How are heavy lasers better than light lasers??

They are better against light fighters

I recommend reading this thread. People way smarter than you or I have done the math and the research to back it up.

https://board.en.ogame.gamefor…ter-than-the-Heavy-Laser/

Specifically check out what @Dark Depresion said.

Quote from Dark Depresion

Let me preface this by saying I am actually a HL advocate, and thinks HL is both wrongly used and underused.

The main reason is cost/effect ratio. HL costs precisely 4x as much as LL, but doesn't have 4x better stats.
Put simply, for the same cost, LL increases the firepower and resilience of your defence more than HL does.

HL does have a very good feature, which is the main reason why I heavily endorse building a good bunch of HL, and that is their ability to one-shot kill LF/SC far cheaper than gauss or plasmas. A good defence deters heavy fleets through excessive fuel-costs and light fleets through heavy losses. Your ability to cause a lot of permanent damage in round 1 to those light fleets is thus very important to deterring that potential attack.

In summary: LL IS a better unit than HL, that is an undeniable fact when looking at the numbers. Unlike Ions, HL is still important though and should be included in substantial numbers in any defence.

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Or in other words, 1 hl prevents 1 lf from going to the next round, causing massive "Permanent" loses to attacker in round 1. As Dark mentioned.

As the previous two posters mentioned, sim against massive numbers of light fighters.

1 HL vs 1000 LF means the LF player loses 1 LF. 4 LL mean they lose nothing.

No one's going to attack 20k LF into 20k LL. Instead, LF farming tends to involve an overwhelming amount of LFs, for example:
[TOT: 443.608.000] Snowflake Generation [The REVS] vs. Ozon [R P] (A: 78.351.000, D: 365.257.000)

If you replace the 70k LL in that hit with 17.5k more HL, the attacker would suffer 15m+ more damage, causing the hit to not be worth doing.

In general, fleeters will only attack with overwhelming numbers against defense. So your sims with equal numbers of LF and LL just isn't a realistic scenario.

Quote from Miscellaneous

Ok I see, it works better when there is other defense to fodder the HL.

No, it works better against SC/LF when the attacker has a lot more force than defender (as is usually the case). In the hit I linked, most of the defense is in LL - yet if you remove them and make HL instead, the hit would no longer be profitable.

HL's are better against Light Fighters and Destroyers.

LL's are better against everything else. I did some sims since the last time I made my own thread about this and doing exactly 4LL per 1HL (funnily enough it's their difference in price) is the best ratio. Never use one over the other, use both in 1HL per 4LL ratio.