The capital swarm missile launcher fires 6 missiles at a time, the standard chaos swarm fires 8!

Each missile does the same amount of damage (850), but because the turret/capital one fires 2 less missiles it's outputting 1700 less damage per volley... add to that the fact it costs 20k vs the standard swarm price of ~7k plus the turret swarm has a grid usage of 25 (thus can ONLY be mounted on a capship, not on non-capship turreted ships).

Something seems really out of place. I suggest a buff to the capital swarm missile turret to make it more worthy of being mounted on a capship:
* change mass from 2500kg to 7500kg
* change damage per-missile from 850 to 1500 (total damage from 6 missiles = 9000)
* change velocity from 80m/s to 70m/s, and lifetime from 20s to 30s
* reduce proximity fuse from 25m to 10m

These changes are intended to make this more of an anti-capship weapon, heavier and slower then a standard chaos swarm but more damage (+longer lifetime, so they have comparable range to standard swarm at their lower velocity).

The reduced velocity and proximity fuse should make these less useful against standard ships, while the increased damage per missile and lifetime (eg range) would make them more practical to use against other capships.

The numbers themselves I pulled out of a hat, so definitely open to modifying those, but think the capital swarm should be more damage per missile and longer range at the expense of velocity/proximity-fuse/mass.

hoiw about not altering capchaos, and making it a different weapon altogether?

That will only make them even more useless than they already are.

If it doesn't create an undue load, I'd say up the duration to a minute. May as well let cap ships hit each other at range.

I'm not sure about the prox reduction; I believe cap ship swarms were originally intended as a fighter defense weapon. It is counter intuitive that they do less damage than regular swarms (if this is true).

1800m is pretty decent range already.

They should launch 8 at a time though. Why the heck are player swarms shittier than the NPC ones?

6 probably keeps the lag to a dull roar.

An endless loop:

1. MOAR AMMO PLZ

2. Devs add more ammo to please the player base

3. Epic lag hits VO hard, making it unplayable by all except those with the fastest computers

4. LESS AMMO PLZ

5. Devs take it back to the way it used to be. Time passes...

6. People forgot about 3. Return to 1.

Incarnate explained a while back why he cut the number. I don't remember the reason though.

I dont mind the reduced number however the damage should have been upped to compensate.....

I think Inc had concerns about lag and overreacted when he made this thing. The super slow reload rate makes it not really a problem in that regard...

The problem isn't single-ships, the problem is when there are a bunch of them in the sector at the same time, engaging targets. It can get bad pretty fast.

Well hows about we limit swarm weapons to 6 max per volley and up the swarm damage to compensate to the loss of 2 missles? keep it consistent...

+1

Inc, the turret version only fires every 10 sec. A couple rags can spew out swarms faster than several capships are ever going to.

Why the heck do new add-ons always get whacked so hard with the nerf-stick this game?

arf: I know that, but if I nerfed the rags that would have a huge impact on existing gameplay (single-player, etc). New addons get nerfed specifically because they are new. It's far easier to play with their parameters without impacting anything people take for granted.

Also, we have no NPC-related content involving large numbers of rags firing swarm missiles. But we have a lot of battles (Deneb, Hive Skirmish, etc) that involve large numbers of NPC Military Tridents. I'm trying to add more content like that. So I took steps to mitigate it a bit in advance.

It was not done at random. We did some basic tests early-on and the military-trident lag was kinda nuts. So it was nerfed to the current state (firing rate, number of missiles).

I'm not opposed to increasing the damage per missile or whatever..

"I'm not opposed to increasing the damage per missile or whatever.."

please by all means do so :D

Yes please do increase the damage of capswarms to where they're comparable to chaos swarms... even with the firing delay that's imposed on capswarms... to where the dps is the same.

It is, after all, CAPITAL swarms... should be at least a little better than the regular L port chaos swarms that can be put on little ships. Same as capgauss - though they may not be higher dps than g2/g3 (which I think they should be higher dps) but they are at least a little better on velocity and range.

Just some quick napkin calculations:

Chaos Swarm Missile Launcher:
DPS: 850*8 / 1.5 = 4533.3 damage/second

Capital Swarm Missile Launcher:
DPS: 850*6 / 10 = 510 damage/second

You can see the massive difference, regular swarms are almost 10 times more DPS then capital swarms. For capital swarms to equal regular swarms without changing the fire rate or number of missiles, each missile would need to do:
4533.3*10/8 = 7555.5 damage per missile

While I agree they need a buff (or I wouldn't have posted this), unlike regular swarms capital swarms have practically infinite ammo (leave turret and return), and up to 4 can be mounted on a dent. Given this, maybe a slightly lower DPS would be acceptable. Something in the order of 5000 per missile seems reasonable? This is still far more then I originally suggested.

Anyhow, my personal preference would be that the delay be reduced to 5 seconds, and the damage increased to 3000 per missile, maybe up the lifetime to 30 seconds as well (since capships are so big they feel like they time out too early)... but I'm open to input from others. My own suggestion would put them at:
3000*6 / 5 = 3600 damage/second

Still lower then chaos swarms, but by a small amount rather then a factor of 10.

+1.

Drazed++