Thoughts on the 'Lazer'

Do you guys have any balance concerns?
Do you guys think the cool down between firing is too short?

I think the cooldown should be five minutes at the very least, either that or simply make it a one-shot weapon.

As it currently sits, it's a very cool but WAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYY too powerful weapon. Hopefully it'll change a little before 1.0 is truly released.

I think a cool way to slow it down is to have one of the catalysts gets destroyed as a result of it firing.

Late game that wouldn't really matter much.
You can easily just use 20-30 advanced engineers to get one back up in 10 or so seconds. The price of each catalyst would have to be several hundred thousand metal for that to make shots be far apart. And at that point the metal investment wouldn't be worth the power of the weapon.

I think one-shot and then it's broken is totally reasonable considering that one shot DESTROYS A WHOLE PLANET.

Why is there no "energy planet storage" you must refill until you can fire the laser?

The same thing has the comander with his uber canon why not also for the metal planet after you build the 5 catalysts?

Side note- can you permanently disable the laser by smashing a planet into it? I can't remember if metal planets have craters (I've actually never smashed a planet into a metal planet), but putting a crater where the laser was should render it unusable, right?

Like spots where you put energy storage to give the planet access to your energy supply?
idk. the planet itself seems to have a lot of energy in it already. After all, it has its lights on day and night and they don't even flicker.

you need some amount of energy to activate the lazer. when the thing fire all your energy must be down to 0.

i was thinking the same

You can smash a metal planet, it used to give a hilariously out of place moon crater (Still might) 'dunno about it disabling the laser, they may not have thought about that... Haha.

surely if you take out one of the blue spots, the weapon can't be finished?

Well you can say, it needs more energy for the laser as it already has.

P.S.
The metal planet itself has this energy storage.
Anyone can fill it.
In the worst case you have almost finished the refill and then the enemy conquered the planet and place his own 5 catalysts on it and resume the refill. (The storage goes not empty until it is full and anyone fired the laser.)

I'm concerned that it's far too weak. All that charging up to destroy a single planet. It should rotate gatling style like the Buzzsaw in TA so you can hit at least 5 planets. For balance.

But each of the catalysts cost as much as a halley, you need six of them... and yet it can be used multiple times?

Well, if you smashed one of the areas that's supposed to hold a catalyst, it should completely disable the metal planet's laser by "disabling" the placement spot (kind of like craters destroy metal spots)

Tried that out and when you smash a planet at the shooting pole, where you can build those Catalysts, the planets will be unable to fire.

Ninja...

Pretty sure lasers are cheap to construct and fire only because they want to see whether the functionality itself is working fine. If it was high enough, they wouldn't manage to make enough people fire it enough times to cover enough edge cases to be sure it's working fine.
And personally, I'm torn between wanting to have it shoot more often and it being and endgame weapon. Wondering how it will shape up in the end.

Oh hell yes.

Ah, so it's confirmed then? Death Stars can be disabled, you just have to fling a freaking planet into them.