Station Balance

[LordSutekh]

With the new ship interiors making capital ships and freighters much harder, that makes some stations surprisingly... fragile. Logically, a Huari Fortress should have more "interior" than a Destroyer, yet it takes quite a bit of weapons fire to take down a Destroyer, and then it's relatively simple to hull a Fortress. Now, I'm not saying to make every Centauri Camp an armored hardpoint in space, but some of these stations are now surprisingly weak when compared to the ships that guard them. Although, to me, the biggest danger of a station isn't how much armor it has or damage it can dish out, but the reinforcements that it can call.

[RPC]

Wb LordSutekh!

Actually I've felt the opposite (but I've only been playing in early game, this opinion may change in midgame): I feel that the charon outposts and outlaw mining stations feel like they take more punishment than they could in alpha.

I'll update this post when I get to mid-game.

[LordSutekh]

My point is; IN COMPARISON TO THEIR SHIPS, some stations are counterintuitively weak. (Really? "Counterintuitively" isn't a word? It should be. I'm making it one, spell check.)

[digdug]

Wb LordSutekh,
also, yeah, that's a good point. The Huari example is definitely one.
On the other hand, Korolov missions are easier, and I'm very happy for that.

Also, yeah, the Charon outpost is slightly harder, which is good, since before it had "rice paper" instead of titanium barricades.

[the_Butler]

I think popping a station should be work, I mean you have to have a weapon with the WMD perk to do any real damage, or at least I thought you needed it. MASS destruction you know.

Stations do get harder (I FINALLY beat the beta lastnight, but I was using the modded guns PM made me) but I still don't think they're hard enough and I don't think they call in enough reinforcements either.

HOWEVER, I don't know how dynamic the game is, but I think reinforcements shouldn't just magically appear, I think if you've destroyed every ARES shipyard in a previous system then they shouldn't have as many reinforcements in the next system.

Still I think stations should be dangerous to bust, more so then they are right now, in all solar systems- They have much more mass thus more possible armor, more space to mount more and larger weaponry, if not more weaponry then just more armor to make it take longer for you to plink away at their armor so they have more time to plink away at you.

This makes me think of being able to "call" your shots, certain weapons can already be designated to damage internals, but why not be able to just designate a target manually? You could take down the weapons of a station or a ship for that matter, disable the drives or whatever and board/loot the station/ship without destroying it..... Sounds like a good pirate mod... I forgot what I was going on about. Sorry.

[Deltax]

One of the reasons why many stations are so weak is because of the way they take damage, stations that lack a "multihull" attribute will usually receive 1% damage from any non WMD weapon projectile that hits them. This is why dual laser weapons are so much better for early game base busting then kinetic weapons, and is also why repeating weapons like the particle/ion lancer are so good at destroying stations.

Also, stations in the early parts of the game usually have 1 very slow firing weapon and are absolutely no challenge to the player, towards the middle they usually have enough firepower to kill ships/the player in a 1v1, but only if you sit there like a capital ship and tank all the damage. Near the end of the game most enemy stations don't even have weapons to defend themselves, and rely completely on reinforcements to repel enemies. Sometimes I think george made the stations like this so xenophobe worldships wouldn't wipe out entire systems and leave the player to hordes of free loot...

TL;DR, any weapon that fires many shots at once will be extremely effective at busting stations, sometimes more effective than weapons that are custom made for busting stations! *cough* howitzers *cough*