The Kinetic weapons fire nearly twice if not 3x as much as the beam weapons. However they are the 'shortest' range. If you can survive long enough once you get into range kinetics EAT UP anything they touch. 

Tips:

Put 2, 3 or 4 thrusters on your ships. This causes your ships to move MUCH faster in the arena getting you to their targets faster.

Load up on Shields first then Point Defense.

If room allows it, put a jammer on your ship. 

Personally, until the AI gets better at designing ships to counter or for special purpose I will stick to beam weapons as they are just too damn good. 

I think the designers want you use to use tiny ships as cannon fodder.  If you had 10 tiny and a massive with kinetic guns it would tear things up.  Haven't tried a carrier/kinetic combo yet, but it seems like it would be extremely deadly.

Completely agree.  I see no reason why they can't put range (and firing rate) into the weapon description right along with mass, damage.. etc.

Larsenex's tips are good, yes you need to remove weapons to make room for thrusters (and other augments - jammer, range increase..) but having a ship with half the fire power actually get into the fight is better that one with 2x fire power that gets destroyed before it gets a shot off.  Unlike GC2, you really need to thing out your ship and fleet configuration before going into battle.  You probably even want to have at least 2 different specially configured fleets when taking on an enemy.   One setup to counter enemy fleets and now that starbases are beefed up, one to take them out.  Fights look like they will require much more thought than they used too

I think carriers get tiny free ships.

God this is so exciting, I'm close to my first war and this info is invaluable.

I like the way kinetic weapons sound, I agree with the sifi reasoning.

Like, yeah.

I'd like missiles to have longest range, beams middling and kinetic shortest. As it stands now it looks like you need to research one weapon (beams) and all three defenses plus all the enhancements.

Over very large distances this is true, but I don't think that would be worth modelling in-game simply because combat distances of light-seconds would have negligible slowdown, and even at those distances it would be tough to hit anything. Impossible to hit a moving target unless the slugs you were throwing were themselves either guided or moving at near-light speed. At 2 light seconds, targeting even with lasers and light-speed slugs becomes extremely problematic against a manuevering target because even for a future computer that thinks at incredible pace, it takes 2 seconds for you to notice any course corrections the enemy makes. Then your shot will take an additional two seconds to arrive on target. Thus, any slight modification made to the momentum of the enemy ship in that 4 second total window will result in a total miss (because 2ls distances themselves are already incredibly hard to aim at precisely).

Lasers (literal lasers, not the class of weapons in gal civ) would bloom out in all directions and probably still hit targets in a fair radius, but as the beam de-coheres over distance like that, it also loses its ability to do meaningful damage. At a couple of LS, you're probably just warming their hull slightly instead of blowing a hole in them.

One light-second is 186,282.397 miles. The intensity of a laser drops over distance because of quantum phenomena causing photons to spread out. In practice, hand-held laser beams in the visible spectrum bloom enormously, to the point that a beam a couple of mm wide will be several times wider on the other side of a football field. Larger lasers of specific types are much less prone to blooming, but the theoretical minimum that an ideal laser can expand over distance in a vacuum is such that were you to fire a beam from the Earth to the Moon (~1.3 light-seconds) the intensity of the beam would be 1/4 of what it was at the source (double the radius; 4x the area). That's pretty good if you've got hugely powerful lasers, but this is also requiring 8 meter apertures and is reaching distances where laser beams can be avoided to some degree thanks to random manoeuvring (2.6 second round trip time from spotting enemy position to firing laser beam at them, assuming it takes 0 seconds to aim your gun and process where they are).

Lasers can shoot down incoming missiles. In some SF circles there is an ongoing "Lasers vs Missiles" debate, but ultimately the winner depends on how cheap missiles are, how powerful engines are, and how effective lasers are in a given setting.

Still 25% after 238,900 miles (384,400 km) ?   What ranges are you proposing for space battles?  I stand by "gradual".   And how long would a missile take to go 1.3 light-seconds?   If you were able to manage a velocity of 0.1 of the speed of light (which is practically ridiculous) that's 13 seconds.   Fortunately, in a space game we are not dealing with reality.

EDIT:   The sources I have been checking suggest the dissipation over 238,900 miles would be a lot more than 25%.  That weakens my argument, but I am thinking space spaces (as suggested by the battle view scales) would be engaging at far closer ranges.

Oh well, thanks for getting me thinking about laser light...odd, I have just been reading Feynman's book on QED, which is a lot about light, most of which I am very slowly absorbing.

Combat range would presumably be dictated by the weapons themselves, but the thing about missiles is that you can launch salvoes at enormous distances and have them coast to target, activating a final heavy burn to make them difficult to hit when in weapon range of the target. Two targets moving towards each other in real-space could be aware that combat is happening days in advance and launch their weapons 24 hours or more before actually meeting. Light second distances are problems for unguided weapons, but not for missiles. Yes, travel time would be long, but since they have independent propulsion that's not an issue.

If you're firing slugs, combat ranges would be quite short. Lasers could be short, medium, or long, depending on how powerful the laser is, what kind of laser it was, and how close to the theoretical ideal cases you can get in terms of the beam spread. In my personal opinion, Lasers will never achieve significant fractions of light-seconds as feasible combat ranges unless they are huge ones mounted on space stations or something like that. But SF, and all that

FTL rules in-universe can behave however the author wants them to. It can allow ships to close distances very quickly if we are talking about arbitrary FTL, where it's sort of "fly anywhere" at super speed. Trek ships have this. Some FTL takes place in an alternate dimension, like Slipspace or Hyperspace. Some FTL is like in The Mote in God's Eye or The Forever War where it only takes place at specific objects or points in space - and these points can be blockaded and monitored easily but combat itself is a strictly conventional Slower Than Light affair. If you have Trek style Impulse Drive or Mass Effect style FTL drives, missiles themselvse can be equipped with partial FTL functionality to travel either at the speed of light, or faster. This makes combat ranges enormous to the point where beam weapons should in principle be irrelevant (the writers often do not realise or ignore this side of things). For Galactic Civilizations, the world-building has always been pretty vague and they like to include pretty much every trope from every SF series. Wormhole travel, stargate travel, Warp Drive travel. It's all here.

The ranges we see in battle viewer are obviously ludicrously close so we can see all units on screen at once. Same reason why hollywood has F22s engaging transformers within spitting distance or Star Trek fights almost always happen where the enemy ship is well within visual range (even when we see exterior shots that are NOT subject to "viewscreen magnification" or other excuses that fans will bring up).

While I understand it's a game so rock/paper/scissors. But if there would be a touch of reality, I don't really think it's the range of the weapons so much as the targeting computers. Armor would honestly have the same protection from missiles as it would from kinetics as well as beam weapons. Honestly.

Missiles would actually be the most accurate because of self guidance programs (susceptible to jamming of course). We can send a cruise missile that can follow the contour of the land. Locking on to a ship that theoretically moves slower than a missile would be simple especially a capital ship. Small bursts of fuel for corrections in a vacuum would be negligible. They would be hard to counter especially if sent as MIRVS or simply in vast numbers. What if you had a really big missile with an FTL drive, how would you stop that?

Kinetics would have an almost infinite range but would be limited by the ability to target the enemy. So it makes sense they would be short range heavy hitter weapons.

Energy weapons are cool but somewhat impractical once again because it would have to be based on the accuracy of the targeting computer, but because of it's speed it should be a medium range weapon.

I'd rate it this way.

Missiles:

range: long (+3)

damage: medium (+2)

accuracy: high (+3)

cost: very high (-3) (it takes space to carry munitions like missiles)

TOTAL: (+5)

Kinetics:

range: short (+1)

damage: high (+3)

accuracy: medium (+2)

cost: low (-1)

TOTAL: (+5)

Energy Weapons:

range: medium (+2)

damage: medium (+2)

accuracy: high (+3)

cost: high (-2)

TOTAL: (+5)

I have no clue what I'm talking about but I just wanted to contribute to this convo. Seems plausible in my mind.

Depends entirely on how the FTL works and how the sensors work. For example, if the long range sensors operate through hyperspace or something like that, it's plausible that you're capable of detecting ships that are moving through hyperspace at incredible ranges yet be unable to detect anything in real-space except by bouncing light off it. Conversely it might be the case that it's magic trek sensors that can see everything at implausible range through unexplained mechanisms (except when the strange mineral of the week is blocking sensors).

You argue that you can maneuver around missiles and such, but it once again depends on the situation. Suppose I launch a spread pattern of 7 missiles, one aimed based on your current trajectory and the other six steering outwards at various angles anticipating where you could potentially maneuver to. There is no such thing as "range" on these missiles, just delta-V, they can just cruise towards you for a month if necessary and only activate their engines in response to your changing momentum when you do burns to maneuver. Outrunning the missiles consists of extending beyond their own capacity to burn by cancelling out their momentum relative to you, matching their speed and trajectory such that they will never hit you. They keep accelerating, so you have to keep accelerating the same direction. This is possible, but you have now conceded the battlefield. If you were defending your home-world it's now a pile of radioactive debris because you had to outrun my missiles.

I could launch my payload in waves of missiles at light-second intervals away and keep a portion in reserve. I could chase you down and keep firing, my own engines matching YOUR engines, and if I can run you out of Delta-V, you won't be able to run away anymore and I can fire my reserve. Luckily for you, we now enter the point defense phase of things, where you use your laser that you were hoping to kill me with to intercept the incoming missiles. Can you do it in time? We don't know, find out on the next exciting episode of Boy I Wish I Didn't Care About Realism Because this is Boring. In any case though, you've now been neutralized as a threat if you can no-longer pursue me because you have to outrun my missiles and I've returned to base to seek resupply. A long slog, a battle of maneuver and positioning the results of which could probably be optimally calculated by a computer program.

The wrinkle comes when we get FTL and exotic drives though. In these games it's simplified as being a battle takes place whenever my guys run into your guys on the game map. This might imply that combat is taking place at FTL speeds, or that FTL is periodically de-activated over long journeys, at which point fighting can occur in real-space at normal velocities. If I can use magical impulse drive (like Trek) to attain huge sublight speeds, then can't I also make impulse missiles? And if combat is taking place at FTL, can I use "warp sustainer" type things to make my missiles also fire at FTL? Or if it's like alternate hyperspace dimension the rules could be bloody anything I please. It's impossible to answer without a firm grounding in the lore and GalCiv lore is an inconsistent, throw-everything-in-at-once type of deal that rarely goes into any detail. Since it's an abstract game we don't actually see detailed realistic combat going on - the battleviewer is pretty laughable with everyone firing at ludicrously close ranges and stuff.