So perhaps taking it to the extreme was a bit much. That's where everyone has stayed glued.
Steve, apologies if that seemed aggressive, it certainly wasn't the intent, its why my posts tend to be large, I am often misconstrued when too few words are used to clarify my position. Granted, I could use other words, and perhaps not be so mis-understood, or perhaps more so, who knows.
I think that might be a strong indicator to switch from quad turrets to singles.
Which, obviously, will only mitigate your specific situation a small amount. But I'm excited to see C#'s changes in action before requesting further PD changes.
Well, yeah, the case was specifically chosen though. One could doom stack PD and not need to worry ever. We mostly exist between the extremes, perhaps that was the main failing of my example.
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I can't see you ever facing that situation in the game unless you create it yourself. The AI isn't going to design ships that fire hordes of single missile salvos.
Wouldn't fighter or FAC swarms create a similar scenario? That was more the point, I really shouldn't have made it such an extreme case. They can create multiple stacked salvos that are far smaller than available PD capability, more numerous than available PD, and larger in sum, and will repeatedly attack as need and/or reloads in a hangar permit. I assume the AI will use fighters and FACs against us with missiles? Just using missile fighters against the AI would create this scenario without even trying to.
Example, 10 fighters, 4 launchers each, you've got 40 inbound in 10 salvos, again, assuming an idealised one shot one kill. Supposing we split the quad turret to singles, you stop 4, have 50% idle, and get plastered by the remaining 6 salvos. If you didn't split the turret and had it as a quad still, you stop one salvo, and eat the remaining 9 salvos, 90% idle.
Perhaps turrets that are under utilised could be permitted to engage another salvo with a penalty to accuracy. Perhaps, 1-(used/max) for something direct and simple, subtract it off the current base and use that?
Re-using the above scenario, assuming base accuracy of 80%, engages a 4 missile salvo, spends 5 rounds, kills the salvo. Retargets, base accuracy penalised by 15.6%, accuracy now 64.4%. Spends 7 rounds to kill 4 missiles, second salvo stopped. Re-targets, base accuracy now penalised by 37.5%, accuracy now 42.5%. Spends 10 rounds to kill 4 missiles. Re-targets, base accuracy now penalised with 68.75%, accuracy now 11.25%, would need 36 rounds to stop 4, has 10, lets say it gets 2. Rather than only 4 kills, you get 14 of 40.
Using the 4 singles example, same setup. Each spends 5 rounds for the first salvo it engages, 4 salvos are killed. Each has 3 rounds left, suffers a 65.5% penalty on their second engagement, 17.5% accuracy. They would need 23 rounds to kill 4, a bit under 6 per. To simplify here, lets just say each gets one more kill in, so each tags 5 missiles, instead of just 4. Rather than only stopping 16 missiles, you stop 20.
In the extreme example I started with, 32 singles, using that setup, you'd average 17 kills per increment, rather than 1.
The salvo system remains essentially unchanged, there is no free lunch, PD is less easily overwhelmed by quantity in salvos, while still easily overwhelmed by quantity in total sum.
Would that perhaps be a sensible mitigation?
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I'd personally be happy to just roll with the progress that was made in that regard, since it does appear to have been somewhat improved. Though I mean, the better balanced the game becomes the more common player versus player scenarios will become.
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Like guys though, really, its kindof annoying when he improves a thing and you are like 'ree but what about these other things'. I've been in more than one community like this and its actually pretty counterproductive to be that way at this point, even if it seems to you to be an innocent enough question.
Its not merely somewhat improved, as is, with what we know now, its enormously improved, and I'm happy to have it either way, overjoyed that he doesn't charge for it, just releases it to us.
That said, he is human, he can forget or overlook things, just as we can. He is very anti-abuse in some areas, less so in others. We can't know if this means of abuse is overlooked, intentionally as is, or just lacking a suitable solution until someone asks and he answers. The topic came up, I asked.
AMMs already suffer vis-a-vis beam PD and if I've understood things correctly, C# is not helping them, whereas the improvements to PD will make that aspect of defence even stronger. Limiting the number of missiles an MFC can control would nerf AMM defence even further. And since PD is getting help with the salvo issue, I really wouldn't want to limit missiles in general even further until we know for sure how much the current changes, all combined together, affect the gameplay.
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The mitigation to that is to not have all your eggs in one basket. Steve confirmed that the AI will never do that so the only case is in human-vs-human battle scenarios, in which you should diversify your PD anyway. Yeah, that gauss turret is great at taking out one big salvo, so it needs to be accompanied by another ship that is built to take out many tiny salvos. It's not even a problem in multi-faction single-player games, only in specific PvP scenarios, IMHO.
Of course, in the long run I agree that having beam PD use all their capacity instead of being idle would be great but it's not a high priority thing in the current system since I assume it would require replacing the salvo system with something else.
Definitely agreed on priority, I would note I asked if it had a chance in the future, rather than now.
I'm not so sure the salvo system needs to die to allow further utilisation. If I understand things, Missiles move, and in so doing reach a piece of code where PD is checked for as area defence or final fire. When checked for, spent turrets are skipped over, or excluded from the list which is used to pick the next turret to open fire in defence. Presumably, once a weapon engages, it is marked as used, and thus not considered in successive salvo movements this increment. Not marking it used until fully used would leave it available in such case for multiple salvos. A caveat is if it searches for fully loaded turrets only, a partially spent turret is not fully loaded, no way around that other than a change to what makes the turret available. I can't say with certainty either way.
Agreed on the obvious in-game design mitigation, not placing all eggs in one basket, it was certainly a contrived situation, but one that comes up often enough in similar state, especially once missile fighters or FACs get involved. Many small salvos arriving in the same increment. The obvious answer is to stack many small PD weapons, since collectively they can all engage big salvos, or spread across small salvos, especially now that you do not need more than one FC to engage more than one salvo.
AMM's might need some love someday to make them more viable, yes, or a wholesale hit to PD accuracy to make it less effective, or who knows what else I can't think of now. I agree its too powerful as is once you can afford to stack competent turrets in your fleet.
