Posted by: iceball3
« on: May 19, 2016, 10:14:43 AM »Engine power tech is cheap compared to your base engine tech, and missiles profit greatly from it. I suggest researching it before making a missile-centric fleet.On terms of the armor penetration of missiles, with numbers as low as that, it's usually not significant, if your target is too heavily armored to pierce on the first shot.
If you don't, cutting down severely on missile range doesn't get you much, and 5m is too close for comfort.
One of the things that can make missile fighters work is that they can deliver their ordnance before they are detected, this favours the smallest practical fighters with moderate-range missiles.
Warhead 5 is also not a very happy number. Square numbers get you an additional layer of armour breached, n^2+n (6, 12, 20, ...) gives you 2 damage on the deepest layer. So 4 is good, 6 is good, 5 is nothing special.
It's just an optimization thing, and if your missile deployment is relying on sandblasting someone's armor off (due to the armor being thicker than your penetration), then the penetration isn't so significant as much as just getting a quantity of hits and damage.
At least, in terms of whether the number is a square or not.