Questions about kinetic weapon balance

Durantium driver OP?

Hello all!

After having played a lot of GalCiv2 back in the days, I only recently started playing part III.

After a couple of failed attempts, I slowly get the hang of the new part as compared to the older one.

Now, I'm currently playing a game as Terrans on normal difficulty, version 2.71, no expansions or mods.

I decided to go for kinetic weapons and have researched them up to Quantum Drivers. Thing is, it seems to me that the measly Durantium driver, which I acquired ages ago, is still the best/most efficient weapon I have. Sure, it's relatively expensive, but it has by far the best damage/mass ratio - if I want high firepower the Durantium driver is the best way to go. Durantium is easy to come by, so Durantium costs don't matter much.

Both Graviton and Quantum drivers have twice the mass for the same (GD) or one higher damage output (QD) respectively. So I wonder - is there anything about those techs that gives an advantage over the DD? They seem to have the same range and reload time(?) - so why even develop those relatively costly techs if the best kinetic weapon is already availably relatively early in the game?

In other words, unless I'm missing something here, which is quite possible, given that I'm still new to GCIII, the balance in the kinetic weapons tree is seriously off...

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2373

That's a good question. Let me look at the data and I'll see what I can come up with.

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To elaborate (because who would have fun playing games when he can make charts and stuff):

The graphs here show the problem. I ranked the weapons according to when I acquired them, which should roughly correspond to research requirements. First graph is damage (blue) and damage output per mass investment (red) - all normal weapons follow a linear trend with the exceptions being the durantium drivers - they are extremely good here. Esp. the DD is better even than the singularity driver, which is supposed to be the best kinetic weapon in the (terran?) tech tree. Out of curiosity I took one ship design and loaded it with as many weapons of one type as possible - only DD yielded 51 total attack, only SD 40.

The second graph is taking cost into account. Here the Durantium Drivers fare worse due to their relatively high costs. Still - given a reasonably good economy/production, I would argue that the considerably higher potential damage output (and as a result higher survivability) is (usually) the more important factor compared to a faster ship production.

Kinetic weapons

That is not to say that high cost can't be an interesting way to differentiate the weapons a bit. A weapon with high potential damage, but equally high cost could make for an interesting decision to the player. However, assuming that this weapon shows up relatively early in the game (as the DD), I would expect more advanced weapons eventually catching up...

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