Damage Suggestion - Fixing missiles

[TheDeadlyShoe]

This is a graph Theokrat created recording simulation results of 144 points of damage distributed in different size warheads. It rates them by internal damage dealt against a ship with 6 armor strength distributed in 40 columns (10,000t).

it's from this thread:

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,4926.0.html

[Paul M]

Look guys, I am talking in generalities.  If you want to get down to specifics then yes you can always find something to argue about with what I said.

My contention is:  It is considerably more difficult to stop 200 size 1 missiles then 22 size 3 missiles. (22 picked to make the damage equal on a warhead size*# of missiles basis)
My contention is:  The game allows for the launch 200 size 1 missiles.  Based on the analysis of Shoe this isn't a wopptie do da for a moderately high tech race.  
My conenteion is: The damage from the 200 size 1 warheads ~ the damage from the 22 size 9 warheads because at the end of the day the armour is ablative.  Actually because of the first problem the damage from the 180 size 1 warheads is considerably greater than the damage form the 2 size 9 warheads (for the sake of arguement lets say you can stop 20 missiles).
My contention is:  That the first and second contentions would not be a problem and would not require fixing if the third contention was not true.

So either you fix the problem of size 1 warheads doing damage to ships or you tackle the more complex problem of reducing the salvo size without all the associated knock on effects I would expect to come out of it.

It isn't about if it is more efficient to use a scale 9 warhead as a ship killer missile warhead.  That is a given.  With templates you can more efficiently kill a ship with a smaller number of larger warheads.  I am not saying you can't.  All I am saying is that I can use a larger number of size 1 warheads and do the job (kill the ship).  Are you saying that this isn't the case?  Unless you are I don't honestly see what we are arguing about.  The curve is nice but you still get internal hits with 1 damage point warheads, and the peaks are relatively similiar moving from 4 to 10 internal hits.  As it doesn't factor in the chance a missile hits due to point defence I  am not sure how much relevance you can assign to it, for this discussion.  It is done under the assumption that 144 scale 1 warheads landing on target has the same chance to occur as 16 scale 9 warheads.  If this were to be the case then I doubt this topic would exist.  The chance that 16 missiles will hit is considerable lower than that 144 small missiles will as the point defence will have an easier time stopping 16 inbounds then 144.

Also all the statements about landing on top of each other apply to single damage point missiles as well.  The more missiles I have landing on the target the more likely I'm going to get single points of damage through even though the armour may not yet be sandblasted away.  To me this is a non-issue frankly as you aren't firing 200 small missiles at the target to kill it efficiently, you are doing it because it is a way to exploit the game system to accomplish your goal of killing the enemy ships.  Or am I misunderstanding something?

As for nuclear warheads.  We are talking about space battles.  Fundamantally the damage from a nuke in space is considerably less than in an atmosphere as the main damage comes from the plasma that was the missile body.  The prompt gammas and the slightly slower particles (neutrons and light stuff) are basically dangerous only to the electronics and the crew.  The plasma is largely affected by the r^-2 law.  So for the missile to be that effective the warhead has to detonate within a few km or possibly even closer to the hull.  Given the speeds of the ships and missiles in aurora this means a ms error in the detonation time probably puts the missile well outside of an area where the ship takes anything but the gamma/particle flux.

As I said elsewhere on the board at the velocities the ships and missiles use in Aurora a nuclear warhead is the little sugar sprinkles you use to decorate a cake.  A kinetic impact of the magnitude of a size 1 missile moving at 12,000 km/s would reduce the ship hit to scrap metal and render the crew into undiferentiated paste.

So I'm not impressed by a patry 150 kt nuclear warhead when these missiles have the kinetic energy equivelant of gigatonnes (from memory of sitting down and working this out).  Even if only 0.1% of that the transfers to the target ship... frankly my mind shuts down when I consider this sort of collision dynamics... that is megatonnes.  I quite honestly can't concieve of what happens at the moment of impact.  Only during supernova core bounces does matter interact like this in the real world...and at nothing like that sort of velocity.

To me it is magik anyway so I don't worry about if the armour is somewhat more magikal than the weapon.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

look... ship damage... it's a probability thing.  I really can't explain it better than I have, or better than the links I've provided.  Damage does not equals out in the end; larger warheads stack better.  *shrug*

But hey, damage isn't the problem anyway.  Armor isn't the point of failure, missile defence is the point of failure.  Armor works just fine against AMMs.

Anyways, respectfully signing out of this discussion.  It was interesting.

[Nightstar]

Larger warheads are 20-50% more efficient, depending on a number of factors. Paul's wrong, blah blah.

Now, the problem: Size 1 ASMs (not AMMs) are far more difficult to shoot down than larger ASMs. Assuming ANY significant missile defense, this vastly outweighs the benefit of large warheads. At size 5 or so, it starts evening out some, with armor and sensors.

There are suggestions for dealing with this problem:

Leave it alone. Small ASMs do have (relatively) short range. I'm not convinced this is a good way to go though.

Rework missile armor. Have the effectiveness of missile armor change with your armor tech, remove the base 1 htk on every missile. Probably necessitates a gauss cannon buff. AMMs wouldn't get so much better per tech level. (May also require an agility buff to compensate.) I kinda liked this idea, beyond the question of how you stuff 4x the armor on a missile per HS than on a ship.

Damage reduction. This is kinda problematic for beam combat balance. I suspect it would work out if you switched meson/HPM range with railgun/gauss. Maybe rebalance particle beams a little. Plasma carronades needed a buff anyway. This would also shift ship design from masses of small weapons to less bigger ones. Not a bad thing IMO.

I'd be happy to see either of those changes. It's not like aurora was very carefully designed in regards to balance. It's more 'throw it in, see how it works out, adjust as needed'.

EDIT: To comment on shock damage, unless it's rather better than 50% effective bonus, it WON'T solve the problem. It'll make comparisons between size 3-12 missiles more interesting, but size 1's will have mostly the same issue. I guess it'd help some.

[sloanjh]

It's not like aurora was very carefully designed in regards to balance. It's more 'throw it in, see how it works out, adjust as needed'.

Ummm actually Steve worries a LOT about whether changes will break balance.  Missiles my seem to be (tactically) unbalancing but as you may have heard before they have severe strategic penalties in the other direction.

John

PS - On a different note, it sounds like everyone is in violent agreement with the statement that the problem with size-1 missiles is that they A) overload the interceptors and B) cause damage so you either have to fix A or B.

[Conscript Gary]

Fixing A would also remove some of the punch from box missile megasalvos. Though unless anybody has any brilliant ideas, also a lot harder to fix

[Nightstar]

Shows what I know.    I guess I looked at plasma carronades and made assumptions. The missile aspect of combat is great, beams seemed less complex.

Anyway.

If we pick A, we wish to not make larger missiles worse at the same time. Seriously changing the missile armor system, and improving missile defense to compensate is the only way I see to go about it.

If we pick B, that means damage reduction. It could be missile only though. Or I suppose much less linear damage. Of course, you'd have to reduce the effectiveness of lower power missiles anyway.  Drop warhead power/research maybe?

[Paul M]

Shoe, I wish we could have talked about this in person and not via bloody posts.  The trouble is when discussing any mathematical concept with words it easy to get things mixed up as everyone needs to have the same vocabulary.  When you use math this confusion goes away, so if we could have both drawn on a piece of paper the number of times we went around the mulberry bush would have gone way down.  I am not saying what you said was wrong either.


To again restate my original point:
So long as armour is ablative it is hard to fix AAM swarms in aurora (small craft in starfire, etc).  It is because the limits on the damage distribution function are linear with damage, and it is likely that taking into acount the situation as a whole a lot of peashooters perform better than the single Überkannonen.
I think that if you assign armour a damage resistance value and assign weapons both a damage value and an independant penetration value then you have the maximum flexibility to solve the problem in a way that achieves what ever it is you set out to do with the least amount of "oh crap" effects.

 

[Conscript Gary]

Could we hock the HTK system, maybe? The top cell in an armor column has an HTK value equal to the height of the column. Warheads can have the square root of their size as the damage, (unrounded so non-square warheads have utility) beams can be based on range maybe?. So now armor thickness doesn't just give you more layers to ablate, it increases the toughness of the armor while still allowing smaller hits to get through if you pile enough of them on. As a fun side effect, basing the HTK on the current height of the armor means that as you take damage, your damaged armor segments are weakened both in ablative ability and in ability to resist damage.
The most glaringly obvious issue with a system like this is that it would probably increase the complexity of the combat calculations by some absurd magnitude, but a man can dream.

[alex_brunius]

I think that if you assign armour a damage resistance value and assign weapons both a damage value and an independant penetration value then you have the maximum flexibility to solve the problem in a way that achieves what ever it is you set out to do with the least amount of "oh crap" effects.

You can also solve it by assigning damage types and corresponding armor types, for example missiles deal explosive damage which certain research can reinforce your armor against, but this means leaving you vulnerable to kinetic / beam damage types instead.

More details in my full suggestion at the "Semi-Official 6.x Suggestion Thread".

[Rabid_Cog (OP)]

Wow, looks like my thread devolved into quite the argument. I guess a lot of people feel strongly about AMM spam. I have recently begun to think that perhaps things aren't as bad as all that and fixing it might be simpler than we thought.

Increased warhead size does provide a better distribution of damage, but the improvement is mild at best. I mean, you have to QUADRUPLE the warhead size before you get any significant improvement, so its a mild improvement per WH increase of 1.

On the other hand, smaller missiles
- have greatly increased firing speed (best illustrated by the fact that a size 1 and a size 2 missile launcher have equal dps if you just scale the missile accordingly)
- require twice as many AMMs (minimum) to be stopped
- have better utility as they double as AMMs themselves for reduced logistics overhead (this probably offsets the extra few damage points worth of missiles you need to shoot to kill something)

So to balance things, we just need to limit their advantages.
Reduce firing rate of smaller launchers relative to larger launchers (bring them closer together).
Reduce the speed of smaller engines, making AMMs rely on agility more than speed to intercept targets. This makes all intercepts against them easier.
Possible idea to allow a 'partial' warhead of 0.5 which does 1pt of damage to internals and unarmored missiles but no damage against armour.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Personally I would not mind if missile combat changed to reflect reality a little more in which actually hitting a ship becomes more or less impossible with a missile and that missiles explode and damage many ships in a formation. Much like in Newtonian Aurora. Sure this would change the balance of missiles but would make things more interesting since larger warheads will also mean higher accuracy and damaging more ships at the same time.

I would also like armour to change into something like described in Newtonian Aurora. I really think that the current version of Aurora could do very well with these changes until Newtonian Aurora is developed.

The current missile combat mechanic is very unrealistic since a nuke that detonate right beside a ship should more or less vaporise it, not to mention the high kinetic energy stored in the projectile itself. Unless armour is super tough that is...

Anyway... there is no problem for me to just refrain from using smaller missiles as ASM in a game. Personally I never use missiles smaller than size 4 as capital ship ASM and size 2-3 as anti-craft (Fighter/FAC/corvettes) missiles. At size 4 and above missiles are pretty evenly useful when you apply armour to your bigger missiles.

[Charlie Beeler]

Frankly I don't see that there is a major problem with smaller missiles.  This is just my opinion, but if you find yourself being overwhelmed by defensive missiles being used in an offensive mode you've done something wrong.  It could be any number of things from blundering into a defensive zone unawares to a lack sufficient offensive missile strikes to give those defensive missiles something to do other than target your ships.  At the very least you've given tactical initiative to the OPFOR.

<snip>
On the other hand, smaller missiles
- have greatly increased firing speed (best illustrated by the fact that a size 1 and a size 2 missile launcher have equal dps if you just scale the missile accordingly)
- require twice as many AMMs (minimum) to be stopped
- have better utility as they double as AMMs themselves for reduced logistics overhead (this probably offsets the extra few damage points worth of missiles you need to shoot to kill something)

The first and third points above are mostly correct and function as designed. 

The second point is not necessarily accurate.  It's more of a function of missile design decisions.  If both small and larger missiles use the same proportions for engine (to include min/max power multipliers), fuel, and warhead then they should result in missiles with the same speed.  With the same speed they have the same probability of intercept.  If the design choices give the intended ASM less engine and thus slower, then said ASM is proportionally easier to intercept. 

But here is the kicker.  It is actually functionally possible to design a larger missile that is more difficult to intercept by the simple expedient of allocating more engine than the small missiles can.  As long as the larger missile design using reduced msp allocation for a component that the smaller missile can't (example warhead) then it can actually be faster and more difficult to intercept.  Keep in mind that allocation of missile armor can also influence this at a level that smaller missiles can not match.

So to balance things, we just need to limit their advantages.
Reduce firing rate of smaller launchers relative to larger launchers (bring them closer together).
Reduce the speed of smaller engines, making AMMs rely on agility more than speed to intercept targets. This makes all intercepts against them easier.
Possible idea to allow a 'partial' warhead of 0.5 which does 1pt of damage to internals and unarmored missiles but no damage against armour.

It's evident that I disagree.

If anything, larger missiles should have a proportionally longer cyclic rate instead of a linear one.

Smaller missiles are already proportionally slower and can consistently use more agility than previous versions.  This is a result of the change in missile engine msp granularity changing from 4 decimal precision to 1 decimal precision.  At first blush this results in longer ranged small missiles.  But with some design considerations you can get a good amount of agility added for a small price in range that results in a much better intercept missile.

Don't see Steve going with a warhead that does different damage depending on variations in the target.  He has steered away from this kind of approach in the past for the sake of programming consistency.  Something to note here.  In much older versions missiles with 0 warheads could successfully destroy missiles while doing no damage to ships.  This loophole was deliberately closed.


Nor do I see changing the missile damage mechanic to that of Newtonian Aurora.  That level of complexity is exactly what Steve is after in Newtonian, but in Standard my opinion is that he should stick to a more KISS principle. 


I'm not saying that current missile mechanics don't have areas that need updating/improving.  Notably missile armor is one that does need attention.  But functionally hamstringing small missiles isn't one of them.  This is my opinion, your mileage can and will vary.

[Nightstar]

Let's list the advantages of each:
Large missiles:
Effective warhead increase against armor. Up to ~50% bonus at reasonable sizes.
Fuel decrease. Very significant at long ranges, irrelevant at short.
Sensors. Highly tactical.
Granular allocation efficiency.

Small missiles:
MASSIVE increase in effectiveness against active defenses.

Armor isn't an advantage, you can put it on small missiles too. Agility, same. They're just percentages of the missile.

One more comment:
Small missiles do NOT equal AMMs. Repeat: Small missiles are NOT always AMMs, they're NOT always 'defensive missiles'. Changes to AMMs don't fix the problem of size 1 ASMs. Now, there are a number of functions small missiles can't really perform. However, outside of those situations (like if you're outranged one way or another), and assuming any significant active defense (what designer doesn't have that?), there's no competition. If you're building a plain short range ASM, it should be size 1. Some people, now including me, think this limits design, and makes the game less fun. Take that as you will.

[Konisforce]

I think it might be valuable to point out that, at least from my POV, the knock on offensive size 1 missiles isn't that they are size 1, but that they are the smallest possible size. 

From a strategic / design perspective, the appropriate response to being spammed by size 1 ASMs is to build size .2 AMMs, with a reload rate of 1 second, that can successfully engage an incoming salvo multiple times across the anti-missile envelope.  Which would mean (reductio ad absurdum) then the enemy would make size .2 ASMs, and I would build size .04 AMMs, until eventually we have space mosquitos chasing aether wasps who're battering their wings against an armored warship.

It is not the size of the missile, but that the missile sits against a boundary, and that boundary condition causes these things to happen.  It's the fact of the boundary itself (which is a necessity in the programming, of course, I'm certainly not arguing for 4 decimal granularity of missile size.  Good god, the spreadsheetery that would ensue . . .) that argues for mitigation in some sense, either through a non-liner progression, or a similar boundary condition in effectiveness, or something else that someone smarter can think up.

Apologies if this is overly reductive or has already been beaten to death by someone else.