Semi-Official 7.x Suggestion Thread

[lennson]

Even with ablative armor (say damage of strength 1 is negated) there would still be the issue that anti-missile measures can be largely negated by simply putting all missiles into a "super" volley.

It seems like there should be some sort of defensive mechanic that prevents launching all missiles in a single volley from being ideal.


As has been suggested a form of area damage defensive measure is one approach.

An alternative is the idea of a "decoy" that would cause all missiles aimed at the ship to miss for one time increment. Think of the decoy as a flare that is expended to temporarily emulate the signature to the ship causing the missiles to target it instead of the ship. This would strongly encourage the use of multiple volleys since a ship can fully mitigate a small number of missile volleys aimed at it through the use of it limited number of decoys.

[Sheb]

Another thing could be a limit on the number of missiles that can be handled by a single fire control.

[iceball3]

In fact, thinking about this, I think the reason why AMM missile spam is a problem, and why we don't see more large beam weapons is one in the same, that armor is ablative rather than (at least partially) absolute. If higher tech level armours (or a new type of shield) ignored the first point of damage then it would have a dramatic effect on game balance. I guess Steve has already gone some of the way with shock damage, which is a very cool mechanic, but I don't think that removes the sandblasting approach.

Technically already exists, the Absorption Shields.
That said, I'm not sure if they actually still exist or not, they might've been removed.

[83athom]

Technically already exists, the Absorption Shields.
That said, I'm not sure if they actually still exist or not, they might've been removed.

They're still in, you just have to get lucky with ruins or salvage a spoiler equipped with it.

[iceball3]

They're still in, you just have to get lucky with ruins or salvage a spoiler equipped with it.

Is it considered meta when you've set up a secondary layer of obsfucation within the first? Hah! Though, thanks for letting me know. Is there any information on the absorption shields specifically around? I'd like to know how they work and last I checked they weren't on the wiki.

[Havear]

Add gene-mod support for either individual poisonous gasses or them as a whole.  As it stands, besides the cost-benefit issue, gene-modding falls short in that it's often easier to terraform a poison gas out of an atmosphere followed by making it ideal. If a gene-mod to ignore poisonous gas(es) existed, it'd at least offer a very viable alternative in several cases.

[bean]

Another thing could be a limit on the number of missiles that can be handled by a single fire control.

I like this one.  It's quite realistic (up until fairly recently, this was a major limitation on naval SAMs) and it would cut the problem immediately.  It also fits the general principle of solving problems with the least new stuff possible.
Even better would be having the accuracy of missiles go down as more are stacked onto the same fire control.  Time-sharing the FC (different salvos linked to the same FC having different targets) might cut it even more, although this would muck up defensive AMM use considerably.

Even with ablative armor (say damage of strength 1 is negated) there would still be the issue that anti-missile measures can be largely negated by simply putting all missiles into a "super" volley.

How?  If I take 100 strength-1 AMMs but have ignore-1 armor, all of them will bounce off. 

Another solution is to add a mechanism for proximity kills.  Say that a sufficiently strong (4-9?) AMM warhead can do damage to other weapons in the same salvo as the target.  Suddenly a (probably ASM-sized) AMM can counter an arbitrarily-large salvo, and there's a serious motivation to go with lots of little salvos.  Again, no major new mechanics.
Edit:
Thinking proximity kills over more, I see a problem.  Allowing a missile that auto-kills a whole salvo is going to dramatically change the way the AMM game is played, and I'm not sure that's a good thing.  There are two ways to deal with this:
1. The warhead is not guaranteed to inflict proximity kills.  Instead, after the missile itself hits, there is a chance of a proximity kill on each missile in the rest of the salvo, based on warhead yield.  I'd have to run numbers before making a recommendation on the values to put there.
2. Increase the chances of a proxy kill based on how many missiles are in the salvo.  Assume that for (mumble mumble transnewtonian) reasons each salvo can only occupy a definite volume of space, which is larger than the damage radius of a typical weapon, but not hugely larger.  With a small salvo, the missiles are spread out, making it unlikely that more than one or two would be caught in a given weapon.  As more missiles are added, the chance of a given missile being caught in the radius goes up, although it's going to plateau at some point as the percentage of the space that the damage volume makes up.  (This can be somewhat modified by making the AMM smart and having it go after the densest part of the salvo.)

Edit 2:
Actually, I don't think 2 is necessary.  If the proxy kills are percentage-based, that provides all the incentive needed to avoid large salvos.  Let's assume that proxy kills first have to attack a missile using the normal rules before triggering the proxy effect.  (An alternative is to have them only attack by proxy, and give them a bonus to 'attack' necessary to trigger it.)  We have two options, both with the same probability of hitting:
A. A size 1 AMM.
B. A size 4 AMM with a 25% chance of proximity kill if it hits.
Let's say we choose between a single B and 4 As, options which should have equal cost.  (I'm assuming that all weapons hit.  Alternatively, assume I fired 1/PH of B and 4/PH of A.) 
If the target salvo is 5 weapons, A will kill 4, and B will kill one directly and one by proxy.  If it's 9, you'll see 4 kills by A and 3 by B.  Crossover is at 13, and above that, B gets more kills than A.  If we assume that above size 4, the scaling of proximity kills is linear with warhead size, you see the same effect.  Nonlinear scaling there is going to move equilibrium about some, but it's not hard to make a scenario where it's better to shoot current AMMs at small salvos and proxy-fused AMMs at big salvos.

This does bring up the launcher paradox.  At the moment, the launcher system has two separate linear scaling effects with weapons size, size of the launcher and time to reload, which means that the 'throw weight' (MSP/unit time) is inversely proportional to the size of the missiles being fired.  A 6-HS size-6 launcher is going to fire every 30 seconds (6 MSP/(30 seconds*6 HS) = 1/30 MSP/(HS*sec)) while a 1-HS size-1 launcher with the same tech fires every 5 seconds for 1 MSP/(5 sec*1 HS) = 1/5 MSP/(HS*sec).  I'm not sure that there shouldn't be some scaling, but the current setup is grossly against bigger launchers, and that probably plays into the reason AMM salvos are so powerful.

[lennson]

Even with ablative armor (say damage of strength 1 is negated) there would still be the issue that anti-missile measures can be largely negated by simply putting all missiles into a "super" volley.

How?  If I take 100 strength-1 AMMs but have ignore-1 armor, all of them will bounce off. 

What I meant is that ablative armor armor doesn't encourage using multiple missile volleys. It would remain the case that the best way to get past an opponent's missile defenses is to throw all your missiles (which would of course need more damaging warheads) into a single volley.

[TCD]

What I meant is that ablative armor armor doesn't encourage using multiple missile volleys. It would remain the case that the best way to get past an opponent's missile defenses is to throw all your missiles (which would of course need more damaging warheads) into a single volley.

True, but if you have to use ASM rather than AMM the absolute numbers of missiles in any volley will be much smaller, making current point defense more effective. It would also force a more realistic choice for players between AMMs that are only useful for missile defense (and targeting fighters/FACs that are too small for an absorption shield/armor) and ASMs that can also damage enemy warships.

It seems that this could be achieved by making absorption shields researchable for everyone?

[QuakeIV]

It seems like absorption armor would be enough.

Not clear how exactly you would design that mechanic though, would you gain one level of absorption every time you upgraded your armor tech?

Would absorption-1 armor stop every type of missile up to damage 4 where it gets two layers of penetration, or would it just linearly remove damage points from the missile?  I guess probably the latter, but it makes somewhat less sense in my opinion.

It seems like this would turn into a bit of a hassle for Steve to implement.

[bean]

How?  If I take 100 strength-1 AMMs but have ignore-1 armor, all of them will bounce off. 


What I meant is that ablative armor armor doesn't encourage using multiple missile volleys. It would remain the case that the best way to get past an opponent's missile defenses is to throw all your missiles (which would of course need more damaging warheads) into a single volley.

True.  But it does force a gap between AMMs and ASMs, and will usually drive up the size of the missiles required, both of which cut down on how many missiles can be flying at you.

That said, I still like proxy kills as a mechanism for controlling large salvos.  It doesn't render gauss weapons useless against other ships, and it breaks fewer things.
Other implementation thoughts:
Make the kill chance somewhat based on missile size (large missiles being more resilient).  This should provide some counterbalance against the trend towards small missiles.
Force a minimum size on the proxy warhead so you can't just load your size-1 AMMs up with proxy warheads at high tech levels.

[QuakeIV]

I don't see why a hard limit should be applied to technological progress, it seems to me that if you have the tech to make size 1 proxy-kill warheads then you should be allowed to.

[TCD]

That said, I still like proxy kills as a mechanism for controlling large salvos.  It doesn't render gauss weapons useless against other ships, and it breaks fewer things.
Other implementation thoughts:
Make the kill chance somewhat based on missile size (large missiles being more resilient).  This should provide some counterbalance against the trend towards small missiles.
Force a minimum size on the proxy warhead so you can't just load your size-1 AMMs up with proxy warheads at high tech levels.

Great idea, here are two thoughts:

If you call it an EMP warhead then the proxy damage is actually damage to the missile control systems, so how about just varying the kill chance with armor? The better the missile radiation shielding (roughly speaking armor) the better the survival chance against the EMP pulse. That in turn favors larger missiles worth putting armor on. You could also hand wave a bit to say that larger missiles are more resilient as the controls are buried deeper, but that's a bit of a push.

Instead of making it a special proxy warhead, why not implement as a feature of all missile warheads, representing the natural EMP from the nuke going off, but with a sharply scaling effectiveness based on warhead strength (kind of like shock damage). The proxy kill chance could be the square of the AMM warhead strength for instance, so 1% for strength 1, but 81% for strength 9. That seems pretty fair as the EMP blast from the nuke gets bigger.

[bean]

I don't see why a hard limit should be applied to technological progress, it seems to me that if you have the tech to make size 1 proxy-kill warheads then you should be allowed to.

A fair point.  I tend to think out loud, although small proxy warheads do move the equilibrium towards smaller proxy missiles, which means that it's efficient to proxy-kill small salvos.  That may or may not be a bad thing.  If it is, a minimum size is important.

Great idea, here are two thoughts:

If you call it an EMP warhead then the proxy damage is actually damage to the missile control systems, so how about just varying the kill chance with armor? The better the missile radiation shielding (roughly speaking armor) the better the survival chance against the EMP pulse. That in turn favors larger missiles worth putting armor on. You could also hand wave a bit to say that larger missiles are more resilient as the controls are buried deeper, but that's a bit of a push.

Nuclear EMP is a result of interaction with a planet's magnetosphere, not something generated by a nuclear detonation in deep space.  I'm not sure if it would be possible to make a nuke generate an EMP on a meaningful scale in deep space, if for some reason you wanted to do that instead of killing your opponent with X-rays.
Actually, armor could be easily integrated.  Treat it as non-ablative against proxy kills, with the subtraction being equal to the MSP value of the armor.  So a missile with .25 armor is totally immune to a 25% proxy missile, except on a direct hit.

Instead of making it a special proxy warhead, why not implement as a feature of all missile warheads, representing the natural EMP from the nuke going off, but with a sharply scaling effectiveness based on warhead strength (kind of like shock damage). The proxy kill chance could be the square of the AMM warhead strength for instance, so 1% for strength 1, but 81% for strength 9. That seems pretty fair as the EMP blast from the nuke gets bigger.

Besides the fact that that's not how nukes work (I don't blame you for not know this, as nuclear effects are the area I'm familiar with where common knowledge is most wrong), I'd push very strongly for a cap on proxy percentage no higher than 50% (maybe 75%), and have the lethality scale inversely with yield above a certain point.  Under your math (and assuming that cost scales linearly with warhead yield), against a sufficiently large salvo (ignoring direct hits), a size-10 warhead is 10 times as effective per unit cost as a size-1.  Actually it's more so, because 100 1% hits will leave 36.6% of the targets intact vs 0% for the 100% killer.  In practice, direct hits will skew this somewhat in favor of the smaller missiles, but 100% is a very long lever, and should not be attainable.  More missiles in a salvo should always be worse for the defender, not something he's totally indifferent to, although I agree that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction.  The reason for scale-down is to encourage medium-sized AMMs. 

[QuakeIV]

I don't think it would be effecient to proxy kill small salvos if the missiles are overkilling their targets.  Still a waste of a missile.

On the other hand, you could probably achieve the effect you want just by making proximity kill warheads their own (heavier, more expensive) beast that essentially enables you to deter the use of large salvos.