Game without missiles

[ISN (OP)]

I recently ran into a major bug with missile fire controls (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=12522.msg155490#msg155490) that significantly interfered with a large battle in my current game, so for my next game I'm considering playing entirely without missiles (multiple player races, no NPRs, no spoilers that use missiles). I've played games before where I don't use missiles, but I still had to defend myself against missile-armed NPRs. Has anyone else tried playing entirely without missiles? Is there enough tactical depth without missiles to keep the game interesting? What kinds of tactics does this open up that would be impractical with missiles? I imagine without missiles it's safer to split up your fleet a bit more, as you don't have to worry about concentrating enough PD, although of course you can still be defeated in detail. What else?

[nuclearslurpee]

I would imagine that without missiles, the dominant fleet-building strategy would be maximum speed, maximum range. You would see each power focus on propulsion, BFC, and a single beam weapon, most likely lasers would be almost exclusively the focus. Particle beams struggle to reach the BFC range limit so would be overmatched, likely the same for railguns although they may be useful as specialized JP defense weapons. Plasma may be able to outrange BFC tech just because it is so cheap but the DPS is questionable. Gauss and Mesons are both useless, and for HPMs I am not sure what their maximum range looks like at each tech level.

The winner in every battle is essentially whichever fleet is faster, or at worst the faster fleet can always secure a tactical draw if they are outranged by the enemy.

I think there is still some room for tactical exploration, but ultimately it is less exploring a full range of options and counter-options and more a fairly quick search for a static equilibrium. With missiles in the equation, the equilibrium is dynamic as every strategy has an effective counter and more different weapons and builds are viable in different niches.

[nakorkren]

Ship speed advantage over your opponent will be even more important, since controlling speed controls engagement (whereas with missiles you can sneak up and perform alpha strike). Stealth will probably be even less important, since passives and actives range relative to beam engagement range is orders of magnitude higher than wrt missile range.

Beam fighters will become MUCH more useful, possibly even dominant, because they can force any larger ship into combat due to their high speed. Fighters flying bombing runs with reduced-size lasers will also become more viable since they don't have to close across millions of km while taking missile attacks, just a few hundred k-km across beam range, meaning many more of them will survive. That would in turn drive up the use of turreted small gage lasers, rail FACs, and other fighters by the opponent.

HPM may become viable again, since it's the fastest way to mission kill an enemy ship, and again there's a lot less distance-under-fire to close with missiles out of the mix.

I imagine that gauss cannons will be less useful, since the only use for them other than PD would be anti-fighter (due to fighter speeds) and most fighters will be using longer ranged weapons like railguns or lasers, so the fighters can just say out of gauss range.

Planetary bombardment is going to get harder, since STO always has 1.25x range of ship based weapons. Easier for your planet to turtle up.

To summarize, I think the novelty will definitely provide you plenty of enjoyment since it'll be so different from what you're used to.

[Stormtrooper]

Well, I played my previous campaign almost without missiles and the current one without any missiles at all due to this annoying bug that erases your gallicite stockpiles once you try to build them. Sometimes even when you think about them. Given that obviously I couldn't miss this thread.

Well, first thing needing to be told is that missiles don't really provide as much tactical depth as you would think. Sure, missile designs themselves maybe (though even without them ship and fleet design is already deep enough), but in an actual battle they're rather meh - both sides can reliably defend themselves from them with enough gauss spam and you just keep launching them until one side dies. They have a bit more logistics overhead, but that's rather outside of the battles themselves, though.

Beam firefights have a great potential to be equally boring, BUT if you're lucky to get a very similar speed to the npr and tech level equal or a bit lower than them, things really start to get interesting, all the ranges, crazy manoeuvres coming from nprs splitting their fleets randomly and flying in different directions, suddenly making you either too close or too far to them... I was lucky enough to hit that sweet spot of balance in my very first try and my first campaign revolved around these exciting battles a lot.

As for the actual weapons I dare to disagree with comments above. Firstly, lasers aren't an all-round weapon like players tend to depict them. They have great damage potential, but only from a very close distance. From my observations the damage falloff is brutal (yes I am aware of wavelength tech, still falloff remains brutal) and particle beams of similar tech will outdamage lasers at their max range since they deal same damage at all ranges. Technically for kiting at max range lasers are better if you're faster because you'll get more range out of them, just enough to outrange particles, but you'll deal only 1 point of damage in such situation and most your shots will be misses, so make sure to have plenty guns and msp to feed them through this loooooong engangement. And adding a shield, even a very weak one desgined specifically to nullify these sporadic 1 dmg hits and nothing more will allow you to comfortably sit at particle beam ranges and blow up enemy after enemy which dared to use the above tactics without caring about their lasers (ecm advantage works here too). Unless they're faster. But speed is always most important. Even for missile fleets, because you want to be able to maintain range or get away or chase enemies down no matter what you use to kill them. So faster speed for staying on top, but only a very slight difference between your opponent to get the max fun out of battles.

As a last note, gauss aren't as useless as you might think. Had many ships destroyed that way, feared lasers better than mine, got too comfortable (and too close to finally get a meaningful laser damage) and lost many ships thanks to the gauss volleys alone. The thing is, you can cheaply stack these turrets and just destroy stuff through the sheer amount of hits, even if it's only 1 dmg each, so I can see some heavy armored gauss squadron work. Though probably railguns would be better at this role, I think. Probably. Never underestimate hundreds of 1 dmg hits every damn 5s like I once did.

Last but not least, you've mentioned splitting fleet yourself. Highly impractical in most situations, but damn it does produce cool battle screenshots. Bonus points if different ships have slightly different speeds like in my first campaign. Some were tiny bit slower, some tiny bit faster than enemies and I had three different speeds in total, so naturally I'd be splitting them and whatnot. Fun times they were. Missiles did spice things up here and there a few times, but their fun value for me was just some more variety on the battlefieldspace, on their own they are nowhere near as fun to use in battles themselves as beams.

[nuclearslurpee]

Well, first thing needing to be told is that missiles don't really provide as much tactical depth as you would think. Sure, missile designs themselves maybe (though even without them ship and fleet design is already deep enough), but in an actual battle they're rather meh - both sides can reliably defend themselves from them with enough gauss spam and you just keep launching them until one side dies. They have a bit more logistics overhead, but that's rather outside of the battles themselves, though.

Broadly agree with most points as they are good ones. However I do want to make a note about this bit.

If you are playing with a single player race against NPRs, it is true that missiles are not a very deep mechanic. This is mainly because NPRs only use full-size launchers, which are laughably easy to defeat with basic beam PD for ASMs (for AMMs they are a reasonable threat), and NPRs are woefully incapable of dealing with box launchers or any other method of mass salvo launching. Frankly against NPRs missiles are blatantly overpowered in the hands of a semi-competent player unless one imposes rather arbitrary restrictions on oneself.

However in the case of player race-vs-player race combat, with intelligent "opponents" (granted, it is just you playing against yourself, but for many players this is good fun in practice), many of the typical "exploitative" tactics find effective counters. Box launcher volleys for example may be countered by AMMs with sufficient range + fire rate, but over-investing in this leaves a fleet vulnerable to, e.g., beam fleets with heavy railgun, Gauss, etc. PD which can close through an AMM storm and wreak havoc. When almost every strategy has an effective counter, which is itself countered by another strategy, intelligence gathering, reconnaissance, and probing maneuvers all become of paramount importance to ensure that combat only happens on favorable terms for a particular fleet.

Basically the tactical and strategic interest of missiles depends very closely on what kind of game the player is playing, but under the right conditions missiles add a lot of depth to the game. Of course, so do beams, and in combination there are even more layers IMO.

[ISN (OP)]

I think there is still some room for tactical exploration, but ultimately it is less exploring a full range of options and counter-options and more a fairly quick search for a static equilibrium. With missiles in the equation, the equilibrium is dynamic as every strategy has an effective counter and more different weapons and builds are viable in different niches.

To summarize, I think the novelty will definitely provide you plenty of enjoyment since it'll be so different from what you're used to.

I like how different the responses I've gotten are!

Well, first thing needing to be told is that missiles don't really provide as much tactical depth as you would think. Sure, missile designs themselves maybe (though even without them ship and fleet design is already deep enough), but in an actual battle they're rather meh - both sides can reliably defend themselves from them with enough gauss spam and you just keep launching them until one side dies. They have a bit more logistics overhead, but that's rather outside of the battles themselves, though.

I largely agree (notwithstanding the good points made by nuclearslurpee) -- I often don't make much use of missiles because long-range missile fights are just not very fun to play. Launch some salvos, hope they're enough to get through the PD screen, repeat. Very different from the second-by-second tactical decision-making needed in a fight at close range. For just this reason I've experimented in the past with doctrines that use a combination of beam weapons and very short-range ASMs, which were probably pretty far from optimal but were quite fun.

Anyway, I don't think I'm going to abandon my current game just yet, but this does seem like it could be interesting to try on my next playthrough.