Pulse Wave Microwave for anti-salvo

[Droll (OP)]

I've been talking with EnterElysium on his discord and we've come up with an idea to mitigate small-missile dominance and AMM spam.

A new tech for microwaves that turns it into a pulse weapon.
This new pulse mode is very weak against ships and is even shorter range than normal microwaves

But it is an AOE weapon that can attack entire salvos, with a % chance of destroying every missile in a salvo.

The % can depend on some factors -
each missile can dedicate some space for electronic hardening, it effectiveness determined by the associated tech and helps to reduce the % chance the missile gets fried by the pulse
larger missiles are less likely to get fried by microwave pulses.

Edit: You could make them also AOE ships in the same location but make the pulse easily stopped by energy shields

[Steve Walmsley]

I've been talking with EnterElysium on his discord and we've come up with an idea to mitigate small-missile dominance and AMM spam.

A new tech for microwaves that turns it into a pulse weapon.
This new pulse mode is very weak against ships and is even shorter range than normal microwaves

But it is an AOE weapon that can attack entire salvos, with a % chance of destroying every missile in a salvo.

The % can depend on some factors -
each missile can dedicate some space for electronic hardening, it effectiveness determined by the associated tech and helps to reduce the % chance the missile gets fried by the pulse
larger missiles are less likely to get fried by microwave pulses.

Edit: You could make them also AOE ships in the same location but make the pulse easily stopped by energy shields

The problem is I think missiles are may be too weak already, even small missiles, so I am not keen on reducing their effectiveness further. If anything, I would be looking for ways to improve missile penetration of energy point defence.

[Droll (OP)]

I've been talking with EnterElysium on his discord and we've come up with an idea to mitigate small-missile dominance and AMM spam.

A new tech for microwaves that turns it into a pulse weapon.
This new pulse mode is very weak against ships and is even shorter range than normal microwaves

But it is an AOE weapon that can attack entire salvos, with a % chance of destroying every missile in a salvo.

The % can depend on some factors -
each missile can dedicate some space for electronic hardening, it effectiveness determined by the associated tech and helps to reduce the % chance the missile gets fried by the pulse
larger missiles are less likely to get fried by microwave pulses.

Edit: You could make them also AOE ships in the same location but make the pulse easily stopped by energy shields

The problem is I think missiles are may be too weak already, even small missiles, so I am not keen on reducing their effectiveness further. If anything, I would be looking for ways to improve missile penetration of energy point defense.

This baffles me completely. Missiles are the only weapon that allow the player/NPR to attack while being completely safe from beam retaliation. Even if im getting only one missile through I can just make faster ships that can infinitely harry and resupply.

The missiles damage potentially needs to be low otherwise offensive beam weapons are useless. The only NPR ships I encounter that pose some degree of threat are ones with missiles because often combat is just a nuclear missile exchange with very little offensive beam combat against ships.

I've had to force myself not to use missiles because they are that powerful.

To repeat, missiles outrange everything, they should not be able to deal the most damage as well. The whole limited ammunition thing does not seem to be coming into play here when a single good alpha strike wipes out half the combat capable ships on the other side.

Hell even in JP assaults, with max distance upgrades your fleet can literally jump in outside of beam range and just fly away. The only thing that can hurt them in that scenario is AMM spam... so missiles. Furthermore I can just make short range torpedoes that can out speed at short range even AMMs AND have massive warheads.

Missiles also have massive strategic advantages where you don't need to refit a ship in order to have modern systems. You only need to swap out missiles and in the extreme case do a cheap refit for new MFCs.

Note: This is all ignoring the existence of box missile spam which is IMO cheese anyways. I use reduced size launchers which I think should be representative of what might be expected from the AI to use.

[Droll (OP)]

Honestly, if you think beam PD is too strong I'd much rather you remove gauss weapons and allow railguns on turrets. Maybe even add a shot increase tech for railguns with some sort of penalty associated with above normal shot count. (range debuff?)

If you think turret railguns make other beam weapons weak I'd rather you also buff them instead of making missiles more powerful.

[Black]

I don't really see missiles as whole as too powerful right now. In all my games, ASMs are never a problem. And I see myself to use them less and less as I start new games. Honestly, in my last game I am only using them because I like my missile armed battlecruisers.

What I see as problem for missiles is AMM spam. The amount of AMMs NPRs and spoilers can launch is sometimes ridiculous. So I don't have problem with boost to normal ASM, but I would like to see some modification to AMMs so they are less effective against ships.

[Lord Solar]

I've been talking with EnterElysium on his discord and we've come up with an idea to mitigate small-missile dominance and AMM spam.

A new tech for microwaves that turns it into a pulse weapon.
This new pulse mode is very weak against ships and is even shorter range than normal microwaves

But it is an AOE weapon that can attack entire salvos, with a % chance of destroying every missile in a salvo.

The % can depend on some factors -
each missile can dedicate some space for electronic hardening, it effectiveness determined by the associated tech and helps to reduce the % chance the missile gets fried by the pulse
larger missiles are less likely to get fried by microwave pulses.

Edit: You could make them also AOE ships in the same location but make the pulse easily stopped by energy shields

The problem is I think missiles are may be too weak already, even small missiles, so I am not keen on reducing their effectiveness further. If anything, I would be looking for ways to improve missile penetration of energy point defence.

Early game sure; missiles are pretty balanced (ion era tech). But in later techs or using alpha strike strategies missiles ships are vastly more effective than beam focused strategies. IMO missiles should be balanced around "softening up" enemy fleets from long range, they should be capable of doing this even if the enemy has a lot of PD, and not be able to inflict crippling damage except at large power difference. In short; they should work kind of like artillery.

[Bremen]

The way I see it is that it's not that missiles are too strong or too weak, it's that they're too binary. It's very easy to get in a situation where you launch a huge salvo of missiles and every single one gets shot down. It's also very easy for a player to come up with tactics that help bypass the PD, like box launchers and massive salvos, in which case missiles can be absolutely devastating.

I have a few thoughts on things that might help with this.

A) Point defense could be less all or nothing. Basically, instead of point defense that can shoot down 60 missiles moving at 30,000km/s, I think it would be interesting if that same point defense setup could instead shoot down 60% of the first 100 missiles moving at 30,000km/s. Basically, find a way to make it "leaky", in that at least a few missiles often get through. Mathmatically, this probably means something like making it so each missile only gets shot at once/twice/etc no matter how many guns you have, or at least the game goes "there are 20 missiles and 30 point defense guns, so 10 missiles get shot at twice and 10 missiles get shot at once. Now making chance to hit rolls" instead of assuming exactly enough guns fire to hit each missile and then move on to the next.

B) I'd like to see laser warheads come back, by which I mean missiles that do less damage but bypass the final defensive fire phase of point defense.

C) It would be best if the AI used at least a few tricks to better penetrate PD, like box launchers/reduced fire rate launchers or (if B is implemented) having some salvos consist of laser warheads.

[punchkid]

AMM spam is a bit of an outlier. It can get quite ridiculous.

As far why missiles are OP I think is the fact that launchers require very little crew, and with reduced size launchers its not that hard to overwhelm PD.
They also have the benefit of being easily upgradable when new tech is researched, as well as being more versatile since again you can carry more then one type and swap them out as you need them (long range vs low range high dmg, or low range high speed making them better at penetrating PD).
Their only drawback is ordnance logistics, and that is not really that big of a drawback compared to what they provide.

The microwave pulse suggested here is a good way to deal with a huge number of smaller missiles. Maybe just make it very ineffective against missiles over a certain size?
One way to do that woulds be to make them only able to affect a certain weight of missiles. (ie. one pulse would affect 20 size of missiles, 20 size 1 or 1 size 20)

[Droll (OP)]

I don't really see missiles as whole as too powerful right now. In all my games, ASMs are never a problem. And I see myself to use them less and less as I start new games. Honestly, in my last game I am only using them because I like my missile armed battlecruisers.

This might just be because of poor NPR design AI. They just don't have a sufficiently diverse set of templates right now. Ships are all similar sizes and all fly at the same speed.
Especially true since they don't seem to be using reduced size launchers, limiting their salvo sizes significantly.

When I use missiles the only ships that even have a chance to fire back are the NPRs missile ships and any beam based NPRs just die.
The only time AI puts up a fight is when fighting NPRs. Their ships seem to have enough missiles to at the very least run down AMM reserves but they aren't exactly what I would call good missiles. They are too slow and I don't think represent the actual power of missiles.

Perhaps the problem isn't that ASMs are too strong but that beams are too weak.

A technologically inferior foe with missiles can at least fight back and scratch at your fleet.
A technologically inferior foe with beam weapons is powerless against missiles.

[Droll (OP)]

I've been talking with EnterElysium on his discord and we've come up with an idea to mitigate small-missile dominance and AMM spam.

A new tech for microwaves that turns it into a pulse weapon.
This new pulse mode is very weak against ships and is even shorter range than normal microwaves

But it is an AOE weapon that can attack entire salvos, with a % chance of destroying every missile in a salvo.

The % can depend on some factors -
each missile can dedicate some space for electronic hardening, it effectiveness determined by the associated tech and helps to reduce the % chance the missile gets fried by the pulse
larger missiles are less likely to get fried by microwave pulses.

Edit: You could make them also AOE ships in the same location but make the pulse easily stopped by energy shields

The problem is I think missiles are may be too weak already, even small missiles, so I am not keen on reducing their effectiveness further. If anything, I would be looking for ways to improve missile penetration of energy point defence.

Another idea I saw was to make AMMs not need a warhead in order to kill missiles - think kinetic kill weapons. This would make AMMs less than useless against ships but might make them too powerful against ASMs since they no longer need space for warhead and can just go full speed.

Edit: My suggestion to fix that problem is to make missile agility matter more for hit chance but I remember there being a thread somewhere talking about missile agility already being too strong so idk.

[Bremen]

Edit: My suggestion to fix that problem is to make missile agility matter more for hit chance but I remember there being a thread somewhere talking about missile agility already being too strong so idk.

The issue with missile agility was that it was an unreciprocated improvement as tech improves. Consider warheads - your missiles hit for more but the enemy's armor is more effective. Or speed, your missiles are faster but their firecontrols are better and turrets use less tonnage to track faster. In those cases both sides are improving. But missile agility just gets better and better - at a high enough tech level an AMM will have a 100% chance to hit itself.

However, that's less of an issue in C# now that missile ECM and ECCM are internal. The base accuracy of an AMM will get better and better but it will also have to deal with the accuracy penalty from shooting at missiles with ECM, unless you give the AMM ECCM and that's hard in a size 1 missile.

[Droll (OP)]

Edit: My suggestion to fix that problem is to make missile agility matter more for hit chance but I remember there being a thread somewhere talking about missile agility already being too strong so idk.

The issue with missile agility was that it was an unreciprocated improvement as tech improves. Consider warheads - your missiles hit for more but the enemy's armor is more effective. Or speed, your missiles are faster but their firecontrols are better and turrets use less tonnage to track faster. In those cases both sides are improving. But missile agility just gets better and better - at a high enough tech level an AMM will have a 100% chance to hit itself.

However, that's less of an issue in C# now that missile ECM and ECCM are internal. The base accuracy of an AMM will get better and better but it will also have to deal with the accuracy penalty from shooting at missiles with ECM, unless you give the AMM ECCM and that's hard in a size 1 missile.

I haven't had trouble at high tech fitting ECCM on AMMs especially since warhead size shrinks quite a lot. I can mount ECM and reach 10m km at 270000km/s with space left for a little agility. Most ASMs don't even reach 100000km/s.

The problem with ECM is that I haven't encountered and NPR with more than ECM/ECCM 3.

It seems that once you reach a certain tech level it becomes very hard for the game to generate NPRs at a similar level and that makes it hard to judge how effective things are.

[Iceranger]

Edit: My suggestion to fix that problem is to make missile agility matter more for hit chance but I remember there being a thread somewhere talking about missile agility already being too strong so idk.

The issue with missile agility was that it was an unreciprocated improvement as tech improves. Consider warheads - your missiles hit for more but the enemy's armor is more effective. Or speed, your missiles are faster but their firecontrols are better and turrets use less tonnage to track faster. In those cases both sides are improving. But missile agility just gets better and better - at a high enough tech level an AMM will have a 100% chance to hit itself.

However, that's less of an issue in C# now that missile ECM and ECCM are internal. The base accuracy of an AMM will get better and better but it will also have to deal with the accuracy penalty from shooting at missiles with ECM, unless you give the AMM ECCM and that's hard in a size 1 missile.

I haven't had trouble at high tech fitting ECCM on AMMs especially since warhead size shrinks quite a lot. I can mount ECM and reach 10m km at 270000km/s with space left for a little agility. Most ASMs don't even reach 100000km/s.

The problem with ECM is that I haven't encountered and NPR with more than ECM/ECCM 3.

It seems that once you reach a certain tech level it becomes very hard for the game to generate NPRs at a similar level and that makes it hard to judge how effective things are.

Based on Steve's earlier comments, he considers Ion or MPD 'late game' techs in his games. So anything beyond that is probably not properly balanced.

I recall in VB6 a 1000% difficulty can generate some challenging NPRs (tech wise, their ship design still sucks). If C# still uses the similar way of NPR generation, NPR's tech could scale harder over time.

[Platys51]

Based on Steve's earlier comments, he considers Ion or MPD 'late game' techs in his games. So anything beyond that is probably not properly balanced.

I recall in VB6 a 1000% difficulty can generate some challenging NPRs (tech wise, their ship design still sucks). If C# still uses the similar way of NPR generation, NPR's tech could scale harder over time.

It also generates so many single ship fleets single NPR will grind your game to halt if it generates past 100 year mark...

[Droll (OP)]

Based on Steve's earlier comments, he considers Ion or MPD 'late game' techs in his games. So anything beyond that is probably not properly balanced.

I recall in VB6 a 1000% difficulty can generate some challenging NPRs (tech wise, their ship design still sucks). If C# still uses the similar way of NPR generation, NPR's tech could scale harder over time.

It also generates so many single ship fleets single NPR will grind your game to halt if it generates past 100 year mark...

Just wait until you see the "escape route" waypoints