Aw, darn. I keep praying that when I get to the five Zartoths stage of the Gauntlet my full shields will save me given my massive hull damage, but in the end those ion cannons just eventually slip through... Ah well.
Re: weapon_energy_regeneration_rate
Sounds a lot like my first stab at rebalancing it all actually. The first table I worked out had this awkward system where less efficient weapons augmented the total size (and thus the regeneration rate) of your battery more than the more efficient weapon systems. The whole endeavour was partially spurred by recollection of the Freespace ship gun loadout customization, which I thought was a neat mechanic. I also remembered tweaking my gun loadout in Privateer, and thought "Hey, if it worked in Privateer, maybe in multiplayer WC:Saga something like that might show up someday". That line of thought really was the genesis of the current project. Changing the ship's max energy in game is utterly impossible... having the different ship hulls have different base energy amounts based on their role, though, is much more feasible. As I was looking into my earlier problem of the quad-laser-arrow, I noted that you could set what weapons were available per given group on the ship independently, which in and of itself lead to the development of the light, medium, and heavy weapon slot idea. But I digress.
Here's a trimmed up version of the table as it stands. Dam/Batt and No. Shots are assuming 100 energy unit battery per gun. The rough idea is that final fighter battery power is base power + no. of weapons * 100, which if you examine the base power amounts, is pretty freaking huge. The Dam/Sec term has listed in parentheses the power used over a second to do that damage. The parentheses modifiers in the range list how much the deviation from laser range affects the weapon's efficiency.
NOTE: All battery values are given in WC terms... so divide all energy drain numbers by 10 to get the FS equivelants!
WEAPONS LIST 2.0
LIGHT Target Dam/Pwr Adjusted Dam/Pwr Fire Rate Range No. Shots Dam/Sec Dam/Batt Notes
Laser 18/14 = 1.25 15/12 = 1.25 0.2 1=999 7.1 75(60) 128 High V
Ion 22/17 = 1.3 23/16.7 = 1.35 0.3 .8=799(+5%) 5.8 77(55) 130
Meson 27/20 = 1.35 27/19.5 = 1.38 0.32 .85=849(+3%) 5 84(60) 135
MEDIUM:
Mass 34/25 = 1.325 32/22.55 = 1.42 0.3 0.6=599(+10%) 4.44 106(75) 142 High V
Neutr. 40/29 = 1.375 same 0.35 1=999 3.44 114(82) 138
Photon 46/32 = 1.425 48/33.65 = 1.426 0.4 1.05=1049(-1%) 2.97 120(84) 143
Reaper 35/24.4 = 1.43 51/35 = 1.42 0.44 0.9=899(+2%) 2.85 116(79) 146 High V
HEAVY:
Particle50/33 = 1.5 52/34.66 = 1.5 0.42 1.1=1099(-2.5%) 2.885 123(82) 150 High V
Tachyon 65/41 = 1.55 same 0.5 1.2=1199(-5%) 2.44 130(82) 158
Plasma 82/50 = 1.66 80/48 = 1.66 0.6 1=999 2.08 133(80) 167 Low V
Innate Battery Boosts:
Darket: 300
Arrow/Dralthi/Strakha: 650
Hellcat/Zartoth: 900
Thunderbolt/Excalibur/Paktahn: 1200
Longbow/Vaktoth/Gothri: 1050
Tweaked for readability
