So, the Nomad Cruiser Neutralizer has a few problems. Firstly, the raw stats are incredibly OP. Secondly, developers appear to have "fixed" this with a nerf that has made them absolutely useless.
Their shield damage modifier causes them to deal 0.01x damage to all shield types. This reduces their 40,000 shield damage to 400. They now take an extremely long time to drain even a stationary fighter's shields.
This was a lazy fix to their overpowered stats, that basically removes them from the game.
Following the tradition of nomad cruiser turrets being comparable to scidata guns, here is my suggestion for its new stats, after restoring its shield damage modifier to 1.00x.
Its current stats are:
2 Hull DMG 40,000 / Shield DMG / 1.00 Refire / 30,000 Power Usage / 1500 m/s Speed / 2505m Range
I suggest increasing its Hull DMG up to 700 (Compared to the Cruiser Pulse Cannon's 1,600) and decreasing the Shield DMG to 8,000 (Compared to the Cruiser Pulse Cannon's 18,600). The weaker stats are balanced out by its higher fire rate, reduced energy cost, and increased projectile speed, compared to the Cruiser Pulse Cannon. Overall, these nerfs will still leave it better than Cruiser Pulse Cannons; just as all nomad weapons are much better than civilian weapons.
What ice said. They don't actually deal shield damage, they drain power from your target. 40k power power drain per shot for a cost of 30k of your own power. They're useful for draining another ships power core so they cant fight back effectively.
Posts: 2,750
Threads: 166
Joined: Nov 2009
Staff roles: Systems Developer
Nomad neutralizer, cruiser and battleship ion cannons are weapons that are designed to draw enemy powercore, not do damage. That's why their numbers seem insanely good and have damage reduction to make them work as intended. Unfortunately because of the pulse bug where if the amount of power drawn when a pulse hits the enemy is greater than the amount of power the enemy has, you will recharge a portion (or all) of his powercore, they're not reliable and need to be used carefully. They can be very useful if you know enemy has powercore, but if they're low on it you're hurting yourself much more than you'd gain if they worked properly.
Even if the enemy does have power core, it's still ineffective. It costs 30k power, and it drains 40k power. Their power will regenerate back faster than you can fire the gun again. On top of that, it fires a projectile that can miss, hit a shield that has just popped up, or hit when they have no core to drain. It is sacrificing a gun slot to have very little impact as it drains your own core as fast as theirs.
Comparatively, the cap code cruiser Ion Blaster costs 26.6k energy (which is less) and drains 1,000,000 energy (which is obviously much more).
Since nomad weapons are generally comparable to scidata codes, it should have its damage increased to 100,000. Yes, I understand that it fires more frequently, but it also costs more power per shot. This is a huge drain on the power core, unlike the cap code which costs less than 1k power per second to fire. It's also riskier to use, since you have to fire it constantly.
It would then 2x faster power drain than the cap code, however it will still cost about 40x as much power to use. I believe this would be acceptable.
Alternatively, its damage could remain the same, and its energy cost could be reduced to 3000 per shot. It would cost slightly more power than the cap code variant (99.9k per 33.3s for this, 26.6k per 33.3s for capcode) while dealing slightly more damage than the capcode (1.33m per 33.3s for this, 1m per 33.3s for capcode), while not being as convenient to use because it drains slowly, rather than all at once.