Depend who is comander. I saw few briliant aimers (luckily none of them in dildo), it was almost imposible to come close to them so only way was shooting them from longer distance... bad dream if I imagine them in that nasty slim cruiser while thay are thrusting and from time to time change direction of flying (for example when pair of bombers kill shields on my gunship I am dodging like mad until I hear sound of SN, in this moment I stop dodging and fight again... same strategy should work for cruisers but since they are too slow for efective dodgin, you must first pull enemies to far distance which reduce your handycap).
Taking into consideration the size of the bomber, the SNAC is overpowered. Imo. The only reason the SNAC packs the power it does is to level the playing field against capships. People who are unwilling to pilot a capship for one reason or another want to be able to wield some devastating firepower on their own terms. The SNAC gives them that opportunity.
The game engine doesn't take overall energy consumption into account. We "know" that all ships have a finite energy supply. They burn fuel and use energy-based weapons. Fortunately, gameplay overrides reality in this situation.
If the game engine could take the energy consumption factor into account, a bomber would probably be able to fire the SNAC three times. After that the ship would be floating in space, without power. But this is just my speculation.
I wonder what would happen if the next mod converted the SNAC into a munitions-based weapon system, with the same stats but with some slight tracking ability? Would there be more or fewer bomber pilots?
You must also remember a cruiser could easily use more than one razor at the same time, whereas the fighter or bomber has their energy demolished by using them.
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I don't understand why balance is so important in this case.
A single bomber should be able to do some minor damage to a BS but no more than a fifth of it's hull... That's my vision of them.
But what I really wonder about is the reason why BOMBERS have specieal high-damage GUNS. Why can't they use high-damage torpedos like it was originally designed. Who had this #*\f$?%#! idea of adding antimatter guns with such an dmg output? I want torpedos ffs... They would be absolutely useless in PVP and could only be fired on really immobile targets.
The snac seems to be a very bad compromise to reduce cap-whoring a bit... at the cost of rationality, commensurability and gameplay...
the problem of this issue is that torpedos ( ammo based ) use different characteristics than guns. - at least from what i know.
a gun has no splash damage for one - but does damage to an object when it collides with its hitbox. - a torpedo/missile has splash damage - and the damage is only applied to the target if it actually affects a special part of the hitbox. - so just exploding and touching the hitbox doesn t do anything.
of course it would be better if the supernova was the very same it is now - but used 70 ammo instead of unlimited. - but then we have the nova, which is ammo based and has a HUGE splash damage - still ... when you fire it into the rear of a liner ( shielded ) the shields of the liner won t budge, cause the splash doesn t reach the shield generator. ( a gun would have reduced the shield though )
and other than those problems - we also have a huge bomber lobby that wouldn t like bombers to have their main weapons reduced to 70 ammo of course... .
but on topic:
one must not compare powerplants of each shipclasses. - they are not balanced against each other - but only balanced within. ( thats why the battlecruiser class is somewht problematic ) - you must measure percentages of what a weapon takes and how much damage is dealt for the percentage. - then you have to check how much time is needed to replenish the energy that was needed to do that damage.
for example:
- 1 supernova = around 80% of a small bomber powerplant ( 132k dam )
- 1 mortar = around 70% of a normal cruisers powerplant ( 98k dam )
* it takes around 20 seconds to replenish the energy for the bomber
** it takes - well... a bit longer for the cruiser to fill its energy up again
of course - balancewise - such a calculation is rubbish, cause the bomber will spend the next 20 seconds passivly dodging - while the cruiser - well... will be a sitting duck the next 30 seconds
Well...why don't remove the shields from Cruisers and BS while increasing the armor. They should have a LOT more armor, but that would work. It would even work well....
when the hull is hit - you get a strong shaking of the hull and the curser. - ( much more than you get when your shield is hit )
this shaking is hardcoded it appears.... - so even if they had a lot more hull - but no shields, capital ships wouldn t hit even a gunboat at close range anymore, when the shots came pounding onto its hull