TL;DR
Dissimilarize destroyer robots more from PLDs.What ?
Personal Laser defense equipment and Destroyer robots are similar in function, damage type, and point of use in the game, they directly compete over each-other in use. This makes destroyer robots incredibly hard to balance, as PLD are relatively good at their job.Because of the nature of Personal laser equipment, being low upkeep, and strong with enough damage, speed and armor upgrade, it's kind of hard to justify using both at once considering a majority of combat robot "damage" comes from follower count
My proposition to balancing Destroyer robots is to switch out the destroyer's laser, for a "heat ray", effectively switching their damage type from laser to fire, and changing their damage upgrade tech to refined flammables. Along with this change, I would also increase their starting damage from 10 to 20.
Why ?
In vanilla, If you were to invest in late game laser damage tech to only run destroyers, you would be far better off just skipping the technology, as PLDs benefit from 2 separate techs while also gaining more damage per laser damage upgrade.The flame damage type is incredibly strong in killing mobile troops but weak to bases and very weak to worms; This gives new trade-offs. flamethrower turrets and by extension refined flammables are often paired up with other turrets. Due to the new trade-off the destroyer robots would have, pairing them up with other offensive technologies can really give you the most bang for your buck.
Having a combat robot in 3 different damage types adds variety to the subclass.
Refined flammables has 3 utility science technology opposing to just 2, giving more room to upgrade damage earlier.
