Damage types/armor types vs weapon types Thread - Star Wars: Interregnum mod for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion

Why did the dev's choose to have multiple weapon types per faction (ex. Laser/Turbolaser/Missile/Ion) when damage is really determined by damage type vs armor type? (I know there is research to boost weapon types)

Originally playing this I thought (keeping with the Star Wars versions for simplicity) lasers were for strike craft and small ships while turbolasers/ion cannons were for larger ships and missiles hit everything at longer range with lesser damage. Oops. Boy did I not have a F-ing clue back then. I have long since "got" it but the rationale has still eluded me

I thought a simple Carrack with its Turbolasers couldnt do anything against fighters but would be equally effective against Carracks as against an Executor-class Star Dreadnought when accounting for armor disparity. Nope.

It just seems unnecessarily complicated for a Skipray Blastboat's Ion Cannons to do different damage to a target compared to a Vindicator's aside from the obvious disparity on the info card. I know it adds depth and forces a diversity of fleet composition but I can't shake the feeling that a missile should be a missile regardless of if its fired by a Gladiator-class Star Destroyer or the friggin Executor herself.

It's to match how the vanilla Sins factions are set up. Auto cannons on a flak frigate are not for the same purpose as on the Kol Battleship. They are strong against different targets, but both weapons get a damage boost from auto cannon research.

Also, we decided what role the ship would play based on what they were strong against in the lore. For some like the Gladiator the weapon type played a big part in that decision, but in many cases it doesn't match consistently. Carracks, Vindicators, and Star Destroyers all have a lot of turbolaser damage, but those ships serve as a light frigate, heavy cruiser, and capitalship respectively. We would have to dumb down the Sins combat system considerably if we synced the counter system to match the 4 weapon types typically used by Star Wars ships.

I was unclear. That's my bad. I meant the game developers not the mod developers. I know that you folks are working within the confines of the system designed by the Ironclad.

This aspect of the system just seems crazy. It actually breaks immersion a little bit for me. If a Javelin Light Frigate does less laser damage than the Ragnarov then I get that because their damage score is widely different (because a Ragnarov has a lot more lasers). Then there is this hidden level where a Javelin does varying percentages of that damage depending on the difference the Javelins ship weapon type vs the target ships armor type.

Not a complaint really. More just a question of why they chose to make it so absurdly complicated in a way that seems absurd in practice from an in-universe standpoint.

Edited by: Sypher297