I'd be all for the solution in the original post if it wasn't for 1 sticking point. There are numerous canon energy boats, and such a solution would potentially invalidate a number of them.
There should be nothing to actually stop laser (or otherwise) boating.
The goal should be to balance boating of any particular kind so that it's not so brutally effective that it forces all other loadout types into obsolescence
The reason people defaulted to boaty configs was that there was rarely any reason not to and they often kicked the crap out of variants that didn't boat. The gameplay truth is that its a lot easier to manage and aim several of the same type of weapon rather than 4 separate fire groups.
Anyway, the way i think it could be done. without requiring any particular cone of fire.
Lasers deal damage over duration.
Multiple separate weapons striking the same location within a given small window of time will deal slightly less total damage. representing vaporized metal reducing energy weapon efficiency or torn up fragments of armor prematurely detonating missiles and slugs, explosions and shockwaves affecting trajectories, etc. The more seperate weapons doing the damage, the more this effect.
For example. Joe in his Komodo decides to alpha with 10 medium lasers at Bob in his hunchie. He sweeps his aim across the hunchback's torso, slips past its right arm, and wastes a fraction of the energy into a wall some distance behind. Lets say that 85% of the laser's damage ended up properly on target. Drop that another 30-25% due to the inherent inefficiency of using that many different weapons together at the same time. And then divide that up over the 4 different locations that those lasers sweeped. Its still a lot of damage, but its still most likely to be spread, and for Joe's trouble, he has spiked his heat in a rather hard way.
Such a system would still allow boats, but since arrays of smaller weapons would not longer be able to alpha up ridiculous damage values in one go, they would be not be the end all be all of loadouts, but still be totally legal, and would encourage gameplay that spreads the damage around, but rewards good aim.
Edited by VYCanis, 08 December 2011 - 07:32 PM.