My first thought is that I don't really like the way that you see ECM rendered completely useless by equal-leveled ECCM. It seems like there should be a difference between a case where the attacking ship has ECCM 10 and the target has ECM 10, and the case where the same ship is shooting at a target with no ECM. Obviously, having ECCM should be an advantage, but "I can completely ignore his jamming" seems like the sort of thing you get from significantly better tech, not equal tech.
I agree with this part. although I don't love the suggested implementation as it feels more numerically complicated than it needs to be.
Let me try and make a "simple" suggestion based on Steve's concept of EWA: The magnitude of effect of ECM need not be the same as the magnitude of effect of ECCM. For instance, we could say that every level of ECM contributes +10 EWA, but each level of ECCM contributes -5 EWA. Alternatively, we could say each level of ECM contributes +15 and each level of ECCM contributes -10, so we can select numbers to give a balance that feels right. This leads to the following features:
- No effect if ECM and ECCM levels are zero (this should be trivial, but it's important to check).
- ECCM does not completely defeat same-level ECM.
- Massively superior ECCM can completely defeat ECM.
- At rough EWar tech parity, ECM still has some effect, which should generally improve with tech even if ECM and ECCM tech levels are even. This last part is important, I think, because we want research to feel like actual advancing in capability and not just "keeping up" to avoid a penalty.
- Depending on the exact values involved, the compact ECM modules retain some usefulness against larger ECCM modules.
I would also recommend reducing the size of ECCM components, not only because they are relatively weaker but because you usually need multiple ECCM modules to assign to multiple fire controls. Alternatively, make ECCM an element of fire control design instead of a separate component, as many have suggested in the past.
As an aside, in general I would recommend that we make sure not to worry
too much about how "realistic" EWar is...it should be grounded in reasonable or realistic physics to a degree, but keeping a simpler system that makes for easier gameplay while still presenting interesting decisions and tactics is more important than exactly modeling real-world physics. Notably, while 1/r^4 falloff is realistic it is worth noting that in Aurora active sensors falloff as 1/r^2 largely for gameplay reasons, so we probably want to stick to that for both consistency and because the resulting math will probably be easier for players to grasp.