Are you completely excluding beam PD from this? Personally, I have never tried to 100% stop incoming missiles with AMMs. I have only ever experimented with set ups designed to thin their numbers and have always used beam PD, shields, and armour to absorb the leakers. (Sometimes I use entire battleships to absorb the leakers. #:-] )
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If Steve is going to reprogram AMM PD from 'target nearest salvo' to (optionally) 'target furthest salvo', I don't expect it would be too much trouble to also add 'target largest salvo' to the radio buttons.
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While I agree that the current system is lacking, that would allow a single turret to split fire between salvos arriving from opposite directions. That seems a bit much.
Oh, I didn't mean a radius from the firing ship; but rather a radius around the initial target. So if I shoot / launch AMMs at incoming Missile #578984632115, let the same FC also shoot / launch at any missiles within, say, 5,000 km of it.
The point is that against this exploit you need enough beam defence that missile defence didn't matter anyway. Once triggered
100% of incoming missiles leak. While the AI doesn't deliberately exploit it I have lost ships to it, though I didn't understand it at the time. The AI is defenceless against it and it also negates missile defence in hotseat games since it is simple to exploit.
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Adding either option should be no harder than the other. While I consider one better than the other I am in no way against adding both.
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That supposedly is what missile sensors are for, but good luck mounting those on AMMs before late game in VB or at all in C# due to the new minimum sensor size.
The problem is not Fire-Controls in and of itself, especially not against AMM. If you want to fire say one missile per enemy ASM the problem with Fire-Control usually crop up since you only fire on one salvo so the defender are generally wasting more fire-controls. If a salvo contain say 6 missiles and the defender only have five AMM per fire control you need tow fire-controls to engage that salvo with one missile and waste four missiles in that 5sec turn. Even if there are more missiles incoming, there are no reason that you could not target more missiles from a realistic point of view unless you want to twist and bend the technobabble to fit the narrative.
The thing is way worse for beam fire-controls that can easily be saturated. One problem is that five different missiles fired with the same fire-control create five different salvos as one example.
I don't think that engaging missiles coming in from different direction (in the same 5 sec turn) happen enough in an actual game that it is reasonable to bring up as a reason against engagement of missile fire-control salvos. In that case I would settle for engaging missiles with the same position if that would be a major issue and ignoring the fire-control issue.
Full size missile launcher against an equal tech level opponent is often a waste of resources since beam point defence are too effective (at least until rather late in the game when beam PD become useless, although I never play that late). The only way you can beat beam PD is by saturating the PD by gaming the system (which is possible if you want to). Thus you need reduced sized launchers rather than deep magazines of missiles so you can hopefully overpower the enemies beam PD, this is where AMM become really important.
If the enemy is attacking with more missiles per salvo than my AMM is set up for, I just reassign some tubes. What saturates missile PD is that it takes more than one outgoing salvo to completely kill an incoming one, so you want more FCs than the enemy has.
I've never tried linking different types of ASM to the same FC since I always standardize my loads so I will need to test that. Otherwise I've never seen a missile FC create more than one salvo per tick. As long as they arrive one salvo at a time then one beam FC can keep up with them.
While I misunderstood Father Tim's objection I stand by what I said.
The exploit is that you only need about half as many launchers and a quarter the missiles that you should to defeat AMMs. Theoretically even a start-game attacker could exploit this against an end-game defender.