Thanks.
They are also end to end capable for all shots. 8 movement and 24 range. A real killing machine.
Interestingly it does not ignore Force Field however! (which was added after powershot - initially only on AF+ units but retroactively added to the hover tank instead of Reactive Armor making them the unquestioned king of the FE hill)
From the wiki, which I edited after some testing. I wish the Rail Gun didn't have the Recharge Ability. It's such a great unit to use otherwise.
If you want a powershot unit without recharge then go to Space Age Venus for Power Dragons.
It did not originally have Recharge. This was one case where Inno actually adjusted an item after it was already in the game when they realized it was too powerful. So they added the Recharge feature to it so it could only fire every other turn.
I'm relatively certain recharge was there from the start. The later adjustments to rail gun were to lower its stats - it used to be a beefcake to make up for firing every 2nd turn. Then they lowered that a bit. Because in a world where boost wasn't out of control having a very durable unit that hit like a truck but missed a turn was still really good and they were trying to escape people only using railguns.
Strange. If the devs were concerned that people weren't using AF units, then why didn't they fix the real problem (that AF units are crap) instead of just tweaking a small facet of the problem (nerfing a couple of FE units that are better)? Every single AF unit is inferior to its FE counterpart, it seems, and of course to its OF counterparts. If the campsite trash is attracting bears, why not get rid of the trash instead of trying to shoot random individual bears?
They did at the time of the railgun nerf. As bad as you think they are now, they were worse
They failed. In my OF city, I am still using hovers against opponents up to SAM, depending of course on their boosts. The hovers can still take out most PVP Arena SAM armies up to around 500/500 boosts.