Damage Suggestion - Fixing missiles

[alex_brunius]

Not counter-intuitive at all.  It actually shows imagination and insight into game mechanics.

So you think it's entirelly logical, intuitive and makes sense to introduce a game mechanic where it's easier to hit a 2.5 ton missile then a 50 ton missile both travelling at the same speed?   

[Charlie Beeler]

So you think it's entirelly logical, intuitive and makes sense to introduce a game mechanic where it's easier to hit a 2.5 ton missile then a 50 ton missile both travelling at the same speed?   

Really? Out of that whole string of posts that's the only thing that stuck in your craw? 

In and of itself, no a smaller missile shouldn't be easier to target.  But that is not what I infer from Ian's post, the operative word is decoy.  It is quite logical to envision a small platform that when deployed for a short time is able to generate an active return that looks very much like its larger host to confuse targeting.  Variations of the concept have existed in real world systems since WWII and are very common is military sci fi fiction, no reason that it can't eventually become part of Aurora in the future.

The main reason I think Steve will be hesitant to add it anytime soon is processing overhead.

[alex_brunius]

Perhaps the best way to limit smaller missiles based on logical mechanics that make sense would be to put alot higher demands on Magazines that are supposed to deliver 20 small missiles every 5 second compared to those Magazines that only need to deliver one big missile every 100 seconds? A missile spam magazine should need huge reloading mechanics (similar to how really fast turrets require alot of space devoted to gears).

By punishing the effective space available in Magazines that need to deliver quick reloads to many launchers (due to complex reloading systems) we could achieve a much better balance.

Carriers, Coilers and slow firing bombardment ships that don't have demanding requirements of reload times could then also use a much bigger part of their magazines to actually carry payload, which is something I feel have been lacking in Aurora.

Why should a Magazine that only has to services FTR box launchers onboard a Carrier that takes 30min to reload each have the same size reloading mechanism as a Magazine delivering 20 missiles per 5 seconds?

This change should probably also come with a change to how long time transferring missiles between ships take. A fleet collier probably doesn't have to be able to reload ships in an instant (or at least it shouldn't be possible).

It might even be possible to allow multiple kind of Magazines on the same ships, one for stowage/effective transport of many missiles (with lousy reload times) and one to feed the launchers, or could even open up allowing transport of missiles in standard cargo holds (but with appalling time penalties to reloading).

[TheDeadlyShoe]

I can pretty much guarantee that you're not building ships that counter AMMs with similar tech levels and BPs. Every time I've run on-paper sims and in-game battles the results are the same:  AMM ships can't counter AMMs, and neither can beam ships.  Any defence that even makes a meaningful dent in an AMM assault renders conventional cyclic missile attacks useless, which again illustrates the drastic difficulty of stopping AMMs.  I'm not even talking about small missile ships designed for anti-ship work.  If I was doing that I would use box launchers to have a truely uncounterable attack.  

I mean we've all pretty much settled that the counter to anti-missiles is missiles, and how messed up is that?  Not that I disagree, but when the only practical defence against AMMs is to never have them fired against your ships something is wrong.  

Couldn't be further from the truth.  As with all aspects of ship combat what matters most is who hits hardest and fastest while taking the least damage.  Whether you use small fast missiles with a high cyclic rate and small warheads, or large slower missiles with lower cyclic rate and large warheads is only a portion of the decisions.  

It's pretty rare to get slugfests.  Usually one side can pound the other, and if side B lives through it either side A runs away or side B administers an unanswered drubbing in turn.  Cyclic rate is also not that important in 'competitive' design, as box launchers are pretty much just better even for size 1s.  

Aurora open-space fights go like this at the moment, typically:  ASM from side 1, ASM from side 2, then remaining AMMs decide the fight. That is, if one side doesn't manage to disengage.    ASMs have counters, AMMs do not.

ps.  IMO, people should stop tossing around processor overhead for in combat stuff.  Combat overhead is a tiny part of the time you spend processing aurora, it's all about them industrial cycles in my experience....*shrug*

EDIT:

More depth in magazines would be cool, especially since the 'safety' tech line is kinda lame (less magazine explosions pfffft).  Might also be a way to balance box launchers in there ssomewhere.

[Charlie Beeler]

I can pretty much guarantee that you're not building ships that counter AMMs with similar tech levels and BPs. Every time I've run on-paper sims and in-game battles the results are the same:  AMM ships can't counter AMMs, and neither can beam ships.  Any defence that even makes a meaningful dent in an AMM assault renders conventional cyclic missile attacks useless, which again illustrates the drastic difficulty of stopping AMMs.  I'm not even talking about small missile ships designed for anti-ship work.  If I was doing that I would use box launchers to have a truely uncounterable attack.

 

Hmm,  I regularly shutdown AMM ships with tech at or even a little below the tech I'm facing.. at least against AI designs.  Against NPR's I'm controlling it's much more difficult, and should be.  The primary counter is to maintain a standoff engagement and have more magazine depth.  At near parity of tech it is difficult, not impossible just difficult, to have ASM's (without armor) that require an average of 5-6 AMM's to intercept.  At that ratio it is quite easy to run AMM ships magazines dry long before the ASM's ships run dry. 

Another factor has to do with whether the AMM ship is designed to intercept at extended (30 seconds plus) ranges or not.  At extended ranges they run dry faster, but the short range variants tend to be overwhelmed quicker. 

So far, the best counter is missile fighter groups.  When designed to engage shipping from extended range the volleys you can produce swamp most defenses hands down.  This of course can be countered by fighters/gunboats/small warships/etc that are designed to rundown said missile fighters.

There is no such thing in Aurora as an uncounterable attack.  Just because you haven't thought of one, or built and deployed one doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I mean we've all pretty much settled that the counter to anti-missiles is missiles, and how messed up is that?  Not that I disagree, but when the only practical defense against AMMs is to never have them fired against your ships something is wrong.

 

Actually, at near of parity tech levels hullspace for hullspace the best counter to any, non-armored, missile is the 10cm railgun with C3 capacitors.  At least until gauss cannons reach 5 shots per mount.  I was a bit shocked by this when I turned this one up.  On a mount per mount basis GC's outperform at 3 shots, but when analysis shifts to hullspace usage railguns takeover.  They do require the that you invest in max tracking bonus to offset the speed differential penalty. 

Nor do you need dedicated escort ships for this to work.  With a percentage of each warship dedicated to point defense and your fleets mutual defense is much more effective.

It's pretty rare to get slugfests.  Usually one side can pound the other, and if side B lives through it either side A runs away or side B administers an unanswered drubbing in turn.  Cyclic rate is also not that important in 'competitive' design, as box launchers are pretty much just better even for size 1s.

 

Versus the AI it tends to play out like that, but against player controlled NPR's it can be a very different story. 

Aurora open-space fights go like this at the moment, typically:  ASM from side 1, ASM from side 2, then remaining AMMs decide the fight. That is, if one side doesn't manage to disengage.    ASMs have counters, AMMs do not.

See above

ps.  IMO, people should stop tossing around processor overhead for in combat stuff.  Combat overhead is a tiny part of the time you spend processing aurora, it's all about them industrial cycles in my experience....*shrug*

Your experience is different from mine. AI NPR v AI NPR conflict by far bog down the game the most in my experience.  Granted that is the AI routines loading the system.  Even when I'm running combat between two races I'm controlling the processing time escalates.  When combat is not occurring, my games tend to run fairly smoothly.

EDIT:

More depth in magazines would be cool, especially since the 'safety' tech line is kinda lame (less magazine explosions pfffft).  Might also be a way to balance box launchers in there ssomewhere.

Personally I find the Magazine Ejection tech quite useful.  It's quite annoying to have a warship taken out by a single armor penetration that hits a loaded magazine.

Variable magazine depth is already in the game, Magazine Feed System Efficiency.  It starts at 75% of magazine hullspaces for missile storage and goes to 99%.  That's a starting point is 27msp to 31.8msp per hullspace.  Doubt anyone is going to convince Steve to allow magazines to store more. 

[sloanjh]

I mean we've all pretty much settled that the counter to anti-missiles is missiles, and how messed up is that?  Not that I disagree, but when the only practical defence against AMMs is to never have them fired against your ships something is wrong.  

I've put this out out to Steve over the years, and never gotten traction on it, but I'll throw it in again:

Have each missile require a fixed-cost "guidance package" (or "bridge" ) of e.g. 0.25 or 0.5 HS.  This will devastate the scaling for small missiles - for 0.5 HS, a size-2 missile will have 3x the usable volume (1.5 HS) than a size-1 (0.5 HS).  Since this would also have a big impact on AMM performance, this should probably be coupled with a return to "str 0 warheads can kill missiles".  

If he went with the size-0 idea, then something would have to be done about missile armor.  I think a reasonable thing to do would be to treat missiles as a tiny ship.  If I missile size point is really 1/20 of a HS, then why not calculate armor mass appropriately, with each point of missile armor equal to a 1/20 point of ship armor (in size, cost, and damage absorbtion).  So a AMM with a 1-pt warhead could kill an armored ASM with armor level 20 or under - unarmored missiles would be obliterated.  A size-0 warhead could be str-0.05, i.e. enough to kill level-1 armor on a missile but not enough to do significant damage to a ship or heavily armored missile.

One final note: the guidance package size could be a tech line, allowing higher tech folks to eventually build "brilliant pebble" missiles.

John

[Erik L]

Why not something adapted from what I did in Astra Imperia?

Each ship has a number of control channels. I use the channels to track targets for offensive fire, incoming missiles for defensive fire, and each missile.

[Charlie Beeler]

John the guidance package idea has some merit.  

Personally I'd rather see a change to the MFC's that limit the total number of missiles that can be controlled.  Have it scale both with tech an installation size.

edit:  I see that Erik beat me too it.  

As far as missile armor goes...I'd rather see it completely dropped.  Damage that takes out a point of ships armor should destroy a missile. 

[alex_brunius]

Why not something adapted from what I did in Astra Imperia?

Each ship has a number of control channels. I use the channels to track targets for offensive fire, incoming missiles for defensive fire, and each missile.

I don't think that one makes much sense.

If military computers of today can track hundreds of targets/missiles, why should fictional computers based on advanced TN technology be significantly worse?

Also sounds fairly easy to circumvent by just building more small ships (if each ship has limited amount of missiles/launchers it can control). I can't see how it helps defending against size 1 missile spam either since the defender has to track say 100 enemy missiles + 100 friendly missiles while the attacker only need to track 1 target ship at a time + his own missiles.

As far as missile armor goes...I'd rather see it completely dropped.  Damage that takes out a point of ships armor should destroy a missile.  

Which brings us back to the popular suggestion that 1 point of damage shouldn't always be enough to take out 1 point of armor. Damage resistance is a surefire way to stop size 1 missile spam in it's tracks.

[Charlie Beeler]

It's a lot more than just the processing power.  It's also the "physical" systems for two-way communication with the missiles.


Don't know how "popular" that damage/armor suggestion is.  It appears to be restricted to a minority that dislike size 1/1pt warhead missiles.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

IIRC, Steve's said there's avionics requirements in Newtonian Aurora.

Newtonian also probably is aiming at much lower numbers of bigger missiles though.  

Hmm,  I regularly shutdown AMM ships with tech at or even a little below the tech I'm facing.. at least against AI designs.  Against NPR's I'm controlling it's much more difficult, and should be.  The primary counter is to maintain a standoff engagement and have more magazine depth.  At near parity of tech it is difficult, not impossible just difficult, to have ASM's (without armor) that require an average of 5-6 AMM's to intercept.  At that ratio it is quite easy to run AMM ships magazines dry long before the ASM's ships run dry.

Err well here's the thing. If there was a beam weapon that did 1,000,000 damage at 2,000,000 km, it would still be shutdown/countered by shooting enemy ships with missiles.  Said beam weapon would still be imbalanced.

In otherwords, countering AMMs with ASMs doesn't matter to whether AMMs vs ships are balanced. I don't think anyone believes AMMs are too good at missile interception.

Don't forget the important "same BP" qualifier. Equivalent-BP equivalent-research AMM ships can usually knock down every missile an attack group can throw up with AMMs to spare, but they arn't usually left with enough AMMs after to really go to town.  

P.S. You have to have pretty imbalanced tech to get '5-6' AMMs per missile.  Space 1899's "Whitehead II" AMMs have only about 18% chance to hit versus "Whitehead" missiles.  But that's because the British have 30000 RP in Max Engine Multipliers, 35000 RP in Ion engine tech, 7000 RP in missile warheads, and only 3000 RP in Missile Agility.  So they have very fast missiles and crappy AMMs.  And that's without taking Grade into account.

[alex_brunius]

Don't know how "popular" that damage/armor suggestion is.  It appears to be restricted to a minority that dislike size 1/1pt warhead missiles.

Not so "popular" at all. It just happens to be the starting point for this entire thread...

On reducing damage done by missiles Steve wrote the following:

Only a percentage of damage would be applied. This would remove the advantage of having missiles of certain warhead sizes.

[Charlie Beeler]

IIRC, Steve's said there's avionics requirements in Newtonian Aurora.

Newtonian also probably is aiming at much lower numbers of bigger missiles though.

True as far as I know.  I really think that controls on total missile handling through the fire controls will be simplier to implement though.

Hmm,  I regularly shutdown AMM ships with tech at or even a little below the tech I'm facing.. at least against AI designs.  Against NPR's I'm controlling it's much more difficult, and should be.  The primary counter is to maintain a standoff engagement and have more magazine depth.  At near parity of tech it is difficult, not impossible just difficult, to have ASM's (without armor) that require an average of 5-6 AMM's to intercept.  At that ratio it is quite easy to run AMM ships magazines dry long before the ASM's ships run dry.

Err well here's the thing. If there was a beam weapon that did 1,000,000 damage at 2,000,000 km, it would still be shutdown/countered by shooting enemy ships with missiles.  Said beam weapon would still be imbalanced.

In what way is that relevant to the conversation?

In other words, countering AMMs with ASMs doesn't matter to whether AMMs vs ships are balanced. I don't think anyone believes AMMs are too good at missile interception.

Didn't say that was the only counter, just the most obvious one.  The balance is that there are several ways to counter a system.  It would only be imbalanced if there wasn't one.

Don't forget the important "same BP" qualifier. Equivalent-BP equivalent-research AMM ships can usually knock down every missile an attack group can throw up with AMMs to spare, but they aren't usually left with enough AMMs after to really go to town.

Haven't forgotten a thing.  The discussion is about systems performance not industrial capacities.  Even so, when comparing roughly equal cost ships I find that well designed dedicated ASM ships outperform dedicated AMM ships.  In the first couple of tech advances AMM's do have an advantage. but once both warhead and reload rate advance past this level the advantage swings to the ASM platform.  They can simply deliver more concentrated damage faster.

P.S. You have to have pretty imbalanced tech to get '5-6' AMMs per missile.  Space 1899's "Whitehead II" AMMs have only about 18% chance to hit versus "Whitehead" missiles.  But that's because the British have 30000 RP in Max Engine Multipliers, 35000 RP in Ion engine tech, 7000 RP in missile warheads, and only 3000 RP in Missile Agility.  So they have very fast missiles and crappy AMMs.  And that's without taking Grade into account.

I'm not going to reverse engineer the 1899 missiles (in detail) for this discussion, but your cost figures are off.

For demonstration purposes the tech available for missile design is (all 4th level):
Ion Drive .6ep per msp                                (24,000rp)
Fuel Consumption: 0.7 Litres per Engine Power Hour    (7,000rp)
Maximum Engine Power Modifier x1.75(x3.5 for missiles)(7,000rp)
Fusion-boosted Fission Warhead: Strength: 5 x MSP     (14,000rp)
Missile Agility 64 per MSP                            (14,000rp)

With this tech I commonly have a:
With this tech I commonly have a:
size 4 ASM speed 29,400kps/warhead 5/500l fuel for a range of 75.5m/km and tohit of 98% vs 3,000kps* targets.  (BP cost 2.72)
size 1 AMM speed 29,400kps/warhead 1/34.75l fuel for a range of 8.1m/km/agility 6(manuover rating 16) and tohit of 16% vs 29,400kps targets.  (BP cost .7277)
*3,000kps being the speed of ship with 25%hs to ion engine without a max power modifier applied

That's roughly 6 AMM's to intercept the matching tech ASM.  Both are optimized for speed.  The ASM can actually be tweaked for a higher speed than the AMM can match at the expense of operational range.

Leaving the ASM alone and optimizing the AMM for a better % leaves it with a tohit of if 19.7% (roughly 5 missiles to intercept) but has it slower than the ASM, meaning that there is enough of a speed gap that the will be whole salvos of ASM's that don't get intercepted at all because of Aurora movement mechanics.  

This is the basis of the 5-6 AMM's per ASM.  No, it doesn't take crew grade in as a factor, only ship systems.

Tech being used is a long way from being "imbalanced".

Not so "popular" at all. It just happens to be the starting point for this entire thread...

Last time I checked, fewer that 10 have commented in this topic in favor of this and the majority of them have been on the forum less than a year.  That's a very low percentage to be claiming it as a "popular" notion.

On reducing damage done by missiles Steve wrote the following:

Only a percentage of damage would be applied. This would remove the advantage of having missiles of certain warhead sizes.

alex you have a very bad habit of taking a small portion of a post to quote out of context to make your point.

Missiles are very good tactically but they are weak strategically. If you play any long campaigns against substantial enemies, you are going to need beam ships.

Even if missiles are overpowered tactically, that doesn't necessarily means you have to correct it. In modern naval warfare, which is the basis for Aurora, missiles are the primary weapon, although there are many different types, just as in Aurora. They are backed up by guns and point defence systems, as well as shorter-range anti-missiles. A hundred years ago, large calibre rifled guns were the primary weapon. A hundred years before that it was large cannon broadsides. There is always going to be a primary type of long-range weapon.

Armour already requires extra weight per layer, as each extra layer uses a surface area measurement for the ship that includes the previous layer.

I have been considering a different way of dealing with the small vs large warhead question. It's possible ships could suffer shock damage, which would result in a chance of a system being damaged without the armour being penetrated. The chance of shock damage would increase with larger warheads, with the increase being greater than just linear. Another potential change is to increase warhead strengths but have missiles detonating some distance from the target. Only a percentage of damage would be applied. This would remove the advantage of having missiles of certain warhead sizes. Proximity of detonation could be a tech line, with better proximity detection resulting in a higher percentage of damage.

Steve

When looked at in context of the entire post Steve is not talking about reducing damage applied to armor at all.

[swarm_sadist]

Perhaps fixing beam ships would be a better way to balance AMM spamming. Some ideas:

1. Have smaller sized calibre weapon systems that only have a chance of dealing damage.  For example, a railgun's lowest calibre which gives a guaranteed 1 damage is 10cm. If there were an 5cm railgun, it could instead only have a 40% chance of causing 1 damage per hit. On the plus side, there could be a lot more railguns mounted on a ship and thus giving a larger rate of fire. Going even farther, there could be 2cm or even 1cm railguns mounted 8 to a 100t fighter.

2. Multifire. Allow lasers to store more energy in it's capacitors than normally required for a single shot, thus allowing even large lasers to fire every 5 seconds, even with a low tech capacitor rating. The laser could then recharge it's capacitor and fire in the normal way, or save up for another burst for use against large missile swarms.

3. Give beam weapons limited ammo. While this might seem like a disadvantage given to beam weapons, this would actually allow for upgrading the effectiveness of beam weapons without destroying balance and making them too overpowered. There wouldn't even need to be a mineral cost associated with ammunition to maintain this, just a restock when orbiting a base or docked in a hangar.

Some ideas for missiles:

1. Cloaking devices, allowing larger missiles to escape detection for at least a short while before coming into the MCR. Any missile under size 6 would not benefit from a cloaking device.

2. Enhanced sensors for missiles. There could be two types of sensors, one scan and one track. Scan would be like ship missiles and used in buoys. Track could be used by ASM missiles which scans a small arc of space where the missile is pointed, and no where else. Since all the sensors are facing one direction, the range would be much better than shipboard sensors. This ties into...
2a. Passive launching of missiles. Launch a missile based on data from passive sensors, with the missile making last minute course corrections with it's own passive sensors, or with an active sensor system that turns on at the final approach.

Mini rant on Electronic countermeasures.
While in the game already, a missile's ECM and a ship's ECM both have different objectives. A ship's ECM is tasked with keeping the enemies' combat ability at a closer range than they would normally require, namely by increasing the difficulty of locking onto a target at long range. A missile's ECM is tasked with keeping the missile alive until it reaches it's target. Because the missile is closing on the target and most of the AM systems are close range, a missile ECM must protect the missile even at close range. This could be done in several ways:

1. Increase the 'apparent' speed of the missile to increase the agility requirements of the AMM to intercept, which would be great versus AMM but not that good against beams (which would have ship board ECCM.

2. Attempt to blind or dazzle any FC currently locking onto the missile, thus giving a chance for a FC to lose the lock on the target. It would give a reason to try attacking the missile at longer range, or a reason to mount ECCM on escort ships.

[alex_brunius]

Last time I checked, fewer that 10 have commented in this topic in favor of this and the majority of them have been on the forum less than a year.  That's a very low percentage to be claiming it as a "popular" notion.

More people have commented in favor of armor/damage reductions to missile damage then has commented against it, that is my definition of popular.

I'm guessing by your elitist attitude that your definition of popular only takes into account the people who been active on the forum for at least 5 years?

alex you have a very bad habit of taking a small portion of a post to quote out of context to make your point.

When looked at in context of the entire post Steve is not talking about reducing damage applied to armor at all.

And you have a very bad habit of focusing on semantics to try to make your point...

My point is that no matter if you reduce damage missiles do by adding armor resistance or do it through another mechanic (like distance detonation) the result in game will be very similar. The result will be that you can't trust a damage X missile to actually apply X damage to it's target, therefor limiting use of 1 damage missiles (and square damage missiles aswell like 4/9).

I want the same thing Steve want in this case, making more powerful missiles worthwhile, and I support his ideas of shock damage and damage reduction of missiles through distance aswell since I believe they would be good improvements.

The only minor problem I have with reducing damage as a percentage is that it hits all sizes of missiles fairly equally (depending on how rounding is applied), reducing damage by absolute amounts is more effective if the goal is to limit smaller warheads.