Yeah, i completely agree, beams need a boost.

As a fan of lasers I would personally like to be able to shoot holes through planets, but those are just fevered dreams. I will certain pass the feedback to the team so they can improve the balance. There's always trade offs with weapon types, armor types, etc. We have to make sure we don;t make them too powerful.  

I recently played a game where I took specific aim at making lasers often throughout the game.  I will say, that in a cutthroat war with a nearby civ where you must spam out as many ships as possible, the laser production bonus does actually feel pretty impactful, allowing ships to come out several turns faster at a time. 

I think perhaps I wasn't giving lasers their fair shot, but that is usually due to the relative scarcity of elerium compared to the other resources.  When I see so little elerium comparatively, I think "Late game I will have so much more of this other stuff, so I should invest in the other weapons instead".  Maybe this is intentional for balance.  Anyway, I am going to try to incorporate more lasers and see how it goes.

I also tend to use all 3. As it usually stands, there's always someone coming at me with all their defense in only 1 or 2 techs, usually only 1, or 1 on ship type A and another on ship type B. So if my attacks are spread across all 3 areas, I'm guaranteed to be able to snuff them. That was mostly in GC3 and I haven't gotten too many battles in GC4 just yet (only just got the game and work interferes, so more time this weekend).

That said, the tech follows a general level of realism. Pretty much everyone will discover how to throw rocks at some point (kinetic - kinda general purpose, low range accurate, decent damage that sharply falls off at range), then boulders (missiles - high damage that splashes, longer range, less accurate), then learn how to dig under the walls and sneak in (beams - more precise, localized damage so "less" damage overall, but devastating to the spot targeted even as accuracy falls off with range but not damage potential).

Yeah, I've only really gotten to play today as it is. Work got in the way during the week and I only got a little bit of tie to play around with adding back in my custom race from GC3. I haven't gotten into any battles yet, beyond losing a couple probes to space monsters, so I haven't seen the ranges used. Honestly, I hope they do add in ranges to the weapons if only because it's a simple enough part of reality everyone expects.