Kaffis Mark V wrote:
Ballistics are actually pretty boss right now, at least until armor gets a little attention.
The breakdown is that ballistics can penetrate shields with some reduction in efficacy (and mild damage to the shield), but still do damage to the ship underneath. Energy weapons do no damage to the ship until they've depleted the shields.
Against armor, the situation is reversed. Armor primarily defends against ballistic weapons, which have to chip away at the armor to do damage to the hull components underneath. Energy and armor largely ignore each other.
Since armor isn't implemented, yet, ballistics largely bypass shields and immediately start stacking up damage regardless of the shield condition.
I'm not sure how missiles currently interact. I think that shields currently defend against them because the initial release of AC was preposterously missile-biased without that; I'm not sure if the intent is for that to be removed when armor goes in.
This actually sounds a little half-assed, at least for right now. Why would armor not be implemented yet?
Also, interesting that they borrowed this - in spirit at least - from EVE, but flipped around. in EVE, shields are (normally) weak to electromagnetic and thermal damage, and strong against kinetic and explosive, while armor is the reverse. EM and thermal come heavily from lasers, while projectiles do mostly explosive and kinetic. Hybrids (railguns and particle blasters) do a mix of kinetic and thermal, the two "middle" types.
Missiles can select all 4 types, but only one at a time per launcher, and projectiles have a limited ability to select other damage types at close range, and there are a million ways to boost resistances against the "bad" damage types for your shields or armor, but basically its the same theme but with the damage types reversed.