Missile Balance Suggestions

[Iceranger]

Nerfing PD tech further is ... problematic, since they are already (more and more) inferior to AMMs at higher tech. The issue here is full-sized launchers are ill suited for penetrating PD unless the whole PD mechanic changes. Not buffing or nerfing, but change the way it is right now, that either you have enough missiles, or not enough missiles. Full-sized launchers have their niche uses anyway so no need to buff them anyway...

I also think that nerfing PD is the wrong way to go, it would be pointless against large salvos. I think that finding more ways to utilize full size launchers would be better. As there still are areas where they are effective and finds use.

I wonder if it actually is such a bad idea that box and reduced size are king in ship to ship combat. You can combat it with a combination of PD, shields and AMM, so it is not impossible to fend off even with lower cost.

I think we should concentrate more on micro missiles being overly abusive as that cuts into beam territory where beam weapons should be king and not spamming micro ASM missiles. I think this is more of a game balance thing than anything else.

I think balancing the micro missile can be as simple as adjusting the way missile hit chance is calculated now.

Currently, missile hit chance is (100% hit speed)/(target speed)*(various bonuses) - ECM, which is different from the beam hit chance calculation. See where the problem is?

For example, let's assume a missile with 100% hit speed of 12kkm/s, and 20% tactical bonus. On the defending side, we have a ship travelling at 10kkm/s with a whopping ECM 6. Under the current formula, the missile's hit chance would be

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12/10 * 1.2 - 0.6 = 0.84
That's also why I mentioned earlier, right now for missiles, AGI can substitute ECCM, as making the 100% hit speed higher can counter ECM under the current formula (which is not necessarily a bad thing in terms of variants of valid designs).

Since the ECM penalty is applied after all bonuses, and the bonuses can make the base hit chance above 100%, ECM is not as effective as it should be. If it were changed to something similar to the current beam hit chance, then it should look like:

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(min(1 , 12/10) - 0.6) * 1.2 = 0.48
In this way, ECM has a much bigger role in the final hit chance, making missiles without ECCM suffer when against a target with ECM. This should limit the capability of ECCM-less micro missiles against ships, also limit the performance of ECCM-less AMMs against ECM-equipped ASMs.

[Droll]

Can I just say.. that... AMM's are missiles..



Arguments re: the cost of AMM's vs beam PD should just be dropped, PD cannot reach millions of km, cannot destroy warships with no threat to the vehicle, cannot be left as zero maintenance minefields, cannot scale output to relative threat, often give their vehicles one chance to fail... and need a refit or redesign of entire fleets when tech improves, as opposed to new missiles which are hot-swapped.



The 'obvious' way to improve the utility of reloading launchers, seems to me, is with tot barrages.

If you want to play with new techs, add different types of warhead

This is a good point, AMMs in addition to their main role bring much more in ways of tactical utility to the field which I think is why they are ok to be more expensive to build than beam PD alternatives. However I do agree that AMMs should still be cost effective when fired at ASMs as that is their primary role.

I honestly think that size 6 missiles and smaller have too small of a detection radius, having 10m km max range against the majority of NPR fired missiles doesn't qualify as sufficient area defence in my mind. I never find myself using AMMs to defend other nearby fleets because at such ranges the two fleets might as well be flying together.

If increasing the lock-on range of missiles is concerning just add the ability to give ASMs cloaking bays at the cost of a lot of space.

[Jorgen_CAB]

In this way, ECM has a much bigger role in the final hit chance, making missiles without ECCM suffer when against a target with ECM. This should limit the capability of ECCM-less micro missiles against ships, also limit the performance of ECCM-less AMMs against ECM-equipped ASMs.

This actually is a very good point... making ECM more effective against missile to hit would go a very long way to mitigate how effective AMM in particular is against ships. It would certainly also make ECCM on ASM way more important as it would be very difficult to counter it with agility alone.

I also still like some other solution such as highter HTK for larger missiles or higher yield for larger missiles. A higher yiled would mean you could keep the damage and fit all the electronics in larger missiles, say size 6-8. In a smaller missile this would become more troublesome.