I'm absolutely with Garfunkel in the point, that we mustn't complain of AI strong sides, we must complain of weak ones!
It's good if AI have an ability to punch me in the nose nigh every time, it's desirable if AI will have an ability to do it multiple times, forcing me to build stronger and more thought-out navy and army. That's fan, that's why I need my brain, that's why I will continue to play Aurora!
What is undesirable:
1. To have an easy and natural way to crush any AI. What's the meaning of such baby food? I'm sentient being, and AI is not, I know I'm smarter - there is no interest to prove this point to myself again and again.
2. To be compelled in some monotonous, repetitive boring activity, absolutely necessary to continue the game. That's not an entertainment for the sentient being.
And here, I think, are our problems with missiles:
1. It's trivially easy to kill any AI fleet with missile alpha strike (box launchers), that AI cannot use itself because it cannot evaluate correctly a value of target against it's ability to dodge (jump away, hide, etc.)
2. It's absolutely boring to click through AMM spam, it's not an intellectual challenge nor aesthetic value.
So, really, missiles needs some form of nerf or countermeasure.
To revoke doubled max boost for one-off engines is an easy solution, but I think it's not a nice solution: better boost for one-off engines is natural, realistic and flavouring thing.
So, I think it will be much better to push more in the way of nerfing fuel efficiency for small engines and/or MFC max range against small/ECMed targets (lesser range of AMMs - lesser click-through time; bigger long-ranged ASMs - easier for AI to counter them).
In addition, I think it will be better to:
1. Make quick jumps impossible (easy way to bait AI's alpha strikes). Implement "warming up" time for any jump procedure, even through the gate (stab.JP).
2. Replace strict MFC range (another easy way to bait AI's alpha strikes) with steady increasing chance of lock failure. It's in addition will take off some strangeness of mechanics that officers cannot implement their tactical bonuses to missile combat.
This is why AI fleets do not use box launcher designs. These require a lot of logistics and production capacities, but cannot be countered on a tactical level. AMMs create a box launcher system on steroids though, as these are hard to kill and numerous at the same time. There is one thing you should remember when encountering these spammers though and it is that the best protection against AMM spam is armor. A point of armor is ~1BP and an AMM is several times more expensive. The enemy will hardly be able to afford to kill your ships with AMMs.
Another option to defeat enemy AMM spam is a healthy use of ECM. For every tech level of ECM advantage over the enemy, the hit rate will plummet by 10%, which is a significant reduction in damage output. Countering this ECM disadvantage costs .25 MSP per missile and significantly affects AMM cost and performance.
Now back to player use of ASMs. The goal of ASMs has always been to overcome enemy missile defenses by saturating them. This can be done extremely effective by shooting large quantities of relatively small missiles. The most extreme thing you could field in this regard would be size 1 ASMs fired from box launchers. There is basically no counter to this form of abuse and not doing it is left to the player. I do not touch missiles very much and right now. The main combat units are beams only. Skirmishers use missiles though and these are relatively large with 12 MSP or 30 tons per. This way they can be used against targets of opportunity and not against the enemy navy, as a small squadron or skirmishers will hardly overcome the combined missile defense capabilities of a sizeable force. These self-imposed limitations keep missiles useful and do not break game balance at the same time.
My self imposed limitations on missiles are my preference for beam weapons (Since we have a overall lack of kinectic weapons) and i just go with is close to our reality, so box launchers are on the multiples we get in real life, such as 36-72, etc. If i really need more missiles than that, then it has to be with missile launchers and those take space from the ship and that balances itself out.
