Weapons of all types should come with a penalty to a ships HP.



When considering how effective the 'Glass Cannon' design tactic, it occurred to me why don't modern ship have very meany guns on them?



I mean, they have the room, they have the Armour, supply isn't a concern for ES, And turrets are usually themselves quite armored......But a ships magazine usually blows up in those action films and such!



Huh.....how many magazines would you need for a destroyer with over 20 weapons of different types....WOW!



So to reflect how easy it would be to blow those ships up and thus promote the use (and possibly extension) of other modules, i suggest weapons should penalize a ships HP, thus ending the 'Glass Cannon' tactic.



This will however make it very easy for larger ships to stay alive, effectively switching dominance of ship sizes.

Alternatively, just limit the number of weapons that can be added to each hull type.



This reduces overall damage output, makes ships more survivable and solves a few other balance problems that occur right now. This could even force the AI to be more diverse. E.g. by giving a hull a specific slot for say, missiles - all ships will start carrying missiles *and* beams or kinetics. This will require ships to carry more defense of different types too.



The only drawback is that I am quite a big fan of the "design from scratch" and design without too many restrictions concepts, but this is less of an issue when more modules/weapon types appear.

EvilTactician, you could simply have each weapon of the same class (kinetic, beam, missile) cost more than the one that came before it and you would achieve roughly the same goal without placing a hard cap on anything.

Just limiting the number is a rather uncreative way of doing it, limiting creativity in designing.



This way you can add as many as you would like, but would have to face the problems of doing so.

I don't think you'd need that many magazines...Most ships only have one magazine, sometimes two if missile launchers are on opposite side of the ship and one magazine can't handle both directions. Considering the size of these ships, having a magazine or two large enough for all of your kinetic rounds and missiles likely isn't too big of an issue. I'm not mentioning beam weapons, because I imagine a laser would, well, produce it's own ammo. You just need it's power source.



The reason glass cannons work is that we don't have to consider the same things in game we do in real life. Living space, storage for food and supplies, engineering sections (okay, maybe this one a bit, since there are engine mods). And I don't any government would really approve of a fleet that's sole purpose is to go out with a huge bang...That's a lot of resources and manpower that is getting sent out to die that could be put to better use.

Even so this idea would solve a lot of problems that we currently face, from the short combats do to ships easy killing each other, to fleet diversity to module diversity.



You just gotta sit back for a second and think about the implications of what i am suggesting.