7- and 8-gun gunboats

[Ursus]

I've been thinking about this some more. The thing that captures me is the fact that almost every other class the lighter ship have distinct benefit against heavies of the same class. A heavy cruiser can essentially delete a light destroyer that stays in the cone of fire, but a light dessie can manuever and get to the heavy cruiser's blindspot then turn the tables on it completely. Also true for battleship class, if you stay in front of a valor you will die but if you use a light BS and can kite or manuever to the rear, then the situation is reversed.

But this is not true for gunboat vs gunboat. If you are in a light gunboat and you come in range of turret-steering heavy gunboat, you are going to lose because he has more turrets for more damage output, and more hull so he can soak up the damage input. Yes some gunboat pilots are able to flop around and avoid taking damage but that is about evasion skill not about ship balance. The point is that the shis are not balanced like they are in the other classes. That is the thing that keeps bugging me, light gunboats are not balanced for effective combat like the light ships are in most of the other classes.

Earlier in this thread I suggested possibility of turret-splitting and reducing powercore, but these are both ineffective solutions for a variety of reasons. Instead we should just copy what works for the caps, which is to phyiscally restrict the number of fring arcs. Generally speaking most of them should have maximum number of turrets facing forward, and fewer numbers everywhere else, so that the more agile ships can get behind the bigger slower ships and tear them up from the rear. There's room for ship-specific customizations here (like bnose and orca having more turrets to the rear than forward, and so forth), but just changing the arcs on the larger ships is probably the right way to balance the class.

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