#Some ideas for front mounted cannons late game

25 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

loud mountain
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Standard cannons and Large cannons are pretty interesting weapons but they have the issue of taking a lot of frontal space that's not really fixed by the overclock for large enough ships.

They are quite difficult to protect, not having enough pen resistance to protect against LCs and above, and their dps, while decent for their price, is absolutely too low for something that will probably die quickly (because front mounted) I think the highest "optimised" full frontal cannon build that's viable for carreer is around 900k (higher for avoiders, but I'm considering that you have other ships to worry about in carrer so I try to exclude direct control ships as much as possible in my reasonings for career).

I think there should be a way to further increase the survivability of frontal guns. Losing dps as soon as the fight starts is too punishing. If lose 20% of your dps from a DC volley while you still haven't scratched the opponents paint, it's pretty obvious what way the fight is going.

This is even more obvious now that thermal weapons are a thing. As a budget weapon, where you use numbers to your advantage, you do not have the money to spend on expensive piping and cooling, unless you're already using overclocks. But even then, all that supplementary piping is a weakness in your already squishy armor. All my frontal cannon designs use some sort of internal armor shell to separate the guns from the rest of the ship. It sadly gets in the way of logistics, as you don't want factories on sacrificable parts of your ship.

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Here's what I'm proposing :
Cannons synergise with themselves when clustered (adjacent), getting damage reduction, increased penetration resistance, BUT, share their health pool. This encourages clustering small (3-4) guns together (they still need individual logistics) for the additional survivability, but also discourages grouping too much of them together where insanely high damage weapons can take out the whole cluster at once. (ions, nukes, DCs) - Maybe also have a cap to the damage reduction.

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Offensively, I'd also like to see this clustering offer some bonuses. Guns in a cluster will benefit from increased fire rate (can be set to fire in salvo or in succession). They also get reduced fire chance from penetrating cannon hits and increased tolerance to hull heat.

They do not allow heat passthrough, so no OC gun snek abomination, you still need proper logistics. They don't share ammo either. The idea is purely to give a bit more depth to some of the most simple weapons in Cosmoteer, to give them a bit more relevance and reasons to use them late game.

If only one thing could be considered, penetration resistance. It's too easy to just hit storages behind frontal cannons, and shield logistics get more and more infeasible late game on such a large frontline, you just spread your force too thin. If something goes down, be it the cannons first, so you can actually use their high hp.

charred sail
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One problem I see then is that, if your cannons go down, you're dead anyways.

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I think it's all right if some weapons become less useful in higher tiers, honestly.

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After all; not everything needs to have complicated mechanics!

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It's good to have simple things to start out with, and it's all right to leave them behind when leaving the early-to-mid game.

loud mountain
charred sail
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The problem is, parts locking together into one mega-part isn't really intuitive.

loud mountain
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I'm not asking them to be viable at like 3mil either

charred sail
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And just having adjacency buffs while being separate parts, while better, is hard to balance; on one hand, you want it to give a noticeable improvement. On the other hand, you want it to not be overpowered. On the third hand, you don't want it to be the clearly optimal strategy in all cases.

zinc turtle
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something i will say is large cannons with overclock + trls do incredible fucking damage and with proper shielding, ~8 or so with a beefy TRL or two can very much last longer than regular cannons

is it cost effective? kind of? it is costly but its the strongest synergy in the game and can cut through armor decently well and melts internals. its probably very cost effective but it still costs a lot.

i will say i do agree its a bit hard to shield cannons later game, overclocked shield or not. i use oc large shields with oc large cannons and i only have like 8 with the surface area i do have. tbf its still more than enough damage becasue of trl making a great synergy, but the cannons still heavily rely on the TRL to do their maximum potential damage, otherwise its just a fraction of their damage

my only problem with upgrading my guns later from large cannon to deck gun is that un-oc and oc deck guns are kinda really boring vs the other 2 cannons, both which are extremely fucking fun vs the other (unrelated but its wild that the deck gun has higher firerate than the large cannon 💀)

tl;dr: trl can help tremendously with surface area issues on large cannons especialyl when oc'd and can decently help small cannons but overclocked large shield or not you're still missing surface area when using large shields

loud mountain
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I'm just asking for a small bonus to make them easier to use past the first system without being overshadowed by the deck cannon who's like a straight upgrade the moment you can afford it in career

I tried using frontal guns but my overly complicated shielded large cannon set-up just paled in front of like
1 DC behind 7 layers of armor

zinc turtle
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i actually disagree with th estraight upgrade hing, i was able to use oc smalls till the 2nd system (I think 4-7) and performed just fine. i just stopped because i wanted to try something new.

i was in i think 7-9 and still using oc larges and TRL and could definitely go into 10-12 probably just fine. if i didnt lack defenses later i could last longer and expand myself sideways

i can see what you mean by straight upgrade without oc though as while it is slower it hurts a lot more. though even an oc deck gun with trl can never come close to oc large and trl

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i do think TRL can make frontal guns more viable as you need less surface area for more damage, at the cost of holy crew members

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and reactor stress

loud mountain
pastel current
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interesting idea, not sure how I feel about it

smoky tinsel
loud mountain
smoky tinsel
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Why? You can get more cannons firing at the enemy while presenting the same profile to them.

wet lynx
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v rammer always works

loud mountain
zinc turtle
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diagonal is worse in terms of moving around but it can pack a lot more firepower into an area which id say depends on the situation

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-# which makes me think of how ironic it is that imperium use diagonals and are their own weakness