On Spire Frigates: yea, they die plenty quick when the fighting gets heavy. And I don't think the ones you get "free" with the refugee outpost need any additional cost, you've paid that already. Though I may decrease the cap-per-structure from4 to 2 (maybe 3?), like I said.
On the Photon Bombardment Cannons:
Yes, their effectiveness varies widely with positioning, etc. That's part of what makes them different from the human heavy-beam-cannons. The other part is the blatantly absurd dps. A Spire Dreadnought's main cannon, over its full firing-and-reloading cycle (10 seconds), has a dps of
1.2 MILLION. It does the full 12 million in roughly 2 seconds (the firing time, then reloads for 8 seconds). For reference, an AI-controled Armored Golem has 25 million hitpoints.
If I change the PBC's to track with their primary target, I'll have to massively nerf that dps down much closer to the human HBC levels (a mkIV does a total of 2 million every 4 seconds, or 0.5M dps, and it is also very difficult to get full-damage-application due to the wide fan).
The main difficulty I see with the current implementation is that it is possible for a player to micro to get much better performance, and thus some players will feel compelled to do so regardless of need, and will have less overall fun because they're microing. It's supposed to be a "yes, they miss a lot, just let them, you'll still come out ahead" thing.
Of course, with how excruciatingly hard the event-attacks have been, players have been forced to be highly creative (I've actually been really impressed with how well y'all have done), and naturally have felt the need to exploit the PBC's micro-ability to the max, which isn't really very fun. We're working on getting the difficulty down to the point where that's just not needed. Has anyone had a chance to see if 4.039 is any better than 4.038 (and previous) in that regard, by the way?
And I can increase the range of the higher-than-frigate main cannons, I just have to keep it below the smallest range of the weapon modules they can mount or they won't properly close the range to use all their weapons. I'm planning to add some new modules soon, it's just a higher priority to address stuff like fallen-spire balance, massive-waves-of-zelec-bombers, crash bugs (not many of those left, it seems), etc.
On the Spire defense platforms:
Yes, I was hoping that by making the city hubs basically indestructible you'd be far more willing to take advantage of their defensive capacity. You see, I really like the whole multiple-nodes-of-multiple-modules-each starbase thing, and I want you to want to use it
So I'd like to avoid shifting that usage to the defensive platform thing since it's basically either a spire-turret or spire-fortress type thing (though I'm not saying the latter isn't coming
).
At this stage, why do you want the platforms? Because you don't want your cities in a fight? Because you can't position the cities where you need your defense points? Or because you simply need extra firepower, over and above what the capital ships and city defenses can give you?
