I am very disappointed with Kinetic also. Lower damage, range, and accuracy than lasers.

On that list of things you mentioned, the only area Kinetics excel in is cost. Cost is meaningless because of how much production everything makes. Even Kinetics' Rate of Fire is pretty pitiful now, almost as slow as Lasers by default, unless you use Rapid Reload, which makes their accuracy even worse.

Kinetics are worse than Lasers in almost every other way:

• Base Range is 600 as opposed to 800/1100.

• Base Damage is 1 as opposed to 3/6. Base Lasers have 1 too, but they are available much sooner and take half the weight.

• Base RoF is 4 as opposed to 5/8. Even if you reduce their RoF to 2 with Rapid Reload, you fire four times for every missile, but for only 1/6 the damage, half the range, and 30% less accuracy, or 2.5 times for every laser for 1/3 the damage and 40% less accuracy.

• Base Weight is almost twice as much as Lasers.

• Base Accuracy is 75%, compared to 90%/100%. If you use Rapid Reload to give them their famed Rate of Fire advantage, it drops to 60%, so to use them effectively, it's necessary to either specialize in Targeting, pick a race that has Accuracy boosts, or load ships up with Targeting Scanners, or all of the above. However, since Kinetics are also very heavy, targeting scanners take space you can't afford unless you go full miniaturization on everything.

 

It should be noted that Durantium weapons were not nerfed at the end of beta, except in Rate of Fire, so those are still worth building. Unfortunately, this means if you want Kinetics, you better have lots of Durantium, because that's the only way you're getting anything out of them until you reach the last tech. Singularity Drivers are the same power as a Durantium Driver, but is heavier. The final level in Lasers and Missiles are each twice as powerful as their best Resource weapon, but at the very least Kinetics finally catches up to them in total DPS per weapon, even if they're still much heavier, less accurate, and shorter ranged.

Kinetics were heavily over-nerfed. They probably were overpowered, but now? Let's just say there's a serious Durantium shortage in the galaxy due to this. I keep saying this, but Kinetics need to be buffed slightly to be competitive again. Something like:

Railguns: DMG 2

Pulse Cannons: DMG 4

Graviton Thrower: DMG 6

Quantum Driver: DMG 10

Singularity Driver: DMG 14

This would make them good again. Fair, but still weaker in damage-per-shot, range, accuracy, and weight. No more having to jump through hoops just to make them usable. Durantium becomes an option rather than a necessity. As they are now, a tier 1 Frigate, a Medium ship, only has enough room to increase its Kinetic Attack to 2 and have an Armor of 8. No room for shields, point defense, life support, or engines. Not even enough room for Rapid Reload to make that 2 Kinetic Attack usable. Pathetic. Even the AI won't use default kinetics on their ships anymore, and they still build Thulium Research Archives on squares with nothing next to them. Oh sure, they'll still research Kinetics, but they won't use them outside of Durantium Drivers or ships that come with all 3 weapon types by default.

Well Paul is wrong about one thing, they certainly aren't low Mass, or I'd agree with him. They're low cost, as in they take less Manufacturing to build, but they have almost double the Mass requirements of Lasers. They're actually the highest mass weapons in the game by far, even moreso than Missiles, so you can't pile them on, in fact you can barely fit one onto a Tiny ship. I would love to pile them on to make up for their lack of damage per shot. If you could actually do that, all my complaints would go away.

That's a great post on Kinetics, right there Vid.

I hope Paul reads it, It more or less shoots holes in what he was saying. At the end of bragging about them he might have said that buffing them a little was not out of the question, but I am not 100% sure he said it. It might be wishful thinking on my part.

Edit: I am sure I misquoted Paul on the mass of K weapons. What he said was that you can reduce the mass with shrinking tech. Later he said they might reduce the mass a little bit.

Oh hell no, that would be extremely overpowered. Keep in mind that Rapid Reload doubles its Rate of Fire, so you'd get 8 shots for every missile -- lower damage per shot, but nearly twice as much DPS even with their low accuracy factored in! Plus, that also breaks Armor extremely fast, so you wouldn't even need Armor Piercing.

Also, my custom race has +30% accuracy, so if I trade an AI for Targeting, I can use rapid reload kinetics with 100% accuracy.

Imagine this, though: before the nerf, Railguns had a RoF of 3 and a damage of 4. Holy crap, right? They needed a nerf, but the nerf was too much, and probably based on incorrect assumptions (i.e. that they are low mass instead of high mass).

It's been "fixed" since this post was made. Standard Kinetics now have a flat mass cost of 18 across all tiers, which is equal to missiles at the outset, and equal to lasers at the finish. I still think the first two tiers need a slight buff (reduce their mass slightly more), but at least now the later tiers are balanced.

 

Could you go into more detail here please?  How exactly does armor work, and what is the salvage ratio I saw in the xml file?  If a target has say 10 kinetic armor and I hit it for 1 damage does it go down by 1?  Do I need to do 11+ damage to 'break' the armor?  There is no information in the tooltips or tutorial about how these numbers actually work.

 

So let me make sure I get this straight, lets assume very early game ships, 1 kinetic weapon and 1 set of kinetic defense.  (I don't actually remember how much a unit of kinetic defense provides, so we'll assume 5).

If two of these ships fight each other, the offensive roll can only be 1, and will always be 1, because the roll is 1-1.  The defense roll is 1-5.  Since the defense roll can never be lower than 1 either, every successful attack (as in a non-miss) should reduce armor by 1.  After the armor hits 0, it will just always do 1 damage.  Is this correct so far?

How do multiple weapons work, does the sum of their values get 'rolled', or do they roll independently?  What about fleets?  Sums, or independent?  And you said "Current single strongest defense mod", are you saying that shields can reduce damage taken from kinetics?  or chaff?  Why would that be the case?  

Also, how do you know this information, where is it available for reading?

 

So two armor mods that add up to 10 wouldn't be as good as a single mod that provides 10 damage, simply because you can't roll as high on the two smaller rolls?

I Believe the diference is: if you have 1 armor on 10 points, when it gets to 0, it's over. When you have 2, one will take damage and be reduced to lower than 10, then the other will be used untill it lowers to below the first armor current points, then it changes to the other armor again and so on, using all the armor hitpoints (20), but with rolls of up to (10), effectively doubling how long it takes to bypass that defense. Also, lets say ever time the gun roll a 5, and the armor, the max number allowed, if you have one armor, it would go (10) [full], (9) [took 1 hit], (8), (7)... while if you have 2 armors it goes (10)[full], (10) [ther first got down to 9 points, but there was another armor with 10 points, which is now the current stronger] (9), (9) and so on... I know I'm posting waaaaaaaay too long since you asked, but I hope it is still usefull (and accuarate)