Turret damage should scale with slots

[Wanderlust]

I'm talking specifically about turret factories. Once you get close to the barrier 2 and 3 slot turrets in factories are not uncommon. Around the core this can go up to 5 or 6 slots. Now this would be fine, since at this point you should have at least 20-30 slots on your ship. But as soon as you make a few simple calculations you see where the problem is. The damage is not dependent on the slot number. What this means is while a 1-slot turret might have 3000 dps, a 5-slot one only goes up to about 8000. (coaxials about 12,000) Say you fill 30 slots on your ship with these. If you make the 1-slot turrets that's 90,000 omicron., while the 5-slot ones give you 48,000. It becomes obvious that 1-slot turrets are far more powerful and anything else you're just wasting slots.

 

In my opinion if a turret requires 2 slots it should, by default, get a x2 multiplier, x3 if it's 3 slots, and so on. And then the randomizer. Give players a reason to use larger weapons. Right now it's just not worth it if you want to maximize firepower.

[Kamo]

There is already a lightly exponential damage multiplier by slot (a 2-slot weapon doing 120% more damage than an 1-slot), but damage calculation is way too randomized and exceeds those multipliers. In my creative galaxy I have a legendary godroll independent targeting Titanium Bolter that still does more DPS than my blue Trinium Cannon which is in itself a nice roll (it's the best of twenty-or-so cannons).

It has something like +280% (x3.8) damage, but also a supplementary modifier of "+220% shooting while overheating" (which probably means x3.2 rate of fire in this case), and those two things may add up to +1116% (x12.16). If that beast of a weapon was not independant-targeting (removing the x0.33), it would do 36,48 times more damage than average, which'd be totally ludicrous !

Though the bolter was made before slots were a thing, so the calcs may have changed since.

Rarity is also a multiplier (a green turrets does twice as much damage as a white, a blue thrice as much, etc.) and Material may be (or may be bundled with Tech Level).

[Wanderlust]

I made some more calculations and here is my suggestion.

First of all with each extra slot a turret requires it should get +100%  damage.

With each level increase in rarity, +20% (×1.2)

With each level increase in material, +50% (×1.5)

And the randomizer should be way less, maybe +/- 15%.

Then comes the question of balancing different turret types, but that is a whole nother topic.

[Ravien]

Yup turrets already do more damage and have increased range based on the number of slots they use. Coaxial weapons also do 3x damage compared to a turret of the same type and slots.

 

The problem you're running into is with the random generation being a little too random. All those 3 slot turrets you're finding with poor damage? They'd do 1/3 of the damage and have less range if they were 1 slot turrets, all else being equal.