Weapon Imbalance?

missiles do more damage

or, more specifically...
whereas Laser 1 adds 1 point of laser offense to your ship and takes less room than missiles, the first level of Missiles adds 2 points of missile offense to your ship, but takes up more room than the equivalent laser or mass driver tech.

I actuially have found missiles to be the better tech. I imagine YMMV, but in my last game I found that for straight bang for the space on your ship, missiles were deadlier than an equal weight of energy or mass driver weapons.

If anti-missiles are more efficient weight wise as well (don't notice that, but it may be true), that would keep missiles balanced versus the other weapons.

Missiles do the most damage vs size but cost the most, whereas mass drivers have the worst damage vs size ratio but cost the least, beams are the middle ground. There are also exceptions such as the Nano Ripper and Psionic Ripper which are massive damage mass driver weapons (8 and 10 respectively at a tech level where 3 dmg is the norm) that are hugely expensive.

accidential double post

Nano ripper is actually only slightly more expensive per damage than other mass driver techs at the same tech level.

Nano Ripper costs 120bc while singularity driver 4 which unlocks it costs 28bc and the graviton driver which is 1 tech later costs 33bc.

Nano ripper is 4 times as powerful as SD4 but is 4.25 times as expensive and about twice the size, so yeah per damage it pretty much evens out, unless you can't afford the high damage ships.

They also balance out with the defenses, I'm pretty sure - beams don't take a lot of space but neither do shields. I think. So make sure to factor that into your analysis.

After looking through some things, it seems missiles also don't scale as much as the others i think. This means missiles have a much greater benefit on the large hull ships than compared to the small ships. Thanks for all the input in this matter everyone.