I do not agree with everything, but see also that weapons seem somewhat unfinished.

What we should have:

- Resource cost should go up per tech level in a consistent way.

- Weapons without resource cost should be weaker overall than weapons with resource cost of the same tech level.

Apart from that I disagree that every weapon of the same tech evel should have identical stats and just a different damage type. That would be bland. Actually it's one of the points I love not so much about GalCiv that there are just three damage types and no special weapons with unique effects.

What I also miss is Brad's promise that in Crusade every weapon on a ship fires individually. As much as I look for it I couldn't see that effect anywhere in the game. That alone would be a huge step forward for our tactical choices.

also im not sure i understand what you mean about every ship firing individually, you mean visually or mathematically? mathematically would have an interesting effect because the damage you do to defenses per salvo would change from a linear random distribution to a binomial distribution.

I've tried  the missile firing squad before and it wasn't as great as you would hope, although the numbers are quite different now, i suppose it warrants a retry. as i mentioned before they only got one shot off before they got shot back at, and the way targets are prioritized all your like-classed ships attack the same target, and overkill is wasted damage so they were susceptible to swarming too.

@zuPloed - Jamming and Accuracy are both broken in my book and need a good look by the devs. Stacking stat, where all other stats have a base + modifier.

As for variety, I mean your examples, but also special weapons like ones that target only ship drives (normal drives and thrusters alike), kill the crew (ship is then effectively out of order and could perhaps be captured, works only against biological crews), have an area effect and the like.

Firing individually means just that. Right now if you have 5 mass drivers with 2 attack on your ship if would fire once with 10 kinetic attack on a single target. If it could instead fire all five weapons individually on different targets it would make a big tactical difference whether you put a bunch of small weapons on your ship to fight of small, weakly defended targets or only a few big weapons to target big ships with lot of defences.

I agree with most of the things said.

One of my biggest issues with weapon types is the "needless diversity". One good example is attack speed.

To me, attack speed is a pointless mechanic in a strategic level game as this. At the end of the day, its about how much damage I do.

When I look at an enemy fleet I don't get to see their attack speed, I see their damage numbers. So that's the number that should be focused on.

If we want missiles to have better range than kinetics, ok....lower missile damage and give them the same attack speed.

If we want kinetics to burn through their defenses quicker than missiles, ok....lower the defense of armor so its weaker overall.

While I don't mind diversity, if the combat mechanics require a calculator to really understand how much damage your doing than something is wrong. That complexity is fine in tactical combat and RTS style combat games...but for high level strategic combat like in GalCiv 3 it distracts from the core decision making.