Make missile engines less efficient

[Akhillis (OP)]

It seems to be fairly well accepted that the dominant strategy in Aurora is using lots of very small missiles.  There are a few downsides, but at the end of the day, most battles come down to overwhelming the enemy's point defence and the way to do that is with lots small missiles.  In the general spirit of balance, I propose a simple nerf.  Make missile engines less efficient.

At present, missile engine efficiency is really a bit of a joke.  With a TN start and automatically assigned RP, a size 50 res 1 sensor will spot an incoming missile at 5m km.  At the same tech level, a size 1 missile with 0. 01 (1% of total size) devoted to fuel will have a range of 6m km.  Devoting 10% of total size gives you a multipurpose anti-ship and anti-missile, with only a minor cost to performance.

By making missiles (especially small missiles) more fuel hungry, the efficiency bonuses conferred by larger engines will start to make an impact and we'll have to make real tradeoffs between range and quantity.

[alex_brunius]

At present, missile engine efficiency is really a bit of a joke.  With a TN start and automatically assigned RP, a size 50 res 1 sensor will spot an incoming missile at 5m km.  At the same tech level, a size 1 missile with 0. 01 (1% of total size) devoted to fuel will have a range of 6m km.  Devoting 10% of total size gives you a multipurpose anti-ship and anti-missile, with only a minor cost to performance.

By making missiles (especially small missiles) more fuel hungry, the efficiency bonuses conferred by larger engines will start to make an impact and we'll have to make real tradeoffs between range and quantity.

I think you may be comparing the wrong thing. Early missiles are generally performing very bad.
To get good performance on missiles / Anti missiles you need maximum power modifier.
When using x 6.0 power mod fuel consumtion is increased to be 88.18 times the standard specified amount.

When I try out the same thing with max power mod I need around 5% size dedicated to fuel to get 5mil KM range and making a multi purpose missile with 100mil km range is not feasible with such a fuel thirsty engine even with 50% fuel. (50% fuel gives me around 60mil km range).

I agree that missiles could be even more fuel hungry, but not by any radical amounts.

[Narmio]

I don't feel that changing the fuel requirements would be a significant change to the level of logistics required for missile fleets.  The major difficulty would still be constructing the missiles and trucking them out to the front line.

Perhaps instead the mineral cost requirements for constructing missiles could be tweaked so that larger missiles would be less expensive -- as in, the TN mineral requirements for missiles of size 6+ would be lower. That may incentivise larger ASMs, but of course everyone would still need to make size-1 AMMs. 

It still may not be enough to tip the scales against sandpapering with size 1-3 ASMs. But I think it would do more than changing missile fuel.  Perhaps both?

[wilddog5]

Mabe a 3% increase on all stats for each size increase rathern than a strate size increase than it is now, so a size one will have no bonus but a size 10 will have 30% more warhead, engine power ect, than it does now.

[alex_brunius]

If the purpose is to make small missiles less effective I think two other frequent ideas have more merit:

Update Armor model:
Currently it's 100% ablative which means how many different sources that are inflicting the damage does not matter. If it was changed so that sufficient amounts also absorb some damage it would make sure small missiles are not useful against big warships. For example 1 damage absorbed (subtracted from every damaging attack) for every 5 layers of armor. This also has the advantage that it's harder to design missiles with optimal warheads (1,4,9,16...) since you can't be sure if your target will have thick damage absorbing armor.

Add a guidance/core pack:
This idea resolves around adding a system (modelling guidance/core systems) that always must be part of any missile and take up equal size regardless of missile size. So if it's set to 0.2 size it will take up 20% of a size 1 missile but only 5% of a size 4 ASM missile meaning bigger missiles are more effective.

[Akhillis (OP)]

When I try out the same thing with max power mod I need around 5% size dedicated to fuel to get 5mil KM range and making a multi purpose missile with 100mil km range is not feasible with such a fuel thirsty engine even with 50% fuel.  (50% fuel gives me around 60mil km range)

Its certainly true that small missiles have less of an advantage in the late game as engine power multipliers start to stack up.  But even so, they can afford to devote more space to fuel; my early game AMM needed to devote 25% of its size to the warhead, by the time you max out the multiplier you'll only need 15%.  Missile agility is a similiar story.

 

I don't feel that changing the fuel requirements would be a significant change to the level of logistics required for missile fleets.   The major difficulty would still be constructing the missiles and trucking them out to the front line.

Hmm, I wasn't really intending to change the the logistics concerns.  I was just thinking of reducing the window of engagement for smaller missiles relative to their larger cousins.

[alex_brunius]

Hmm, I wasn't really intending to change the the logistics concerns.  I was just thinking of reducing the window of engagement for smaller missiles relative to their larger cousins.

Then the correct route may be to suggest engine power mod should  be cheaper to research / stack higher. This impacts missile fuel consumption by order of magnitude more then anything else.