In the few games I've played, always seems that beam weapons have the best power to size ratios not taking into account building cost.

Well cost of weapons is a little more complex then making a ship take longer to build, the maintance cost of a ship is based on its initial cost 2.5% of it to be exact and simply changing the sliders around won't change that. Personally I'm a mass drivers man, I like huge low maintance fleets, last game I had top military and a surplus of 25000bc a turn

I think this could be fixed by adding some variety in the weapons. Rather than making each weapon path strictly linear, have some techs where the weapon uses 1-2 less points of space, but takes 10x-20x the production cost to build. That would make for interesting tradeoffs. (Or make the research cost higher for the extra-miniaturized weapons.)

Regarding armor, I found that balanced spending is best. 1-1-1 is 3 points of defense against any attack.

Which file are you using to get this data? I was looking for a list of the costs and such earlier in order to do some data parsing of my own, but I couldn't find the right info and gave up. Is there an xml file in the directory that I should be looking at?

Also, what size hull are you basing the data on? Since the size is not a constant, that might throw off your calculations a bit (though probably not by enough to affect your results).

Your analysis strikes me as a bit simplistic, but probably not greatly flawed. There are other factors to consider (cost, ease of the comparable devense, etc.) but they probably aren't terribly important if the main issue is this large.

do your calculation take into account the total tech cost from the very beginning or are they simply for that particular tech?

Yes. The costs listed are the total cost in research to get to that weapon/defense.

Also any weapon can be effective if the AI's haven't researched any of the defence tech's for it, so it doesn't really matter if they are perfectly balanced.

Nonsense. It's about research time.

Defenses research faster than weapons. So you have to expect anything you research to be countered. The principle way around that is to just out-power them in that area of tech. Get large hulls/miniturization techs, and put so many weapons on your ships that it doesn't matter how much defenses they bring to bear.

If you have 30,000 research points, and want to spend 20,000 on weapons, it is obvious that the right answer is beam technology. You'll get very close to the sweet spot of 1:1 weapon damage vs size. And you'll have small guns. Plus, you still get 10,000 left to spend on defenses.

Had I gone for missile weapons or ballistic weapons instead, I would have gotten a ratio much closer to 3:2 than 1:1 (excepting the Nano Ripper. I thought this was one of those Evil-exclusive weapons when I made my chart. However, it's huge expense does make it prohibitive to use in quantity). My ships would have been under-powered compared to what they could have been. To get equivalent power to a beam-equipped ship, I would have had to spend 30,000+ research. The only way for me to match him is to be out-researching him. And if you're significantly out-researching someone, you shouldn't be trying to match them; you should be beating them.

You have to look at defenses though

I did. See the part of the analysis at the bottom?

Sheilds may be space-efficient, but they are the hardest to research, particularly early on. They get better, and eventually even things up at the 1:2 ratio, but at 1:1 and 2:3, other techs are clearly superior research-time wise. Missile defenses get to 2:3 much faster, and even there they are more space efficient. Shield defenses are actually the worst of the 3 defenses because of how long it takes to research them.

Which file are you using to get this data? I was looking for a list of the costs and such earlier in order to do some data parsing of my own, but I couldn't find the right info and gave up. Is there an xml file in the directory that I should be looking at?

I got it from Link here. I extracted the XML files into a readable HTML form.

However, the source XML file is GC2Types.xml in the data/english directory. That file contains ALL ship parts. The tech tree (which you have to use to go from one weapon to the next) is in TechTree.xml.

Also, what size hull are you basing the data on? Since the size is not a constant, that might throw off your calculations a bit (though probably not by enough to affect your results).

The formula for size adjustment for hulls is not know (well, not to me). If someone does, I'd be willing to incorporate it into my analysis. Everything I've done is built from a spreadsheet, so it wouldn't be hard to add a few more columns.

Um, so I'm looking at this analysis again.....did you take into account that missiles do more damage at every tech level after the initial one

You seem to have missed the substance of the analysis.

It does take into account damage, but the damage is mated (as properly) to the size of the weapon.

A 2 damage missile weapon that takes up 8 space is no different from a 1 damage laser that takes up 4 space (in terms of overall damage output. There are inhierent advantages to having a small weapon). It's not the raw damage per weapon that matters; its the ratio of damage to size.

Check out the very last techs you'll see that a massive hull filled with missiles has a max dmg 30 to 40 points greater then one filled with the best beam weapons

OK, let's look at the last weapons then:

DoomRay: Tech cost is 49125. Ratio of size to damage is 5:11, or 1:2.2. Size is 10.
BlackHole Eruptor: Tech cost is 74250. Ratio of size to damage is 11:25, or 1:2 and 3/11. Size is 11.
Black Hole Gun: Tech cost is 65875. Ratio of size to damage is 3:8 or 1:2 and 2/3. Size is 6.

Overall, the BlackHole Gun is better than either. However, let's forget that for a moment and focus on lasers vs. missiles.

So you spend 74250 research on your precious BlackHole Eruptor. Meanwhile, since we're even (if you have a research advantage, I should lose regardless, right?) I spend the same quantity of research. However, I only need to drop 49125 to get my DoomRay. That leaves me with 25125 to spend on infrastructure. Or, maybe for a gag, I spend that on missile defense. And the final missile defense tech only costs 19970, so I still have 5155 research left to spend, perhaps on miniturization techs. I have my most powerful weapon of my class, the best defense against your weapon, and some other techs. Maybe I invest in manufacturing, so I have more ships than you. Maybe I invest in logistics, so my fleets are bigger than yours.

The minor difference in the size:damage ratios between the Doom Ray and the BlackHole Eruptor is negligable compared to the fact that it took you almost 50% more research to get it. In fact, I imagine that in such a game, you've already lost long before you even see BlackHole Eruptors.

The other thing is that I don't even need my biggest laser. The next-biggest laser, the Subspace Blaster is actually weaker than the weapon before it, so I would only research it as a stepping stone to the Doom Ray. If I don't bother with either of them, and stop at the 3rd best laser, I only need to spend 28925. That gives me a size:damage ratio of 1:1 and 3/5, or 5:8, which is good enough. The size of that gun is 5, so it's pretty tiny. And I save over 20,000 research that can be more wisely invested (in, say, missile defense). You'll be dead long before you see the BHE.

Ok now I see the factor you missed: beam weapons scale the worst while missiles scale the best.

Even if that is the case (and nobody has a specific formula for it, so I can't test anything), it does nothing to deal with the fact that someone going for lasers has an effective technological advantage to someone going for missiles. The guy going for missiles is going to be dead because he couldn't keep up tech-wise with the laser guy. He had to spend too much tech to get equivalently powerful weapons.

Even if that is the case

It is the case just start up a battle of the gods match and check it out. I can't help but feel your overestimating the effect of tech cost since A) tech trading with the AI can give a huge jump in any weapon tech line weapon techs are only part of the total techs you need to build a ship, meaning if 25% more reasearch to get the next weapon version does not directly translate into 25% extra reasearch to get the next version of your missile frigate (whatever you chose to make it) since the other techs involved dilute the research advantage.

Finally as I pointed out in an earlier post extra cost can't be simply cancelled out by increasing militrary production since overall cost of a ship effects its maintance cost.

The first thing I will say is this: this is why there's no multiplayer... because all you'll ever hear is people yelling "nerf!!!". For god sakes man, I had enough of that with the MMORPG. It's a single player game, if people are playing fine with guns, then let them enjoy it.


With that said, all I know is, I research up the beam tree until Disruptors III, and then I turn around and research up the missile tree, because I KNOW that I want Blackhole Erruptors as my main weapon, Subspace Blaster is a joke of a weapon that was meant to be between Phasor and Disruptors (it's even called Phasor7 internally), then there's no sign of the Subspace Annihilator that was suppose to be there, and Doom ray is actually bigger than Blackhole Erruptors while doing less damage. Don't want to believe me? Fire up "Battle of the Gods" and check the stats on a huge hull yourself.

So yes, your analysis of everything upto Disruptor is pretty much correct (at least for smaller hulls), because you can get that pretty fast, but if you start using large and huge hulls, you want to be using missiles (positronic torps will make Disruptors look silly). Plus, you don't want the very end of the laser tree, 'cause that's just worthless. But atleast it's better than the whole mass driver line, which just seems to be to get to nano-ripper (which has been nerfed anyways, so bleh) and the rest also worthless. The way it was designed, it's basically an early rush for Mass Drivers (for Nano-Rippers), then rush to Beams (for Disruptors, cheapest for its power, and a lot quicker to research than the other techs), then the final game is all about missiles. It's possible to go to Doom Ray of course, but that'll probably be the biggest waste of RP you can spend for the last 3 beam techs.

So, are beams good? Yeah, until you get Disruptors III. Are guns any good? Yeah, until you get Nano-Rippers. Are missiles good? Not until Blackhole Erruptors, or atleast Positronic Torps.


If you haven't realized yet, the reason beams are strong at the beginning, and works best for smaller hulls is also why the Dregins (who like smaller hulls) are said to like lasers in the game (at least from the tech descriptions). Which makes a lot of sense.

The first thing I will say is this: this is why there's no multiplayer... because all you'll ever hear is people yelling "nerf!!!". For god sakes man, I had enough of that with the MMORPG. It's a single player game, if people are playing fine with guns, then let them enjoy it.

Multiplayer, single player, it doesn't matter. AI's that happen to pick beam weapons have an inherient advantage against ones that don't. The notion of the game randomly deciding to take a path that is absolutely wrong is not good.

Plus, the game is supposed to have, as part of its design ethic, 3 balanced paths for weapons, such that any path is no better or worse than any other, primarily because the differentiation between the 3 is supposed to be defined by the enemy's reaction to your weapon choice. That's not what we have here.

And it doesn't have to be fixed with "nerfing"; all I'm asking for is balance. Indeed, once modding gets online, I'm going to rebalance the weapons to make them actually balanced.

With that said, all I know is, I research up the beam tree until Disruptors III, and then I turn around and research up the missile tree, because I KNOW that I want Blackhole Erruptors as my main weapon

Have you actually played games where researching down a 70,000+ point tree in addition to a ~20,000 point tree is a viable option? And that doesn't even count defenses. I've never played on huge maps, but I can't imagine how much time it would take to make that a viable strategy. My large-scale map games last long enough for my tastes (too long), and I haven't even seen Disrupter I, let alone Blackhole Eruptors (or large hulls, for that matter).

The viability of such a strategy aside, that doesn't change the fact that weapons are broken. You may not care about that, and are just willing to accept/work around the game as is, but I disagree. The weapon trees are not balanced, but the game doesn't treat missiles any differently from lasers. The fact that you have this pattern you have for large games proves this.

The design of the system is that the best weapon for you to use is the one that is not being defended by the opponent. That's the reason why they have different weapon types to begin with. Otherwise, there should only be one weapon type and one defense. If some weapons are preferrentially selected by being simply superior to others, or being cheaper to research than others, then you create an imbalance in the system. A smart player goes for lasers. Maybe in the long game, he can dive for BHEs, but even that choice is an imbalance, because it doesn't take into account what the enemy is doing. The design is not served by this imbalance, becuase you're not making choices based on what your enemy is doing.