At first glance nukes seem like they’ve been well designed. They do massive damage in a fairly large radius, but they are ridiculously slow and unguided.
As a player who has played many games however, in practice I think nukes are abused, especially during beacon hunt matches. In such games nearly every player is rushing in to capture the beacon. All it takes is for someone to run up to the beacon, point their nose at it, and fire off a nuke so that it hits the wall and detonates instantly, doing 13,000+ damage to everyone in the vicinity. If multiple players on the team have this strategy, they’ll literally just spam nukes every minute or so, effectively preventing the other team from getting close. Even worse, a single player can carry multiple nukes, even 8 of them into a match.
Star conflict is a game about reaction time and quick wits. Dogfighting is very fun, but getting one-shotted so easily and so often feels cheap. It makes the game not fun. Do you have full hull? Full Shields? Energy Shield buffed? Damage resist and passive hull+shield boosted? Doesn’t matter, you’re still one-shot killed in a fighter or interceptor.
I would strongly urge the devs to do data analytics and figure out what percentage of player deaths are caused by nukes. These devices should be cut back so that not so many can be carried into battle, or players should have some kind of option to protect themselves from nuclear blasts, maybe a passive tech that does strictly nuclear shielding, or perhaps nukes do friendly fire damage as well.
I think one of the most important points here is that the game should absolutely have epic grade weapons (like the pulsar) but nothing that could absolutely kill you in one shot without some chance to react. The disintegrator is balanced nicely like this, you can see the red scope beam before you’re hit. The pulsar does incredible damage but players at least have a chance to escape. With nukes there is no warning and no skill to avoid. This needs to be changed, otherwise you’ll end up with a lot of frustrated players and perhaps even some loss of the userbase.
If they are fixed we will see in the coming month(People adapt, try things out, others follow their attempt etc.) and you were actually able to fit 18 nukes on the strong(You can fit double the amount of missiles if they are premium missiles(9 Mk3 or 18 premium for example)