what's awesome about empires vehicles is that you can put several small cannons on a multi slot big tank, or just trade them all in for a massive cannon. The problem is, although fantastic for balance of early - mid game, standard cannon- the only one slot small cannon, is utterly utterly useless. pointless, once you get any research. and what this means is that one of the big features of customisation- adding lots of small cannons or one big one, is totally worthless. what's the solution? a one slot cannon that is slightly better than small cannon, especially heat wise, but that is very costly to research, so you certainly won't see them until after midgame, when medium tanks are about. What do I propose? I propose the microcannon. this is a research extension accessable AFTER having researched railgun. the story behind it is that using railgun technology, but shrunk (would be a lot worse than railgun.. in fact three of them would still be worse than one railgun, so that railgun research isn't completely eclipsed by a better research right next to it), so usable on small tanks and so on. for comparison, in relative terms: standard cannon ROF: 1 DPS: 1 Heat: 1 Ammo: 30 micro cannon ROF: 1.1 (slower) DPS: 1.5 Heat: 0.5 (or even 0.4) Ammo: 32 These are just ideas of values... the thing i'm selling here is the idea of them, the balancing of them can fit in after.
this sounds great. Since they're all of equal type, does this mean the micro-standard would actually be on equal footing with all the other cannons, a true jack-of-all-trades cannon, now?
Using them solely would probably be the jack of all trades... the HE with out the explosion, the railgun without the heatlessness and damage, the ranged cannon without the DPS or range. I don't know, that much is probably a balancing issue. But it would be nice to decide to take less armour and an extra cannon on your NF heavy with the HE for instance, without that cannon being suck.
