All right, I understand that Kinetics were a little ridiculous before, but the nerfs they received were over the top, particularly to the first few levels of weapons.
Here's the old stats side by side to the new stats:
Old Railguns: DMG 4 / RoF 3 / RNG 600
New Railguns: DMG 1 / RoF 4 / RNG 600
Old Pulse Cannons: DMG 6 / RoF 3 / RNG 600
New Pulse Cannons: DMG 2 / RoF 4 / RNG 600
Need I remind anybody that Kinetics have -25% accuracy, and that they are nearly than twice the size of Lasers? They barely even have a RoF advantage over lasers now unless you use the Rapid Reload module on everything, which reduces their accuracy to -40%. Armor is also unchanged, so a single layer of level 1 armor provides 8 protection. Level 2 provides 12, and that costs as much research as Kinetics takes to even use Kinetics in the first place. If anyone is using armor at all, Kinetics are utterly useless, and even if you're not using armor, you could probably tank Kinetics ships without even breaking a sweat. Level 1 kinetics ships are basically wastes of time, because to kill even a small ship, they'd need to land at least 25 hits, while a missile might only need to land 4, and a particle beam would only need to land 7. This, despite the fact that Kinetics now only have 2x the rate of fire of a missile, 4x if you go Rapid Reload, but only have 1/6 the power and none of the accuracy, range, or alpha strike capability.
Thankfully, the Durantium weapons weren't nerfed, but that basically means the only useful Kinetics require a resource to build. The fact that Kinetics have low cost doesn't justify their uselessness, especially when we have so much production by mid game that we're cranking out capital ships in 1 turn regardless.
That said, I agree that Kinetics were a little bit BS before. They needed a nerf, but the nerf they got went way too far. Here's the changes I suggest to bring them back in line:
Railguns: DMG 2
Pulse Cannons: DMG 4
Graviton Thrower: DMG 6
Quantum Driver: DMG 10
Singularity Driver: DMG 14
Essentially, in between what we got and what they are now. Still weaker than lasers, especially with regards to space requirements, but at least they'll be competitive.
PS, Kinetic Accelerator still only adds a flat 0.5 range to Kinetics instead of increasing range by +50%, so it goes from 600 to 600.5 instead of 600 to 900.