So, in the first few hours of Battlestation: Harbinger I played, I noticed I had far more trouble getting through celestial sectors than any other. This is because groups of celestial ships will hit my ships with an insane amount of damage, from fairly long range, so quickly that my FTL drive can't even charge before they've vaporized at least one of my ships.
I noticed the weapon they were using to accomplish this is a death ray. I had found a death ray before, but I believe it was Trolgar (maybe wanderer?). It did about 150 shield and 60 hull damage.
Then, I found a celestial death ray, which did about 200 shield damage and
over 400 damage to hull., with the same recharge time as the Trolgar death ray.
I have since found more death rays, some celestial, some not, and without fail, the non-celestial death rays are mediocre weapons, and the celestial death rays do 200+ shield and 400+ hull damage. Suddenly, celestial sectors being unreasonably difficult makes sense.
But I believe the 400 hull damage is a bug, the celestial death ray is supposed to deal far less hull damage, and that the developer misplaced a decimal.
Here are my reasons:
1. The current damage of the celestial death ray is game-breakingly overpowered.
2. When you attempt to upgrade the hull damage, it only increases by about 10 (about 2.5%), despite most weapons gaining more like 15-20% damage from an upgrade. Even upgrading the shield damage on the celestial death ray adds about 22 damage (10%).
3. 40 hull and 220 shield damage seems like a reasonable amount of damage, compared to other death rays. This would make the celestial death ray deal more shield damage, but less hull damage, than other races' death rays.
Anyway, bug or not, the celestial death ray is absolutely overpowered right now. When the enemies have them, it feels like there's no way to counter them. They have long range, so you can't really out-range them. They're a ray, so you can't dodge them. I've tried shielding ships that are taking damage with other ships, but often they vaporize my ship so fast that I don't even have time to move my other ship in front of the one that's being attacked. The only counter-strategy seems to be to send my drones to attack the enemy ship and hope it targets my drones instead of my ships, which only sometimes works, and doesn't work when you're facing 4+ ships at once.
For the player, the celestial death ray is so good there seems to be no reason to use anything else. It has good range, high accuracy, instant velocity, high shield damage and very high hull damage!
