type, though. If Armor is also the most expensive defense to invest in, it might not be so unbalanced.

All of which just proves what I already knew - Mass drivers are teh sux0r. Takes too long to go up the tech tree and they're too large once you have them. A fighter with 5 railguns could have had 6 or 7 lasers.

The missiles are kind of a shock. It looks like if you go any higher than photon torpedoes, their cost suddenly skyrockets. Which does match my experience. It takes a hell of a long time to go from photon torps to antimatter torps.

And it looks like black hole missiles cost 50% more RP than doom ray?

Think I'll stick with beams from now on.

i don't see why the weapons should be balanced against each other. railguns are expensive to research, but they have the best damage to size ratio, and they're also the least expensive to put on your ships. it makes sense it'd be the most expensive to research.

but i'm not here to defend mass drivers. i use the weapons that are best suited for the situation i'm in. a weapon's balance isn't in a vacuum, but also must be compared to appropriate defenses, their size/absorbtion/cost/research ratios. and ultimately, the best weapon is the one your enemies can't defend against.

i think you'll need a 9-dimensional graph and that doesn't even factor in the sizemod values.

still, an interesting pair of graphs.

Ok, second chart updated to be RP/(size*sizemod); hit refresh to see the changes.

Including such size info shows Gun-9 to come down and be more in line with the other weapons. Gun-4 and Gun-5 are still out there on price/performance. It might be possible to bring them into a more competetive role by removing several redundant 'sleightly smaller/cheaper' versions of the same damage level.

Beam-6 (Subspace Blaster) also remains as an anomaly. Considering it's cost and placement in the tech tree, it would be more appropriate for that weapon to do 10 damage instead of only 6. It would have to be sleightly bigger to fit in neatly.

And it looks like black hole missiles cost 50% more RP than doom ray?

Beams	Cost	Missiles	Cost
Beam weapon theory	100	Missile weapon theory	100
Laser	75	Stinger	150
Laser II	200	Stinger II	300
Laser III	350	Stinger III	400
Laser IV	400	Stinger IV	800
Laser V	500	Harpoon	1200
Plasma Weapons	1000	Harpoon II	800
Plasma Weapons II	700	Harpoon III	900
Plasma Weapons III	800	Photonic Torpedo	1600
Phasors	2000	Photonic Torpedo II	1200
Phasors II	1600	Photon Torpedo	2400
Phasors III	1800	Photon Torpedo II	2800
Phasors IV	2000	Photon Torpedo III	3000
Phasors V	2100	Anti-Matter Torpedo	5000
Phasors VI	2200	Anti-Matter Torpedo II	5200
Phasors VII	2400	Anti-Matter Torpedo III	5400
Disruptors	4000	Quantum Torpedo	6000
Disruptors II	3200	Quantum Torpedo II	6200
Disruptors III	3500	Quantum Torpedo III	6800
Subspace Blaster	6000	Positronic Torpedo	7000
Subspace Annihilator	5200	Positronic Torpedo II	8000
Doom Ray	9000	Black Hole Eruptor	9000
Total	49125	Total	74250

Thanks

railguns are expensive to research, but they have the best damage to size ratio, and they're also the least expensive to put on your ships.

If the AI were unfortunate enough to decide to research guns, it would fall behind in military tech. Once it hits Guns-3 (Graviton Drivers), it will be stuck there for a long time. Meanwhile, the player can go from Beam-3 (Phasors) up to Beam-4, Beam-5, Beam-7, and finally Beam-8 (Disruptors III) before the AI can get to Guns-4. By then it would be too late, the war would be raging, the player on to the Beam-22 doom rays before long, and the AI would still be struggling to get to Gun-5.

Has anyone been attacked by an AI ship with a high Gun-attack rating?

I like the techs to have quirks in their research and attack size ratings.

I research and use what the AI doesn't. It varys game to game. But the new impact of version 1.2 combat makes defense more important.

Larger ships , even with module sizes being different, have an advantage that by stacking weapons they have a larger attack factor that can destroy or damage any one undefended ship per round. While if they have enough defense they can become almost invulnerable to other smaller ships because their combined attack factor cannot penetrate their shields.

I like seeing 0's on the combat display.

The chart does not take into account the advantages of big ship firepower/defense nor does it take into account the fact that the AI often researches both the attack and matching defense trees at the same time.

If mass drivers are not AI researched you can cut through their fleets like butter.

Just had a recent game where the AI had beams and sheilded ships and I concentrted on mass drivers and shields.

Nice chart though, it has potential as a greta reference.

To teh end of the line of the mass driver tree although most of the game I was using the atk 9 weapons.

I had conquered 2 civs first when the other AIs starting declaring war two at a time on me. They were using battleships and frigates using combined 40-60 attack points per ship, plus 20-40 in shields that were virtually useless against my shields. I think then were using atk 8 or so weapons.

The final two civilizations actually improved their designs to mass drivers to counter my shielded ships but they stayed wwith shields. I had to generate a new generation of ships with mass drivers and armor for the cleanup.

Well, looks like you beat me to it. I was planning on doing some analysis like this this weekend. I haven't looked at the spreadsheets yet, but I will take a look.

BTW, what is "sizemod"? I have no idea what that number means.

Didn't really look at all your charts and graphs but i have done my own research into weapon tech costs and the payback on different types. And i go with missiles myself and haven't had a problem. You can look at cost all you want but the big stat is how much damage you can put on a ship so damage per space is what really matters.

And from what i see, defense on the ships is a waste of space and I wouldn't want to lose time researching defenses. If i got em for free from espionage or battle prizes i might consider using them. I have run up against ships that had lots of missile defense and they were easy to take out and had a few ships given to me that were like that -- and they weren't good except against ships that were using older equip and hadn't been upgraded.

I've gone up against civs that had better missiles than me and taken them out.
Sure liked getting the Anti matter torpedoe tech as a battle prize when i was still using photonic missiles.

You do need to choose a line of weapons and go with it. The tech costs go up for a second line of weapons and even more for the third line of weapons. I tried researching 2 weapon techs ( beams and missiles ) but found out the research costs were about 16% more for each tech doing that.

This plot is a study of when the various weapons become available. It shows the technology race in the three main weapons, and who will get what first.