Capships, increasingly slower fighters? Or strategic weapons?

[Tenacity]

you can limit firing arcs, that pretty much reduces the ability of weapons to be effective at close ranges.

And no, i didnt leave out fighters - fighters are designed to be anti-bomber, and most fleets that want to take out enemy caps will be bringing bombers along.

The problem is that none of this can be done without a character wipe. We'd have to change all of the turrets currently available, and remove many of them, to createa a rock/paper/scissors setup, and you cant do that without forcing a wipe.

Basically the way I see things:

Battleships > everything at close ranges (Defense cannons + flak cannons)
Cruisers > battleships and gunboats at long range (artillery)
Gunboats > Fighters/bombers
Bombers > Cruisers at short range, and > battleships at long range
Fighters > Bombers

Fighters have their own heirarchy as well - Heavy fighters (including VHF's) have the higher firepower but are outmanuvered by light fighters.

basically you just have to focus each ship on a specific type of weapon-

Battleships would have two weapon types - flak turrets for anti-fighter (extremely high projectile speed and decent damage, medium refire rate, easy aiming with 360degree firing arcs; but short range), and defense turrets for anti-capship (decent projectile speed, high damage but somewhat restricted firing arcs, say 180degrees, and medium/short range).

Cruisers would focus entirely on artillery weapons - Extremely long range and extremely high projectile speed, but very limited firing arcs. A cruiser would thus be worthless at short ranges, because it wouldnt be able to turn to hit the target - think something along the lines of the liberty cruiser forward gun, but with a much higher projectile speed and higher damage. Ideally a cruiser should attempt to use it's speed (higher than a battleship) to keep at a good distance from the enemy, while pummeling it with heavy hitting guns. The counter is being weak at close range.

Gunboats would focus entirely on short-range anti-fighter weaponry like missile turrets and solaris turrets. These weapons wouldnt have enough firepower to take out larger ships unless several gunboats group up against a single enemy. They'd get torn to peices by battleship turrets, but would be able to swarm cruisers, avoiding the cruiser artillery cannons while using weak shots to wear him down over time.

Bombers would need to be rebalanced to have their primary weapons (supernovas, currently) more effective when fired from a longer range, so they could stay out of the flak turret range of battleships - they'd still need to be effective at close ranges as well to exploit the cruiser's 'deadzone' and get in close where the artillery guns cant hit them. All bombers would need agility reduced somewhat to make them more susceptible to fighters.

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