posted on June 25th, 2009, 7:25 pm
A superweapon is usually a very risky thing to add to a game because of the inherently unbalanced nature of it. Personally, I'm not a massive fan of the "super weapon concept" and I usually disable them in other games.
However, maybe it could have a place here but instead of huge cool down periods and such, how about a warm up period? You could activate the weapon so it begins to charge. To make it fair, you have to select the target before it can start charging and the target must already be in weapons range. As it charges, there can then be a physical indication to act as a forward warning to the potential victim, so they they have a chance to counter it by attacking the ship and either destroying it or knocking out it's weapons systems. As an intriguing twist you could give the ship a time limit to unload the fully charged weapon before it causes a power overload and destroys itself.
To be honest, it seems more like a Klingon kind of weapon though.