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New Player - need some help with understanding weapons.

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Daft Loon:
The Hades (fireball cannon) is the only really viable option for long range armor breaking in a side facing gun slot, The Mercury cannon (long gun with a sniper scope) is the other long range armor breaker but it has extremely limited turning so its really hard to line the ship up so your gunner can ever shoot it.

The other option that I usually go for is to have just harassment weapons on the long range side, 2 Artemis rockets to break guns and engines, and a Banshee to add repair pressure by doing moderate damage to armor and balloon and setting fires.

Note that the above advice (mine and I'm assuming everyone else's) is mostly based on PvP, for PvE especially on the lower difficulties armor breaking weapons are not as important, you can often break through the armor just by brute force of usually unsuitable weapons, especially if they include a chance to start fires, the Banshee is very good at this.

Thalassa:
Hi Ghroznak the Orc,

The others already gave quite complete responses to your questions, I'll try to summarize it all down:

Things that have health:
The ship's armor. It's like an "energy" shield
The ship's hull. This is its health, but to damage it you must first destroy it's armor
Components: guns and engines have life too and can be damaged/destroyed
Balloon: these are air ships helt aloft by a balloon, pop it and the ship falls down.

How weapon damage:
All weapons have 2 types of damage.
- One is the direct hit damage, and applies right where your projectile hits.
- The other is burst damage, and applies as an AoE (area) damage around where your projectile hits.
That is, you shoot, and when the projectile hits it applies both damages. But one is concentrated at the impact point, the other spreads. These damagaes can be of various types: fire, explosive, etc...

Weapon damage types:
Each damage (direct hit, and burst) can be of a damage type. This affects what elements on the ship suffer damage.
For example, piercing ammo does a lot of damage against ship armors, but not so much against hulls.
Fire damage on the other hand is great against balloons, and shatter damage can destroy engines and enemy guns.
What is the game mechanics behind how damage applies you ask? Check out this link:
http://gunsoficarusonline.wikia.com/wiki/Damage_Types

Ammunition:
Now comes the fun part: loading different kind of ammunitions into your guns. The ammunitions do NOT change the damage type: the gatling will still do piercing (direct hit) and shatter (burst) damage. But it changes all other aspects... among them Damage Per Second.
Check out this link to get more info about how the DPS changes for each weapon and ammo:
https://yalneb.blogspot.com.es/2017/04/guns-of-icarus-online-weapons-chart.html

How to play "efficiently":
You will want a weapon to remove the enemy's armor as quickly as possible, and then a weapon to damage it's hull. Is there a weapon that does both?: no.
So, as the others stated, a good layouts (commonly found) are:
- For close range a gatling + mortar. You destroy the armor with the gatling, then kill the enemy with the mortar.
- For close to mid-range engagements I personally prefer a gatlink (lesmok rounds) + a flak or a banshee.
- For mid to long-range engagements, I like the Hades combined with a flak.
- And for long range, I love the Mercury and the Artemis.

GL&HF o7

Schwalbe:
Artemis and banshee are more viable options to put instead of light flak to pair with gatling, even with lesmok.

Light flak you'd like to pair with banshee - both have arming time - and keep that medium distance at all costs.


Edit: Light flak is near useless close range, while both artemis and banshee have no arming time. Artemis has some kill power when aimed at exposed hull, with ability to wreck enemy's engines and guns when needed, banshee has... well there is certain degree of kill power there... with possibility to spread chaos and keeping engineers busy with fires. So these two have good versitality paired with gatling gun. Also, light flak does not have that much kill power as you might think, so the enemy is going to be able to rebuild the armor before you are able to fuck him up for good. Thus giving him a chance to come too close for LF to be usable.

The only situation I can think of right now, when Light flak is actually favorable is when paired with hades with kept distance, or paired with lesmok gatling, on the very brink of range of that gat, against things like hwachaside of galleon (thus such a long distance - so he has trouble screwing you over with hwachas). On the other hand, lesmok clip is as far as I remember not enough to tear down the galleons armor to allow for such situation, soooo...

PS: Hades is difficult yet very rewarding weapon. It's projectiles do fire damage primary (on hit, good against balloons AND exposed perma hull) and piercing on secondary damage (dealt in AOE, piercing shreds the armor). Oh and because of that fire damage it can set shit on fire, thus spreading fire and giving engineers even harder time coping against someone good at firing it at them, because the armor on smaller ships (when used with greased rounds) just fucking melts.

Ghroznak the Orc:
Thanks for the insights and help guys!

I've started to mix up weapons a bit more now.

Been trying a Junker with Teslacoil and Artemis launcher on one side and the Gatling and Flak on the other... but might swap that flak for a banshee instead.

I suppose I should have mentioned that I primarily play the Co-Op in Alliance. But still, this is all very handy information to help me decide what to put on a ship.

Offtopic question though:

What is a good way to keep distance from enemy ships? It seems to me nomatter how hard I try to get away from an enemy ship (e.g. using Kerosene or Moonshine) they always catch up and stay in range of me. It's somewhat frustrating and I can't figure out what to do. Are NPCs just naturally faster than any ship we can fly ?

Daft Loon:
They aren't inherently faster than all ships although the junker is the slowest so they might outpace that. The main factor is probably that going in reverse reduces your engines to 50% thrust (71% top speed because of how the drag equations work).

The gatling + mortar armed AI ships also do a silly amount of damage to engines if you are trying to escape with them behind you.

Currently the main option for stopping advancing ships is the mine-launcher if you can find someone who knows how to use it well enough, reversing and dropping mines forces them to either change course to avoid them or get knocked back hitting the mine, either way they slow down a little.

If at some point they re-balance the gas mortar (order of chaladon weapon unlock) to not suck it might be useful too, currently though the AI ships will just fly through its clouds too fast to take any real damage.

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