Heavy beam cannons ignoring target orders

[RCIX]

I'll sometimes order a heavy beam cannon to blast targets at the other end of a large group of units, and they'll merrily continue to fire at other targets.

[keith.lamothe]

Do you mean that the beams hit units between the cannon and the target, or is it actually shooting in some totally different direction?

[RCIX]

WEll, i'll usually order them to target something in the same direction it's already firing then it s beams will halt at some other ship more-or-less on the way to the target. If i see that it fires a different direction though i'll notify you.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, these beam weapons actually lose strength as they do damage, so if there's some hostile in the way with enough hp the beam won't make it to the target.  On the other hand, if it gets to the target, destroys it, and still has strength left it will punch through and hit any hostile behind it (within max range), too.

This is pretty different from the beam frigate and beam starship, which literally do a line-shaped aoe attack with equal strength against each hostile intersected by the line.  It also just draws the line to the target, not to maximum range through the target.  If I made the heavy beam cannons use this kind of attack I'd have to divide the attack power by some huge factor to balance it, and it just didn't seem to fit with the theme to have them be so weak.

[triggerman602]

can you make beam frigates act like the heavy beam cannons?

id say pick one type of beam behavior and use it across the board for consistency.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, I can make both beam frigates and beam starships act like the beam cannons.  They'll need to be rebalanced as the mechanics are so different, but if that's what people want I'm all for it.

[keith.lamothe]

Actually, on second thought, I don't think it would work for beam frigates since those sometimes show up in 1000+ swarms and the beam-cannon behavior probably would really drag down performance there.  Of course, so does the normal behavior in that case, just to a lesser degree.

I would probably explain it as the red beams being a sort of penetrating radiation that's tough to generate in huge amounts, and the green (in 3.085) beams being a giant wall of energy that doesn't skip anything, it just kicks the door down.

[RCIX]

Ah, ok. That makes sense then. You can mark this as completed