Fix Gunboat Turrets

[Antonio]

The addition of spread to their primary turrets, causing them to be less accurate than even gatling turrets.
The reduction of damage of Gunboat Cerberus Turrets from 6,000 to 3,000, making them weaker even than Gunboat Solaris turrets. That's insane. They're way slower AND way weaker, all while still having comparable energy efficiency to gunboat primaries.

I'll start with primaries. Remove their spread. Don't nerf them in any other way after removing their spread. Leave them as they were before. They were not OP. Gunboats are intended to function as the intermediary between fighters and capitals. They're supposed to be strong. Their primaries are a meant to be a well-balanced weapon that is effective against snubs, albeit less effective than solaris, while having extra damage so that they won't be completely defenseless against larger ships. With their spread, a gunboat intending to serve its originally intended purpose as anti-snub must equip a full loadout of solaris, making it completely defenseless against capitals. The way they are right now, a cruiser with a balanced loadout can annihilate two gunboats at once while still being more effective than a gunboat against fighters and battleships at the same time.

"Recent" nerf for primary turrets is misleading unless you just woke up from the grave, they've had spread for at least 3-4 years. You also missed a change where they got buffed (more dps and power consumption, but since gunboat prims used to draw 0 power it was a flat buff). Cerberuses do 6k damage, as explained above. Making them a heavy slot would nerf them unnecessarily, they're nothing special as a prim slot.

You're saying a cruiser with a balanced loadout (I assume prims, pulses and a mortar) can "annihilate" 2 gunboats while the reality is that just 1 gunboat with an anti-cap loadout will annihilate the cruiser. It requires skill and patience, but there's very little the cruiser can do. Two gunboats with pulses and cerbs will always annihilate the cruiser, even if the cruiser has solarises.

Gunboats are still the most versatile class in the game. They got nerfed, no one's denying that, but so what? They're still devastating and very hard to deal with reliably except by throwing many snubs at them. That's their main weakness and if it didn't exist, gunboats would dominate all fights indiscriminately. You don't have to take my word for it, take my actions.





And many more. It's a fact that gunboats are still the most valuable class in the game. Reasons why they aren't popular have nothing to do with strength or usefulness, it's because of the following:

1. Flying style is repetitive, tedious and punishing - by far the biggest reason why almost no one flies them. Against capital ships you're constantly circling around them, keeping max range of your guns, trying to not get too close. It takes a long time because of low damage compared to other cap classes, which after a fight or two becomes a chore. Against snubs it's better because you feel you have a bigger impact, but that also becomes repetitive when you realise you're just there to provide area of denial for your own snubs which you depend on because you can't finish enemies off reliably. That's fine strength and importance-wise, but it's not fun.

2. Hard to master - they're very easy to learn, but mastering stuff like perfectly managing range on the fastest-paced cap class will naturally draw people away from it. One mistake can mean an instakill or all your regens gone, and it can happen in a split second. I've no doubt you haven't mastered them or this thread wouldn't exist in the first place.

3. Lack of guns - gunboats have the least amount of gun variance of all classes. Even battlecruisers have sci data codes or stuff like the apocalypse missile that does 1 million damage.


If they need any change it's because of how boring they are, not because of balance issues. How to make them fun? For one, making prim slot pulses to bring back pulse/razor loadouts. Razors in their current nerfed state are nothing to be afraid of, and those loadouts were fun to use back in the day. Also introduction of at least a few new guns, some of which @Tenacity mentioned, including scientific data guns. Make the annihilator usable on all gunboats, not just heavy ones, with nerfed stats accordingly. Why not make a heavy slot cerb or generic prim while keeping regular cerbs and prims, or make regular slot pulses while keeping heavy slot pulses? New guns aren't hard to make, and they'd help diversify loadouts a lot.

The justification for this is: "Gunboats are OP. 3 Skilled gunboats can take out a battleship."

Source?

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tl;dr Gunboats are still the most versatile class in the game. They need a change because they're not fun to fly, not because they aren't strong.

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