Aurora 4x
VB6 Aurora => Aurora Suggestions => Topic started by: Rabid_Cog on November 04, 2012, 11:44:24 AM
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Problem(s):
1-Missiles are both overpowered and very min-max-able, energy weapons cannot serve any role but that of the pistol in your boot while you are toting an assault rifle (missiles).
2-Non-square damage numbers are suboptimal for warheads.
3-Despite the engine efficiency bonus given to larger engines, smaller missile remain superior due to their much higher rate of fire and greater difficulty in shooting down.
4-Ships can too easily be designed with massive amounts of armour layers (20+) which make such a ship extremely difficult to destroy.
Discussion:
(1) is not necessarily a problem. The same way that big gun battleships are no longer feasable for naval dominance due to the development of aircraft carriers, the same could be the case for missile ships since these work exactly the same way, they just cut out the middle man (the aircraft). Missiles, of course, have their own weakness in the sense of limited ordinance and ability to be intercepted, but they remain your primary striking arm regardless.
(2) is a problem in the sense that it vastly restricts variety in missile designs. In addition, the 'jumps' between optimal warhead sizes get bigger and bigger as you scale up, exacerbating problem (3). Of course, this is barely noticed, because this problem is completely eclipsed by (3).
(3) is the main problem with missiles. The pros of splitting your missile into as many missiles as you can that each deal 1 damage far outweigh the benefits of leaving your missile as a large monster. Not least of these advantages is greater difficulty in interception and the more rapid rate of fire. It has been argued that the optimal warhead size of a missile is 4, especially at higher tech levels, but that only illustrates the problem. Notice that absolutely nobody builds missiles with warheads of size 81 except for rp reasons.
(4) is not really a problem at present. The main reason being, of course, is because it serves as the only counter to massive numbers of small missiles. Yet that is not optimal as this once again restricts variety. There is very little else you can do to prevent 'sandblasting' and for this very reason it cannot be done away with. Not only is it unrealistic, but NPR's never do the same, leaving them at a significant disadvantage.
Solution:
Bear with me, this is where I seem confusing.
-> Armour becomes (partially) ablative. When damage is done to a ship, the equivalent number of armour boxes aren't immediately destroyed. Instead, the damage is added to a 'damage counter', let's call it 'dmg#'. For each armour box that would be destroyed normally, a check is made. A random number is generated between 0 and 1. If that number is higher than dmg#/(1+dmg#), the armour is not destroyed. If it is lower, the armour is destroyed and the next armour box is checked. Regardless of the outcome, dmg# is reduced by 1. If the armour box is not destroyed, the same armour box must be checked again on the next step.
What the hell?
The effects would be the following (math incoming):
AMMs (size 1 wh) would have a 50% chance of destroying an armour box and thus do 0.5 damage effectively (0.5/wh).
Double size AMMs (size 2 wh) would have an expected damage of 1.16 (0.66 + 0.5). (0.58/wh)
Size 4 wh missile would have an expected damage of 2.71 (0.8 + 0.75 + 0.66 + 0.5). (0.6775/wh)
Note: I've tried posting this in the suggestions thread, but it immediately became spammed back several pages by people who feel terraforming needs to be fixed.
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Forgot to add the nerf to armour that would have to accompany this nerf in damage.
Each additional layer of armour beyond one would have a multiplier to its weight, say 1.05
So suppose a layer of armour weighs 1 HS. Then a ship with 4 layers would spend 1+1.05+(1.05)^2+(1.05)^3 = 4.310125 hs on armour. Very gentle on lower numbers, becomes quite harsh with high amounts of armour.
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So, giving each cell of armor a non-1 HTK value?
Interesting idea
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I would also like to see some mechanic where armor can shrug low damage shots entirely (1-4 damage range). For one it would be great to balance smaller missiles.
The odds of it happening though could depend on a few other factors like:
¤ Total thickness (10 levels thick has a much higher chance then 2 levels)
¤ Armor density (tech level)
¤ Relative angular speed at impact (probably to complex to simulate)
It would also be fun to see some additional detail flavor, like choosing either "reflective armor" (better against laser type damage) or "reactive armor" (better against fragmentation type damage). Could include different technology lines too. It feels wrong to have so many different kinds of weapons, but so few kinds of defenses.
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I don't think the number of layers should increase the HTK. Either have your armor tech increase it, or maybe have it as a textbox option similar to deployment time, with increased armor strength increasing tonnage/cell.
Damage would have to be iterated layer-by-layer to avoid pockets, but it would still buff non-square warhead strengths and larger warheads in general, if every bit of the damage template hits with or as a function of the total warhead strength.
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Missiles as a tactically superior weapon is not a problem. As I understand it, Aurora is less about being a 'balanced' game, and more about presenting a variety of options and seeing what viable tactics emerge.
Massive layers of armor is not a problem. In fact, that is one of the few viable anti-missile tactics. Beam weapons, with unlimited ammunition, will eat through it eventually. Also, the ultimate armor-counter, mesons, are already in the game.
I'll concede that sweat-spot warheads and the issues of smaller missiles being generally better is problematic, but for that a simpler solution presents itself: just ask Steve to bring his Newtonian missile damage/armor model down to Aurora.
In the Newtonian model higher armor techs give higher HTK values for armor boxes instead of making the armor thinner. The missile damage template for armor destroyed is dependent on both the warhead strength and the armor HTK value. This does the following:
(+) Any missile that does less than a single armor HTK box is shrugged off with no effect. Hasta la vista anti-missile ablation.
(+) Every different armor tech level has a different sweat spot. Good-buy one-damage fits-all.
(-) Armor-overhead on fighters can't be reduced by tech. Good thing the new engines make larger fighters viable.
(-) Guass cannons are out of luck, unless we round the armor damage by beam weapons up.
The only other thing that bugs me is the way reload-time scales. Even if the damage is balanced across different sizes in a salvo, smaller will still be much better when size-3 is fired twice as fast as size-6. Maybe if reload time was proportional to the square root of size with a higher base-rate?
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Missiles are very good tactically but they are weak strategically. If you play any long campaigns against substantial enemies, you are going to need beam ships.
Even if missiles are overpowered tactically, that doesn't necessarily means you have to correct it. In modern naval warfare, which is the basis for Aurora, missiles are the primary weapon, although there are many different types, just as in Aurora. They are backed up by guns and point defence systems, as well as shorter-range anti-missiles. A hundred years ago, large calibre rifled guns were the primary weapon. A hundred years before that it was large cannon broadsides. There is always going to be a primary type of long-range weapon.
Armour already requires extra weight per layer, as each extra layer uses a surface area measurement for the ship that includes the previous layer.
I have been considering a different way of dealing with the small vs large warhead question. It's possible ships could suffer shock damage, which would result in a chance of a system being damaged without the armour being penetrated. The chance of shock damage would increase with larger warheads, with the increase being greater than just linear. Another potential change is to increase warhead strengths but have missiles detonating some distance from the target. Only a percentage of damage would be applied. This would remove the advantage of having missiles of certain warhead sizes. Proximity of detonation could be a tech line, with better proximity detection resulting in a higher percentage of damage.
Steve
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Even if missiles are overpowered tactically, that doesn't necessarily means you have to correct it. In modern naval warfare, which is the basis for Aurora, missiles are the primary weapon, although there are many different types, just as in Aurora.
Modern naval missiles do not get a free 0 mass guidance package. If missiles with a range greater than 1.5mkm (ASM rather than AMM) missiles required a guidance package component, even one with small mass, the situation would get much more interesting.
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Modern naval missiles do not get a free 0 mass guidance package. If missiles with a range greater than 1.5mkm (ASM rather than AMM) missiles required a guidance package component, even one with small mass, the situation would get much more interesting.
I have considered it and I did add something similar to Newtonian Aurora. However, even a 1 MSP missile is 2.5 tons so I didn't think a guidance package could be large enough to make much difference (perhaps 250 kg which is 0.1 HS). In NA its different because a size 1 missile is only 1 ton so it does make a difference.
Steve
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However, even a 1 MSP missile is 2.5 tons so I didn't think a guidance package could be large enough to make much difference (perhaps 250 kg which is 0.1 HS).
The size of the transluminal receiver portion of a missile guidance package is entirely at your discretion as author :)
You can make it as small or as large as you want and no one can argue with it. You could make it as large as necessary to spoil the 'small missile is best' equation and still avoid penalizing AMM design by reducing (or eliminating) the requirement with a max range limitation of 1.5 mkm or so.
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Steve: If you go down the road of trying to adjust the balance in favor of big missiles, I think you should "fix" the armor tech for missiles too, so that higher armor tech ratings requires less mass for a certain level of missile armor (assuming you didn't already do this for 6.x). I think the major effect that favors small missiles over large is that (without armor) anti-missile fire is N times more effective (in terms of damage attrition) against M size-N missiles than against N*M size-1 missile. Missile armor changes this effect - the performance impact of level-1 armor is much lower on a big missile than on a small missile.
I think that means that people will need to armor their missiles in order to take advantage of any large-missile benefits you put it; this means that the incongruity of requiring the same armor mass at armor tech level 1 as at level 5 will become more aggravating to players.
John
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The solution could also be in changing how CIWS works. Since it's supposed to be a 'last ditch' system, why not have it only partially prevent damage to the ship. Instead of destroying the missile, it could also just detonate it just before a skin-on-skin hit. The effect wouild be to reduce the damage the missile does - say by stripping off the last dmg ring - a 1 dmg missile would not do any damage, a size 2-4 missile would do 0-1 point, size 5-9 would do 0-4 etc. At the same time the number of shots and accuracy of CIWS could be increased to keep it balanced.
The same change could also give a good reason to use laser warheads, since they could be less effected by detonating a short distance away from the target (and they could have a certain minumum warhead size to make it impossible to fit them in size 1 missiles).
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if the problem is about small missiles, maybe it could be an option, to give some mass to essential missile parts.
like there is allways a:
-cooling system for fuel
-fuel pumps
-energy source/generator
-maybe a heatshield between engines and tanks
-the casing of the missile
-some basic navigation/aiming/flightcontrols
-wings/guidence-systems
-basic eccm
all thouse things together could use some space of each missile - all together maybe 0.1-0.2 of a size 1 missile? - some things you can not realy make smaller.
alot of thouse things must not be any/much larger or more complex for larger missiles(it gets normaly only more complicated for smaller missiles), so they can profit of thouse necessary items taking less % of the total missile mass.
edit: maybe you shouldnt be able to shoot normal missiles at planets or in nebulae
- i mean if a missile with 30k+ km/sec hits the atmosphere of a planet, it will be like hitting a wall compared with flighing in space.
in addition the chances are, that it will burn up before hitting anything, unless it has alot of heatshielding for this speed. - and this heat shielding is useless mass in space.
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the squared-size warhead thing is a little exaggerated,
size^2+size is also a quite viable. if you are actually penetrating the armor with your hit its double the damage.
size 6 warhead does 2 damage at 2 depth, size 12 does 2 damage at 3 depth, size 20 does 2 at 4, and so on.
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I agree with the sentiment that the 'missile problem' is mostly one of internal missile balance between large and small. There's a number of possible fixes but I think they all run up against the AMM problem. No matter how much you buff big missiles or nerf small missiles vs ships, AMMs are only really balanced when compared to size 3-4 missiles; they're insufficient against missiles smaller than that and increasingly excellent against larger missiles. This would be the case even if large missiles fired at the same ROF as small missiles - As long as you have adequate Res1 sensor/targeting coverage you should virtually always run out of AMMs before your ships take any serious damage, unless AMM launcher ROF is completely overwhelmed by a box launcher strike. Big missiles have to be somehow competitive against AMMs. The most immediately apparent ways to do this are buffing missile armor (needs to be mathematically viable) and missile ECM (generates AMM misses?). That might also result in an interesting arms race mechanic, since AMMs with stronger warheads might be a better choice against super-heavy shipkillers with high HTK. Of course, those same AMMs would be sacrificing accuracy and perhaps quantity against an enemy using smaller missiles.
Hmm... though current size 2-4 ASMs would probably work well as anti-heavy-missile weapons. That might work out with 3 tiers of missiles: AMMs which are good against ASMs which are good against heavies... which can soak current AMMs. Of course some maniac will build a size 40 missile with a ludicrous warhead and 25 htk. Godspeed you.
On a related note, I feel the entire missile launcher size reduction line is underpowered until you get to box launchers. There's also a weird tech problem with box launchers, since you just pretty much max out and can't improve them. It's also a little silly that its harder to figure out boxes than tractor beams or planetary terraforming. xD I can't imagine what you'd improve for box launchers though. Marginal increases in size reduction? HTK? Reload speed? (haha.)
I have a mental image of designing missile launcher systems with a # of tubes, size, and reload mechanism. Sorta more like magazines than current missile launchers. So instead of mounting 72 box launchers I might mount 6 12-cell launch systems.
Now I have a weird mental image of removing MFCs entirely... //stops before he goes WAAAY too far into the weeds.
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On a related note, I feel the entire missile launcher size reduction line is underpowered until you get to box launchers. There's also a weird tech problem with box launchers, since you just pretty much max out and can't improve them. It's also a little silly that its harder to figure out boxes than tractor beams or planetary terraforming. xD I can't imagine what you'd improve for box launchers though. Marginal increases in size reduction? HTK? Reload speed? (haha.)
I always though boxed missile launchers was a bit wierd.
Why do I need to invest research to develop launcher rails that we have used to launch missiles and rockets since back when they were invented as a weapon? (World war two days).
Making early missile fighters work depends on box size launchers being available right away and technically it's a very simple contraption. Id like to see all launcher reload vs size options available from start instead.
Perhaps the limit to missiles should rather be some technobabble about maximum range that it can communicate with the Missile FCS? Missiles right now is the only weapon that actually get shorter range as tech improves (seeing how your later 6x engine power designs consume fuel 88 times as fast).
Long range missiles without guidance of their own don't make much sense since the missile itself needs a big reciever to be able to recieve target data info from the ship FCS. So perhaps that's another way to balance smaller long range missiles. The size of this reciever part of the missile could depend on your tech and scale linear with range.
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another way to deal with amm spam is to force amms to do less than 1 damage to target a missile and have a missiles health increase by armor level starting a 0 basic armor and increasing 0.1 per armor researched
edit: side note doesn't the yeald of a nuclear warhead generally depend on the amount of material, the equipment used to trigger a reaction generally stays about the same size thus imposing a limit in how small a bomb can be made.
addition to suggestion have a micro nuke tech line for amm warhead to show how hard it is to miniaturise nukes rising 0.1 damage per tech so only level 10 could damage ships
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Having micro-htk for missies is interesting, but changing missiles to artificially unable to target missiles if they have a size 1 warhead feels forced. There are other solutions to sandblasting presented in the thread, to the extent that it's an issue. Personally I like armor HTK (compared to total size of blast).
Or it could be progressive HTK? 4 damage warhead vs HTK2 armor. first damage alloc, 4 damage remaining so autohit. second alloc, 3, autohit. third alloc, 2, autohit. last alloc, 1, 50% chance to damage second layer. *shrugs*
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Given we already have size-based efficiency for missile engines, can't we do the same formula for missile armor?
In addition to, say, weight reduction to 0.5 for a point on maximum tech?
Even a mid level missile of, say, size 6 would only need to spend 0.55 msp to get the equivalent of a point of ablative armor; it's a subtle change that might not solve the problem, but it'll be a step, and the effect can be evaluated.
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I can't imagine what you'd improve for box launchers though. Marginal increases in size reduction? HTK? Reload speed? (haha. )
Maybe a superposed load like Metal Storm products.
P. S. In my opinion the size 1-4 ASM desing with box luncher is beaten by the size 50-100 box with size 1-4 ASM as second stage, giveng a longer range for a deadly alpha strike, giving enough room to flee/hide if need a second strike.
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Maybe a superposed load like Metal Storm products.
This. Or the option to 'multipack' large box launcher with many smaller missiles, for example 4 Size 1 AMMs in a Size 5 Box Launcher (so some size is wasted - tech line?). This is similar to the way real VLS systems can pack multiple smaller missiles into a larger VLS (US Mk41 can mount either a long range Standard SAM, or quadpack 4 short range ESSM SAMs).
This would allow box launcher designs to be more flexible, without making them more powerful directly.
Also, I think box/vls launchers should be seperated from rail/rack type external launches. The first is more likely on ships, the second on gunboats and fighters, possibly being limited to these types.
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AMMs used in an anti-ship role could also be nerfed by making missiles unable to evade defensive fire by default.
Let's say a missile requires a 'terminal guidance' system to be able to try and evade defensive fire. It could be of a minimum size, say 0. 5 or 1 MSP. If CIWS was changed at the same time, making it 4 25% accuracy guns it would make AMMs extremely easy prey for it. A single CIWS would then be able to take down 16 AMMs at ROF tech 4, and ships would have a reason to mount large numbers of reduced size gauss guns.
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You can sort of do the quad-pack already, by taking, say, 4 size 1 missiles, and fitting them as the second stage in a size-5 missile. The missile itself can be a cheap engine (conventional would work well) and whatever cheap filler you can come up with (Armor springs to mind). The problem is that all of them go off against the same target at the same time.
Adjusting missile armor would be very nice. As is, the same amount of armor is required no matter the armor tech and missile size. Fixing that would make it a lot more useful. As a bonus to larger missiles, the amount of armor required would scale with the 2/3rds root of the size of the missile.
One thing I would like to see is an improved staging research system. Right now, researching a staged missile means you have to pay the research cost for the upper stage(s) as well. Charging something like 10% of upper stage construction cost into the research cost would be nice.
For the other damage stuff, this is starting to sound like Newtonian Aurora. Some of the things from there might be nice to implement. Or maybe we could get the whole thing...
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You can sort of do the quad-pack already, by taking, say, 4 size 1 missiles, and fitting them as the second stage in a size-5 missile. The missile itself can be a cheap engine (conventional would work well) and whatever cheap filler you can come up with (Armor springs to mind). The problem is that all of them go off against the same target at the same time.
Adjusting missile armor would be very nice. As is, the same amount of armor is required no matter the armor tech and missile size. Fixing that would make it a lot more useful. As a bonus to larger missiles, the amount of armor required would scale with the 2/3rds root of the size of the missile.
One thing I would like to see is an improved staging research system. Right now, researching a staged missile means you have to pay the research cost for the upper stage(s) as well. Charging something like 10% of upper stage construction cost into the research cost would be nice.
For the other damage stuff, this is starting to sound like Newtonian Aurora. Some of the things from there might be nice to implement. Or maybe we could get the whole thing...
The problem with doing a two-stage missile for this kind of thing is that it makes a good portion of the missile 'useless' because you've got to fill it up to at least 1 MSP before you can put any other stages on it. It used to be that you could do shotgun-canisters that were JUST a bunch of missiles strapped together, but that got removed due to being able to make size 0.25 missiles and spamming them. It also complicates your missile production; right now in my campaign I have six missiles I need to produce, a Size 4 Torpedo, a Size 2 Torpedo, a Size 1 ASM, a Size 1 Countermissile and a Size 4 ASM. Oh, and the jump-gate mines. Adding another Size 4 design for a CM Canister would just make logistics and production way more difficult.
So while the return of pure canister shot would be nice, it'd still be a little bit strategically inflexible. Now, that said, I wouldn't mind seeing a separation of VLS and Rack/Box launchers. Give VLS a slightly longer reload time at a maintenance port/in a hangar, while Rack would be a 1000 ton (or maybe 500 ton and have them be purely fighter) version that reloads much quicker in a hangar, but can't reload from maintenance ports. And as another defining characteristic, give VLS the ability to pack multiple smaller missiles inside of a larger cell, even if that's a tech line we have to go down, while racks would still need to use canister-style designs.
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Maybe the tech tree should work the other way around? Where you start with box launchers and can research 1x size 1x reload, then 2x size 1.5x reload speed, then 3x size 1.75x reload speed...
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Maybe the tech tree should work the other way around? Where you start with box launchers and can research 1x size 1x reload, then 2x size 1.5x reload speed, then 3x size 1.75x reload speed...
Why would you progress past 1x in this case?
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Maybe the tech tree should work the other way around? Where you start with box launchers and can research 1x size 1x reload, then 2x size 1.5x reload speed, then 3x size 1.75x reload speed...
Wouldnt Box launcher, .25 size .25 reload then you go up like that till you get a full size automatic launcher that is 1x size 1x reload speed. Then the reload rate tech is still valid?
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Why would you progress past 1x in this case?
I think he means 1x would start where 100x would normally be, making the default ROF 3,000 seconds instead of 30 seconds. You would then add tonnage to the weapon system, adding the loading mechanisms.
That would make the tech tree look like:
Tech Name Size Reload Speed Mod
Box Launcher 0.6x 6.6x (no internal reload)
Internal Reload 1x 1x 3,000 seconds
Reloader 1 1.32x 5x 600 seconds
Reloader 2 2x 20x 150 seconds
Reloader 3 3x 50x 60 seconds
Reloader 4 4x 100x 30 seconds
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I would also like to see some mechanic where armor can shrug low damage shots entirely (1-4 damage range). For one it would be great to balance smaller missiles.
The odds of it happening though could depend on a few other factors like:
¤ Total thickness (10 levels thick has a much higher chance then 2 levels)
¤ Armor density (tech level)
¤ Relative angular speed at impact (probably to complex to simulate)
It would also be fun to see some additional detail flavor, like choosing either "reflective armor" (better against laser type damage) or "reactive armor" (better against fragmentation type damage). Could include different technology lines too. It feels wrong to have so many different kinds of weapons, but so few kinds of defenses.
Yeah, I actually like this idea. Make the armour value be able to absorb a certain amount of damage depending on how thick it is-- i. e a 4/5 layer armour might be able to shrug off 1 point of damage-- meaning anti missiles and lasers at long range simply wouldn't do damage (and really, a laser at long range would be pretty weak, but when they close in they'd still probably cut through like butter as the laser is stronger anyway. )
Additionally I'd probably make sure the mitigation factor is limited by range or something, so fighters or FACs that come in close would still be able to score damage (being closer would mean they could target specific weakspots etc, bulkheads, the bridge, engine housing etc instead of just pewpewing from maximum range and hoping to hit something important. )
Whereas a size 10 layers of armour could mitigate say, 3 points instead of 2-- indicating larger, more heavily armoured ships would be able to take more punishment before enough critical system damage racks up. Again, a 20 layer ship would be able to mitigate something like 6 points-- meaning for larger ships you'd have to design larger missiles.
As it works now, all armour is ablative-- if one section takes damage, it takes damage and is lost. I use shields for mitigating damage since they regen (hell, in my first combat encounter my measley tech 2 shields were enough to shrug off a good few volleys of nukes-- and the enemy were firing so slowly I managed to get out of the encounter with only a tiny amount of damage to my armour on one ship of three and no critical system damage. Didn't even lose crew-- and those ships were something I just had to bodge together because my first contact mission ended rather abruptly when a peaceful race decided to blow my survey ship out of space.
I think it would be relatively simple to add the mitigation factor, but I'm not a programmer :P
As for ricochet/Deflection, I think projectiles would be travelling at high enough velocity that this wouldn't matter much unless we had the ability to create angular armour on our ships so as to increase the angle of incidence-- a projectile fired from a railgun or gausscannon wouldn't be losing velocity in a vacuum and missiles would detonate (aside from kinetic missiles. )
However, I can see fighters and FACs being rather angular ships, so perhaps an evasion or deflection modifier based on current speed divided by projectile speed? a vastly faster projectile would have a higher chance to hit while a faster ship would be able to evade or deflect a bit more.
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The problem is in the ablative armour mechanic. It makes all 1 pt damage equal. Since all 1 pt damage is equal it doesn't matter if this is the long range fire from the Überkannonen or some dinky peashooter on a PT boat. As all weapons will do 1 pt of damage it generally becomes advicable to generate damage in many small 1 pt hits rather than 1 big 20 pt hit. This is true of any game that uses ablative armour. It is not something you can fix while retaining ablative armour.
The solution is give armour a rating. It stops x damage. If the weapon does <x then it does no damage. That stops pipsqueek weapons cold.
This is why in the real world destroyers did not engage in gun duels with Battleships. Their 4.5" main guns were not going to do anything of consiquence to the battleship and the battleship had a lot of fast firing secondary batteries that would ruin the day of the tin can. The destroyer was dangerous because it mounted torpedoes that could (and did) penetrate the battleships armour. The same is true of MBTs, armoured cars/IFVs/AFVs don't stand a chance against a MBT in a gun on gun duel. That is because the MBTs armour can shrug off the hits of the small calibre guns they are armed with.
A friend of mine for the game battletech (where exactly the same problem shows up) made a system of penetration and armour that dramatically improved the game play. An assault mech suddenly became an assault mech as you would expect from the game fiction.
As a mechanic for a PnP game abaltive armour is easy to use and appealing but it borks up any game that uses it. It all comes down to 1 pt of damage is 1 pt of damage and it doesn't matter from where it comes and that is what at the end of the day breaks the combat system. It is true of battletech, starfire, aurora, starfleet battles, renegade legion leviathan and every other game I've ever played that uses it as a mechanic. I believe Attack Vector: Tactical uses a fixed armour value that just subtracts from damage done. But in that game getting hit by a missile is a catastrophy you do your best to avoid since it is likely to be highly fatal to the ship.
You can do fancy things were multiple hits to the same section reduce the armour value of an area but principly armour should work as a damage break. If the damage exceeds it then it does something otherwise nothing happens. This would stop cold the 1 pt warhead problem.
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How about a hybrid of the current ablative system, and the system it replaced many versions ago. The old system was each level of armor prevented 1 point of damage from each hit. So with two points of armor a missile doing 1 point of damage was effectivly doing nothing. The same hit with a base damage of 3 would be getting 1 internal damage point. The armor was not changed as the ship took hits. Steve later changed to the ablative armor and multiplied how much armor was recieved for a given tonnage by 4. What would the effect of having every 4 points of the current armor depth stop 1 point of incomming damage?
For example a ship is hit with multiple strength 4 hits and has 4 points of armor. Currently each hit would leave a crater 3 wide with only the center being 2 deep in the armor. A couple of hits in the same place and the armor is breached. With the system I am proposing the 1st hit on any column would only do three points of damage and would not penetrate to a deeper level of armor. It would however reduce the damage reduction to zero so the next hit in the same place would do more damage. I would take 3 hits in the same position for any internals. Compared to the old style where after two hits the armor was breached and waiting for any addidtional damage to be internal.
If you increased the armor to 5 depth then the first two hits on the same place would be weakened and the rest would work the same as the previous example. In both cases the ships would be immune to 1 point hits untill some other source of damage had put some craters in the starting armor.
Some consequences that come to mind are that non square warhead sizes would become more important. With the examples above a 5 point warhead would have double the penetration of a 4 point warhead. I could also see a 6 point warhead being fairly usefull for the same reason against heavier armors (8 - 11 points of armor depth.) This would be less of a point for really big missiles as they have the room for a bit larger warhead, but for the missiles people usually use (size 4-6) it could have a major impact on missile design.
The change would also make long range beam combat more interesting as weapons doing minimal damage at their extreme end would not be hurting a ships armor. Larger slow firing weapons that do lots of damage even at max range would have an advantage, as would particle beams with their fixed damage at all ranges.
Small 1 point damage weapons would still have a purpose however in taking down a targets shields. Small 1 point damage missiles could also be used to help saturate enemy point defense and take down the shields so the heavier missiles that follow could get in close and have a chance to inflict damage. If they inflict enough damage then the small missiles could finish off a target.
The one major question I would have is if this would be to hard to code in. Each shot would need to compare the damage being done to the amount of armor remaining in the specific column being hit. This might add to much processor time to be worthwhile.
Brian
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Couple of things to think about. Its been 15+ years since Ive seen it, but GURPS had a decent armor system. Armor had damage points (hit points) and DR (damage resistance). Lets say you had a type of armor with 10hitpoints and 2 DR. You get hit by a weapon that does 6 points of damage. 6 - 2DR = 4 points of damage to the target. You could something like this, where some of the damage applies to the armor (DR is now 1) and some of the damage goes to the ships internals. Basically, leaky armor.
DR could go up with technology. Increasing levels of tech greatly increases the ability of the armor to shrug off gnat attacks. Also, I would suggest making weight of a ship go WAY up with increased armor. Right now you can add VERY thick levels of armor without substantial weight penalty. Increase this GREATLY. That way you cant just have near invincible 20-armor ships slogging around...unless you want them at stupidly slow speeds.
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The solution is give armour a rating. It stops x damage. If the weapon does <x then it does no damage. That stops pipsqueek weapons cold.
I'm not sure if you remember, but this is actually the mechanism that Aurora started out with. It had its own set of problems - I can remember building something like a level 10-12 (~40-50 with today's armor) armored monitor when I was VERY low tech to engage some precursors. It was completely immune to their ~str-9 beam hits and simply plinked away at them while shrugging off their hits. And yes, I know this is similar to the situation with Virginia and Monitor, but was very unsatisfying as a game mechanic.
I think Steve's idea of shock damage is probably a good compromise. Another possibility would be to multiply the strength of the warhead by some power (e.g. 1) of (WH strength/Armor strength) to get the amount of damage done. For example, if the power was 1, then damage = (WH strength)^2/(Armor strength). This would have a smoother cutoff (less than linear in armor strength), while still tipping the balance towards high-damage weapons and high-armor targets. For example, you would only need a str-2 warhead to do 1 damage point against str-4 armor, while a str-4 warhead would do 8 pts of damage against str-2 armor. And if you measured armor strength by first calculating the hit location then taking the actual (damaged) depth of armor at that spot, then you get the "multiple hits to the same section ..." for free.
John
PS - It would have been good to read Brian's response before writing the above :)
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One thing that makes permanent armour not so bad is to have weapons have two ratings: penetration, and damage. Penetration is how much armour the weapon can bypass and damage is how much it does if it can penetrate. You can make weapons that have high penetration and low damage, low penetration and high damage, or other combinations. Missile warheads can have their penetration increase by the square of their size while their damage is something else.
You can play games with weapon special abilities...hits reduce armour etc. Adding in a damage capacity before penetration drops as was suggested also works. The big thing is that you stop the 1pt (Überkannonen) = 1pt (peashooter) effect that is implicit to the ablative armour model and that at the end of the day breaks the system.
It basically gives a lot of parameters that can be adjusted to tune things.
The fact that at low tech you can make an armoured brick doesn't say the mechanic is bad it says that you have to look at the details some more. For example: You can make a limit to the value of armour at a specific tech level. You can make special rules about how a weapon can still cause spalling or partial armour penetration/shock, etc. There are lots of ways to deal with the situation. Ablative armour is at the end of the day a trap you can't get out of once you are in it. Shapes of penetration are good but only if the sandblaster isn't available, if the sandblaster is then who cares if this other weapon has a nice deep penetration I just hit them with 27 smaller weapons and get the same effect, and it is nearly axiomatic that trying to stop 27 of something is harder than stopping one of something else.
At the end of the day my feeling on what generates a good rule set is to look at how something functions in the real world and base your game system around that.
If you want to specifically stop size 1 missiles being used as a sandblaster then you can change the warhead rules. Make two warheads one designed for Anti-missile work that does only 10% damage to a ship (pick whatever percent you like). The other is an anti-ship warhead that can't be used against missiles. Then someone has to decide which sort of missiles his ships carry. You still end up with the problem of FAC/Box launcher size 1 missile volleys in the 100s destroying anything they are targeted on though.
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Ermm
i think you guys are overestimating the effect of the ablative system.
AMMs and size 1 missiles are 'broken' because they can't be efficiently stopped by active means, not because sandblasting is effective. Bigger warheads are more effective than sandblasting, because of hit distribution.
to draw from other game systems as well, people used lots of PPCs and Gauss Rifles in battletech for more reasons than range. Better clustering led to more dead battlemechs.
any fix to AMMs that encompasses only damage reduction can lead to a cascade of other effects, most notably on beam combat. Plasma cannons, lasers, and railguns would all have severe reductions in effective range. Mesons would be unaffected, and particle beams mostly so.
Also, because of how armor works, it would also likely be a nerf to small vessels, particularly beam fighters/facs.
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Yeah. Which is why I love the 'proximity hits' idea for missile impacts that Steve had. No effect on beam combat while still reserving small warheads for AMM duty
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A bigger warhead does more damage but at the end of the day who cares? Many small hits are equal to one big one. The fact that more small missiles are harder to stop, fire faster, are quicker and cheaper to build, are easier to carry (probably constrained by the fact you need more of them), have a cheaper launcher etc are just awesome sauce poured on the mix.
In battletech a helicopter mounted AC2 is devestating...you are forever shooting in the back of the mech. But the main point is that in battlemech a single lance of light mechs will loose to a single assault mech but after that battle the assault mech will be no longer combat capable. In the real world a bunch of armoured cars engaging a MBT will not accomplish much of anything unless they get lucky and break a track.
A real world navy game, such as Bismark by Avalon Hill, you see very clearly why you don't send smaller ships against larger ones. In the missile age the misunderstanding of the effects of missiles led to people building ships that would not survive combat because the assumption was ships would not survive combat...modern naval designs no longer assume as ship subject to missile fire will be sunk and armour makes a return.
I don't understand why beam weapons are so pathetically short ranged a laser in 5s can fire out to 1.5m km (5 x300,000 km/s). Particle beam weapons would be probably around 0.75c in terms of beam velocity assuming a charged beam but I'm not sure their range would be that extreme since the space charge effects would dominate. For neutral beams the situation is better but still unlikely that you could hold the beam together for so long. Fusion beams or plasma caronades are much shorter ranged since the plasma tends to disperse as the square of the distance travelled.
If you use armour with a damage stopping rating you only run into a problem if for the weapon damage = penetration. Then it is relatively easy to build armour you can't penetrate. Go away from that with weapons rated for both damage and penetration and the problem goes away.
But so long as you stick to ablative armour it always pays to use many small weapons as opposed to one big one. It is the direct consiquence of the fact all weapons must do at least 1 pt of damage and that all 1 pts of damage are equal regardless of where they come from. The only thing generally speaking then that the larger weapons offer is range. But ultimately as Dan once remarked on the starfire board "Quantity has a quality of its own."
My personal perference is not to use "swarm tactics" but it is hard to argue that it isn't effective. And it shows up in every game that I have seen that uses ablative armour and non-differentiated weapons.
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It's not true that many small hits equal one big one in an ablative scheme, as long as it has hit locations. It will virtually always take more damage in STR-1 hits than it does in larger hits to destroy a vessel. Random hit distribution usually results in hits piling on top of each other, giving concentrated damage much greater armor penetration.
Again, you saw this in battletech, most notably with decapitation kills and other forms of coring.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
Also size is irrelevant in the modern scheme. When naval gunnery was dominant, bigger ships mounted bigger guns and therefore had a qualitative advantage. With missiles, every ship packs pretty much the same punch and there is no qualitative size difference. The same goes for armored cars versus tanks, there's a reason everything and their mom has an ATGM strapped on. At least in terms of armaments directly. I'm not sure how big a ship you need for an AEGIS system.
I don't understand why beam weapons are so pathetically short ranged a laser in 5s can fire out to 1.5m km (5 x300,000 km/s).
I think the idea is they can't do enough damage to noticably ablate a ships armor xD
You can eventually get weapons with a lot longer range than that, but I believe beam firecontrols max out at 5c. Longer range just helps your effective range.
@Conscript Gary - Frankly, I'd like to see both of steve's ideas. Shock damage would be great regardless, and would help compensate for the loss of total damage from a proximity system.
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Another method that could be used would be like the one used in the armor for sword of the Stars 2. In this case the armor tech could add a negation layer for every other level of tech.
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Aurora doesn't have hit locations. And in battletech a heavy or assault mech will loose armour over so much of its surface in combat with a group of smaller that is effectly no longer combat worthy. Battletech has specific to hit head hits, which make it fully possible for a medium mech armed with a clan PPC to kill an assault mech with a single hit. That is specific to the combat system of battletech. It doesn't change the fact that damage is damage and if it comes from a PPC or an AC2 it is still damage. Enough AC2 hits is the same as a single hit from the PPC in terms of the damage to armour overall. Clearly a few good hits from a PPC to the same area will end the fight sooner. The same thing happens when high penetration damage weapons stack in aurora or Renegade Legion: Interceptor or Leviathan.
As far as tanks go, politicans continously confuse AFVs and IFVs with tanks. They aren't the same. A MBT is considerably more effective then a IFV regardless of the IFVs ATGMs. It is the combination of armour, and weapon that makes it so. There is a world of difference between a 120 mm smoothbore and 25 mm chain gun or 75 mm smoothbore in terms of effectiveness. ATGMs give the IFV an ambush capacity, but are pretty much useless offensively, and their lack of armour means they can't be too agressive.
Missiles are not identical over ship type. Larger ships in real life carry more powerful longer ranged missiles (harpoons and tomahawks for the US). Smaller ships carry smaller missiles (not necessarily fewer of them as there are or were russian litorial combat ships that carried a massive number of missiles). The effectiveness of the missile is also different (warhead size of the smaller missiles is obviously smaller). It isn't as big as the difference between a destroyer and a cruiser in WW2 but it isn't a trivial difference either.
In aurora there is no reason not to use small missiles to snow the person under. The game is set up to make this the best solution. It is because the armour is ablative and there is no signficant advantage to the larger warhead and there is a huge advantage to a larger salvo size. This is the same thing you see in any game with ablative armour. It is IMPLICIT to the system. It is why the system is for the birds as far as I am concerned. You can't fix it because it is a direct consiquence of the armour model. Sticking in damage paterns from Renegade Legion: Interceptor or Leviathan as is done in Aurora makes weapons have some flavour but at the end of the day the smallest, fastest firing, 1 pt damage weapon will inevitably turn out to be the best min-max solution that the min-maxers gravitate to.
When you have undifferenciated weapons such as starfire does...basically all ships carry the same weapon it is just a function of how many they mount then it gets even worse. In starfire the only two reasons for big ships: WP assaults where the amount of fire power you can get through in each transit wave is critical, and missile ships where salvo size counts. Beyond that generally speaking a large number of small ships or even small craft have the same firepower.
Renegade Legion: Leviathan got around this a bit with its ablative armour a couple of ways. Shields were not ablative and weapons were strongly limited by ship type.
The easiest way to fix this as I have suggested is to make armour not ablative (within that is several flavors of how it works) and for weapons to decouple penetration from damage. When that is done then you can play around with the numbers to make what you want to happen happen. Otherwise you are trying urinating into the oncoming wind or tugging on supermans cape or however you want to put it...
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The Russians built hundreds of 200 ton missile boats that carried 4 Tomahawk-sized missiles. Just as even a fighter in Aurora can carry all but ludicrous-size missiles. There is no correlation between per-missile damage potential and ship size.
Aurora does have hit locations, it has armor columns. You concede that high damage weapons can stack hits and end fights faster but you somehow still conclude that 'damage is damage' ? :/ The fewer stacked hits you require to penetrate the armor and start inflicting internal damage, the less total damage you have to do to a vessel to kill or mission kill it.
In any case. The damage model is not irrelevant, but it misses the point. The size 1 problem is as follows: you can have a group of warships which can stop or mostly stop a wave of 50 size 4 missiles, but they will still be hit by 150 of 200 size 1 missiles. There is no active defense strategy that will help you against size 1 spam without overwhelming superiority in BP or technology. All you can do is stack on armor or stay out of range. Non-ablative armor would not fix this problem, since it's still possible to swamp defenses with size1s.. You can even put stronger warheads on small missiles. (Say hello to uncle MIRV.)
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FWIW a Size1 AMM is about the size of a Tomahawk or the Russian Styx. With a nuclear(or better) warhead. These are big booms you are suggesting having bounce off!
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FWIW a Size1 AMM is about the size of a Tomahawk or the Russian Styx. With a nuclear(or better) warhead. These are big booms you are suggesting having bounce off!
Again, I must point out that a nuke is only x-rays and neutrons. The Orion Drive Main Plate could withstand those explosions from a few metres away (hundreds of times). This is special armour we are talking about.
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as per wiki, Project Orion suggested bombs between 0.03 and 0.35 kt. A Tomahawk W80 goes up to 150kt.
you have a point, but I'm not expressing incredulity over an AMM not killing a ship... 1 pt of damage is not much.
As a side note... the wiki notes that the Project Orion guys did in fact get pusher plate ablation from their nukes... until they discovered that a layer of oil would prevent it O_o
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The Russians built hundreds of 200 ton missile boats that carried 4 Tomahawk-sized missiles. Just as even a fighter in Aurora can carry all but ludicrous-size missiles. There is no correlation between per-missile damage potential and ship size.
Aurora does have hit locations, it has armor columns. You concede that high damage weapons can stack hits and end fights faster but you somehow still conclude that 'damage is damage' ? :/ The fewer stacked hits you require to penetrate the armor and start inflicting internal damage, the less total damage you have to do to a vessel to kill or mission kill it.
In any case. The damage model is not irrelevant, but it misses the point. The size 1 problem is as follows: you can have a group of warships which can stop or mostly stop a wave of 50 size 4 missiles, but they will still be hit by 150 of 200 size 1 missiles. There is no active defense strategy that will help you against size 1 spam without overwhelming superiority in BP or technology. All you can do is stack on armor or stay out of range. Non-ablative armor would not fix this problem, since it's still possible to swamp defenses with size1s.. You can even put stronger warheads on small missiles. (Say hello to uncle MIRV.)
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FWIW a Size1 AMM is about the size of a Tomahawk or the Russian Styx. With a nuclear(or better) warhead. These are big booms you are suggesting having bounce off!
It is at the end of the day not relevant if 4 missiles can do the job of 40 missiles if it is easier, cheaper and simplier over all to achieve 40 missile salvos. Which under aurora's system it is. Box launcher, FACs, size 1 launchers etc. That it is easier to stop the 4 missiles is just icing on the cake. With Aurora's armour locations once I scrub off 50% of the amour from one row, I start working on the next, with 40 missiles I am going to bore deep holes anyway just from random chance, but you require random chance to get fast penetration with bigger warhead missiles anyway. If the armour is deeper then their penetration then the 4 larger missiles are more likely to make 4 holes in the outer layers than stack on each other. I could do the math to see if the chance is higher for 40 missiles to punch through than for 4 missiles but it still comes down to luck.
Where we are going around in circles is that we haven't defined what we want to achieve. If I want to kill the ship and that is all, then I can say it has so much internal damage capacity and so much armour and I have to do that much in the way of damage to the ship. So the ship has 40 internal hits and 100 armour hits and it takes 140 damage to destroy it. How I give that 140 damage is in the first pass not relevant to the price of tea in china. If I say I want to destroy the ship as fast as possible or with as few hits as possible then the way the damage is done matters. To be clear I am talking about the first situation. So to me it is the case that 1 pt of damage from a warhead of 1 is the same as 1 pt of damage from a warhead of 9.
To be additionally clear the use of damage patterns makes weapons distinct and adds flavour but otherwise it is still ablative armour. The inclusion of armour locations in my view doesn't change the issue with ablative armour, it just makes for more tactics in the game itself. At the end of the day enough small weapon impacts in the same armour area are equal to a single large weapon. In most games this leads to the swarm.
In aurora you have two problems: the first is that it easy with size 1 missiles to overwhelm any sensible missile defence, and the second is that the missiles are capable of inflicting damage to the ship or ships targetted.
The first problem is due to the many things. Point defence ranges are also so short that you can't thin the salvo out in the time you have (due to absurdly high missile velocities). As the salvo size is larger than typical counter missile salvos you probably can't stop enough missiles with your area defence ship and have to rely on point defence fire and in which case see above. Those are things to do with the mechanics of aurora, and could be fixed in a variety of ways.
The basic problem though is that the size 1 missile is capable of inflicting damage on the ship. Because if it wasn't then you would not be firing the 150-200 missile salvo in the first place. And it is capable of doing that damage because the armour is ablative. I am seriously dubious people have a size 1 missile with a warhead that does 4pts of damage, they almost always will keep the warhead damage at 1 and use the free space for more range, more speed and more manueverability. But if I wrong so be it, but I have been assuming right from the onset here that people are complaining essentially about getting hit by large numbers of Anti-missile missiles with size 1 warheads used in an anti-shipping role.
If you want to fix the missile damage problem then you have to do something about the root cause rather than treating the symptoms as far as I am concerned. If a size 1 warhead had no chance to damage a ship, there would be no 150-200 missile salvos*, and there would be no problem to solve. In real life you can fire a SAM at another ship, but the damage to the other ship is not exactly overwhelming. Much the same way as firing 20 mm AA guns would do "something" but rather a lot less than 12" main guns to use a WW2 example.
*Or at the very least the missiles would be less accurate, slower and shorter ranged which gives you a better chance of stopping them as a larger warhead on a size one missile has a significant performance impact.
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Virtually all ships will be destroyed with significant amounts of armor remaining, it's not a fixed number. Sandblasting will almost always take more total damage to destroy a ship than big warheads.
Random chance does not equal out between big hits and little hits. It's somewhat counterintuitive. Thus my link to the birthday problem. There's a 99% probability that in a group of 57 people, 2 of them will have the same birthday. This means that if you fire 57 missiles at a 365 armor column ship there is a 99% probability that two missiles will land on the exact same armor column.
The following is repost from an earlier topic:
let's assume you have a 6,000 ton warship being attacked by missiles, which is 29 armor columns. The second missile has a 1/29 chance of landing on the same location. The third missile has a 2/29 chance of landing on either previous location. The fourth has 3/29, and so on. It rapidly becomes more probable to have landed two hits on the same location than not. That's for *direct hits* on previous impact craters. What this basically means is that battle-damaged ships armor will be mountains and valleys - even on the thickest armor, you're likely to have undamaged columns while other sections have been completely penetrated.
or to put it another way: if you hit something with 7 missiles, there are 21 distinct chances for hits to cluster. on a 29-column (or 6000 ton) hull that works out to about a 52% chance that 2 missiles will hit directly on top of eachother. So lets suppose that the hull is armor rating 5, being attacked by strength 9 warheads - you have a 52% chance of internal damage after taking only 63 points of damage out of 148 armor strength. Bear in mind that this significantly underballs that chance, because it does not take into account damage outside the 'central column' of the pyramid.
If you hit that same ship with 10 missiles, you have about an 80% chance that two of your hits will be on top of eachother. 15 missiles is a 98% chance.
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If SAMs had nuclear warheads they'd do plenty of damage to other ships. ^___^
Armor changes would necessitate mass upheavels in weapon balance and a lot of current 'military' designs would end up completely or effectively unable to hurt enemy ships. I think it would also restrict the capability of players since it shifts the game to Go Big or Go Home... the degree of which would depend on the implementation. Though my own "Armor HTK" proposal from earlier in this thread would at least give low damage weapons some capability to hurt armor.
but if you could effectively defend against AMM fire somehow then it would just be another strategy that you can counter. Like right now the AMM balance is basically 3 AMMs per ASM, and the ASM doesn't really matter much. What if it were somehow changed so it's basically 1 MSP of AMM per MSP of ASM? IE, an incoming AMM would be easy to take out, but a size 4 ASM might require up to 4 AMMs to counter, or a single size 4 AMM. I have only vague ideas how such a scheme could be accomplished, but at the least it would only effect missile balance.
My point has just been that you are blaming the ablative armor system excessively. Size 1 missiles arn't broken because of ablative armor, which you clearly don't like on general principles. You could change ships so that AMMs are nearly useless versus ships but you could do that with size 0 warheads if that's all you want.
I don't actually have anything against non-ablative systems either, they have their advantages too. I just had a thought about a simple one actually. Armor just acts like an HTK boost to internals. Like, strength 5 armor causes 1 HTK components to be 6 HTK. So a str1 hit has a 1/6 chance of causing damage to that component, while a str4 hit has a 4/6 (Note this isn't the Armor HTK proposal I just referenced).
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To be clear I am talking about the first situation. So to me it is the case that 1 pt of damage from a warhead of 1 is the same as 1 pt of damage from a warhead of 9.
To be additionally clear the use of damage patterns makes weapons distinct and adds flavour but otherwise it is still ablative armour. The inclusion of armour locations in my view doesn't change the issue with ablative armour, it just makes for more tactics in the game itself. At the end of the day enough small weapon impacts in the same armour area are equal to a single large weapon. In most games this leads to the swarm.
Hi Paul,
I'm not arguing with your central thesis that the fundamental problem with size-1 warheads is overwhelming active defences. But your statement that I've quoted is not precisely correct. It might be roughly correct, but it's not precisely correct. The reason is that you can kill a ship that still has armor left over. In other words, the DTK (Damage To Kill, by which I mean the number of damage points required to burn through the armor and inflict enough internal damage to kill the ship) is different when using large warheads than when using small. (It is also different for hits than for missile hits of the same strength, since beams have a different damage template.)
To illustrate this, imagine a fighter with that can take 1 internal damage point; let's say it has 10 columns of depth-1 armor (I know it would have less than that in practice, but the point I'm trying to illustrate is the same). If I hit it with a str-4 warhead, that hit will kill it; 3 points will be soaked up by armor (due to template) and 1 will penetrate, killing it while 3 armor points remain. If I hit it with 4 str-1 warheads, then chance of a kill is less than 100%, since there's a (fairly good) chance that all 4 hits will hit a different column. (If I've done my combinatorics right, then the probability of a kill is (10/10)*(9/10)*(8/10)*(3/10)*4 = 86.4%). In other words the armor soaks up more damage from smaller hits.
You might say that from a practical point of view this doesn't matter, since if the target has the ability to shoot down 1 missile then the str-1 missiles win (3 damage points applied vs. 0), but I don't think that that's what people are disputing. It's the statement that the points of damage applied from small warheads are the same as those from big warheads.
John
(edit: nope, did combinatorics wrong. Probability of not killing is (10/10)*(9/10)*(8/10)*(7/10) = 50.4%, PK is 49.6%).
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(http://s18.postimage.org/4oe2f024p/image.jpg)
This is a graph Theokrat created recording simulation results of 144 points of damage distributed in different size warheads. It rates them by internal damage dealt against a ship with 6 armor strength distributed in 40 columns (10,000t).
it's from this thread:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,4926.0.html
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Look guys, I am talking in generalities. If you want to get down to specifics then yes you can always find something to argue about with what I said.
My contention is: It is considerably more difficult to stop 200 size 1 missiles then 22 size 3 missiles. (22 picked to make the damage equal on a warhead size*# of missiles basis)
My contention is: The game allows for the launch 200 size 1 missiles. Based on the analysis of Shoe this isn't a wopptie do da for a moderately high tech race.
My conenteion is: The damage from the 200 size 1 warheads ~ the damage from the 22 size 9 warheads because at the end of the day the armour is ablative. Actually because of the first problem the damage from the 180 size 1 warheads is considerably greater than the damage form the 2 size 9 warheads (for the sake of arguement lets say you can stop 20 missiles).
My contention is: That the first and second contentions would not be a problem and would not require fixing if the third contention was not true.
So either you fix the problem of size 1 warheads doing damage to ships or you tackle the more complex problem of reducing the salvo size without all the associated knock on effects I would expect to come out of it.
It isn't about if it is more efficient to use a scale 9 warhead as a ship killer missile warhead. That is a given. With templates you can more efficiently kill a ship with a smaller number of larger warheads. I am not saying you can't. All I am saying is that I can use a larger number of size 1 warheads and do the job (kill the ship). Are you saying that this isn't the case? Unless you are I don't honestly see what we are arguing about. The curve is nice but you still get internal hits with 1 damage point warheads, and the peaks are relatively similiar moving from 4 to 10 internal hits. As it doesn't factor in the chance a missile hits due to point defence I am not sure how much relevance you can assign to it, for this discussion. It is done under the assumption that 144 scale 1 warheads landing on target has the same chance to occur as 16 scale 9 warheads. If this were to be the case then I doubt this topic would exist. The chance that 16 missiles will hit is considerable lower than that 144 small missiles will as the point defence will have an easier time stopping 16 inbounds then 144.
Also all the statements about landing on top of each other apply to single damage point missiles as well. The more missiles I have landing on the target the more likely I'm going to get single points of damage through even though the armour may not yet be sandblasted away. To me this is a non-issue frankly as you aren't firing 200 small missiles at the target to kill it efficiently, you are doing it because it is a way to exploit the game system to accomplish your goal of killing the enemy ships. Or am I misunderstanding something?
As for nuclear warheads. We are talking about space battles. Fundamantally the damage from a nuke in space is considerably less than in an atmosphere as the main damage comes from the plasma that was the missile body. The prompt gammas and the slightly slower particles (neutrons and light stuff) are basically dangerous only to the electronics and the crew. The plasma is largely affected by the r^-2 law. So for the missile to be that effective the warhead has to detonate within a few km or possibly even closer to the hull. Given the speeds of the ships and missiles in aurora this means a ms error in the detonation time probably puts the missile well outside of an area where the ship takes anything but the gamma/particle flux.
As I said elsewhere on the board at the velocities the ships and missiles use in Aurora a nuclear warhead is the little sugar sprinkles you use to decorate a cake. A kinetic impact of the magnitude of a size 1 missile moving at 12,000 km/s would reduce the ship hit to scrap metal and render the crew into undiferentiated paste.
So I'm not impressed by a patry 150 kt nuclear warhead when these missiles have the kinetic energy equivelant of gigatonnes (from memory of sitting down and working this out). Even if only 0.1% of that the transfers to the target ship... frankly my mind shuts down when I consider this sort of collision dynamics... that is megatonnes. I quite honestly can't concieve of what happens at the moment of impact. Only during supernova core bounces does matter interact like this in the real world...and at nothing like that sort of velocity.
To me it is magik anyway so I don't worry about if the armour is somewhat more magikal than the weapon.
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look... ship damage... it's a probability thing. I really can't explain it better than I have, or better than the links I've provided. Damage does not equals out in the end; larger warheads stack better. *shrug*
But hey, damage isn't the problem anyway. Armor isn't the point of failure, missile defence is the point of failure. Armor works just fine against AMMs.
Anyways, respectfully signing out of this discussion. It was interesting. :)
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Larger warheads are 20-50% more efficient, depending on a number of factors. Paul's wrong, blah blah.
Now, the problem: Size 1 ASMs (not AMMs) are far more difficult to shoot down than larger ASMs. Assuming ANY significant missile defense, this vastly outweighs the benefit of large warheads. At size 5 or so, it starts evening out some, with armor and sensors.
There are suggestions for dealing with this problem:
Leave it alone. Small ASMs do have (relatively) short range. I'm not convinced this is a good way to go though.
Rework missile armor. Have the effectiveness of missile armor change with your armor tech, remove the base 1 htk on every missile. Probably necessitates a gauss cannon buff. AMMs wouldn't get so much better per tech level. (May also require an agility buff to compensate.) I kinda liked this idea, beyond the question of how you stuff 4x the armor on a missile per HS than on a ship.
Damage reduction. This is kinda problematic for beam combat balance. I suspect it would work out if you switched meson/HPM range with railgun/gauss. Maybe rebalance particle beams a little. Plasma carronades needed a buff anyway. This would also shift ship design from masses of small weapons to less bigger ones. Not a bad thing IMO.
I'd be happy to see either of those changes. It's not like aurora was very carefully designed in regards to balance. It's more 'throw it in, see how it works out, adjust as needed'.
EDIT: To comment on shock damage, unless it's rather better than 50% effective bonus, it WON'T solve the problem. It'll make comparisons between size 3-12 missiles more interesting, but size 1's will have mostly the same issue. I guess it'd help some.
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It's not like aurora was very carefully designed in regards to balance. It's more 'throw it in, see how it works out, adjust as needed'.
Ummm actually Steve worries a LOT about whether changes will break balance. Missiles my seem to be (tactically) unbalancing but as you may have heard before :) they have severe strategic penalties in the other direction.
John
PS - On a different note, it sounds like everyone is in violent agreement with the statement that the problem with size-1 missiles is that they A) overload the interceptors and B) cause damage so you either have to fix A or B. :)
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Fixing A would also remove some of the punch from box missile megasalvos. Though unless anybody has any brilliant ideas, also a lot harder to fix
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Shows what I know. :) I guess I looked at plasma carronades and made assumptions. The missile aspect of combat is great, beams seemed less complex.
Anyway.
If we pick A, we wish to not make larger missiles worse at the same time. Seriously changing the missile armor system, and improving missile defense to compensate is the only way I see to go about it.
If we pick B, that means damage reduction. It could be missile only though. Or I suppose much less linear damage. Of course, you'd have to reduce the effectiveness of lower power missiles anyway. Drop warhead power/research maybe?
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Shoe, I wish we could have talked about this in person and not via bloody posts. The trouble is when discussing any mathematical concept with words it easy to get things mixed up as everyone needs to have the same vocabulary. When you use math this confusion goes away, so if we could have both drawn on a piece of paper the number of times we went around the mulberry bush would have gone way down. I am not saying what you said was wrong either.
To again restate my original point:
So long as armour is ablative it is hard to fix AAM swarms in aurora (small craft in starfire, etc). It is because the limits on the damage distribution function are linear with damage, and it is likely that taking into acount the situation as a whole a lot of peashooters perform better than the single Überkannonen.
I think that if you assign armour a damage resistance value and assign weapons both a damage value and an independant penetration value then you have the maximum flexibility to solve the problem in a way that achieves what ever it is you set out to do with the least amount of "oh crap" effects.
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Could we hock the HTK system, maybe? The top cell in an armor column has an HTK value equal to the height of the column. Warheads can have the square root of their size as the damage, (unrounded so non-square warheads have utility) beams can be based on range maybe?. So now armor thickness doesn't just give you more layers to ablate, it increases the toughness of the armor while still allowing smaller hits to get through if you pile enough of them on. As a fun side effect, basing the HTK on the current height of the armor means that as you take damage, your damaged armor segments are weakened both in ablative ability and in ability to resist damage.
The most glaringly obvious issue with a system like this is that it would probably increase the complexity of the combat calculations by some absurd magnitude, but a man can dream.
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I think that if you assign armour a damage resistance value and assign weapons both a damage value and an independant penetration value then you have the maximum flexibility to solve the problem in a way that achieves what ever it is you set out to do with the least amount of "oh crap" effects.
You can also solve it by assigning damage types and corresponding armor types, for example missiles deal explosive damage which certain research can reinforce your armor against, but this means leaving you vulnerable to kinetic / beam damage types instead.
More details in my full suggestion at the "Semi-Official 6.x Suggestion Thread".
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Wow, looks like my thread devolved into quite the argument. I guess a lot of people feel strongly about AMM spam. I have recently begun to think that perhaps things aren't as bad as all that and fixing it might be simpler than we thought.
Increased warhead size does provide a better distribution of damage, but the improvement is mild at best. I mean, you have to QUADRUPLE the warhead size before you get any significant improvement, so its a mild improvement per WH increase of 1.
On the other hand, smaller missiles
- have greatly increased firing speed (best illustrated by the fact that a size 1 and a size 2 missile launcher have equal dps if you just scale the missile accordingly)
- require twice as many AMMs (minimum) to be stopped
- have better utility as they double as AMMs themselves for reduced logistics overhead (this probably offsets the extra few damage points worth of missiles you need to shoot to kill something)
So to balance things, we just need to limit their advantages.
Reduce firing rate of smaller launchers relative to larger launchers (bring them closer together).
Reduce the speed of smaller engines, making AMMs rely on agility more than speed to intercept targets. This makes all intercepts against them easier.
Possible idea to allow a 'partial' warhead of 0.5 which does 1pt of damage to internals and unarmored missiles but no damage against armour.
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Personally I would not mind if missile combat changed to reflect reality a little more in which actually hitting a ship becomes more or less impossible with a missile and that missiles explode and damage many ships in a formation. Much like in Newtonian Aurora. Sure this would change the balance of missiles but would make things more interesting since larger warheads will also mean higher accuracy and damaging more ships at the same time.
I would also like armour to change into something like described in Newtonian Aurora. I really think that the current version of Aurora could do very well with these changes until Newtonian Aurora is developed.
The current missile combat mechanic is very unrealistic since a nuke that detonate right beside a ship should more or less vaporise it, not to mention the high kinetic energy stored in the projectile itself. Unless armour is super tough that is...
Anyway... there is no problem for me to just refrain from using smaller missiles as ASM in a game. Personally I never use missiles smaller than size 4 as capital ship ASM and size 2-3 as anti-craft (Fighter/FAC/corvettes) missiles. At size 4 and above missiles are pretty evenly useful when you apply armour to your bigger missiles.
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Frankly I don't see that there is a major problem with smaller missiles. This is just my opinion, but if you find yourself being overwhelmed by defensive missiles being used in an offensive mode you've done something wrong. It could be any number of things from blundering into a defensive zone unawares to a lack sufficient offensive missile strikes to give those defensive missiles something to do other than target your ships. At the very least you've given tactical initiative to the OPFOR.
<snip>
On the other hand, smaller missiles
- have greatly increased firing speed (best illustrated by the fact that a size 1 and a size 2 missile launcher have equal dps if you just scale the missile accordingly)
- require twice as many AMMs (minimum) to be stopped
- have better utility as they double as AMMs themselves for reduced logistics overhead (this probably offsets the extra few damage points worth of missiles you need to shoot to kill something)
The first and third points above are mostly correct and function as designed.
The second point is not necessarily accurate. It's more of a function of missile design decisions. If both small and larger missiles use the same proportions for engine (to include min/max power multipliers), fuel, and warhead then they should result in missiles with the same speed. With the same speed they have the same probability of intercept. If the design choices give the intended ASM less engine and thus slower, then said ASM is proportionally easier to intercept.
But here is the kicker. It is actually functionally possible to design a larger missile that is more difficult to intercept by the simple expedient of allocating more engine than the small missiles can. As long as the larger missile design using reduced msp allocation for a component that the smaller missile can't (example warhead) then it can actually be faster and more difficult to intercept. Keep in mind that allocation of missile armor can also influence this at a level that smaller missiles can not match.
So to balance things, we just need to limit their advantages.
Reduce firing rate of smaller launchers relative to larger launchers (bring them closer together).
Reduce the speed of smaller engines, making AMMs rely on agility more than speed to intercept targets. This makes all intercepts against them easier.
Possible idea to allow a 'partial' warhead of 0.5 which does 1pt of damage to internals and unarmored missiles but no damage against armour.
It's evident that I disagree.
If anything, larger missiles should have a proportionally longer cyclic rate instead of a linear one.
Smaller missiles are already proportionally slower and can consistently use more agility than previous versions. This is a result of the change in missile engine msp granularity changing from 4 decimal precision to 1 decimal precision. At first blush this results in longer ranged small missiles. But with some design considerations you can get a good amount of agility added for a small price in range that results in a much better intercept missile.
Don't see Steve going with a warhead that does different damage depending on variations in the target. He has steered away from this kind of approach in the past for the sake of programming consistency. Something to note here. In much older versions missiles with 0 warheads could successfully destroy missiles while doing no damage to ships. This loophole was deliberately closed.
Nor do I see changing the missile damage mechanic to that of Newtonian Aurora. That level of complexity is exactly what Steve is after in Newtonian, but in Standard my opinion is that he should stick to a more KISS principle.
I'm not saying that current missile mechanics don't have areas that need updating/improving. Notably missile armor is one that does need attention. But functionally hamstringing small missiles isn't one of them. This is my opinion, your mileage can and will vary.
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Let's list the advantages of each:
Large missiles:
Effective warhead increase against armor. Up to ~50% bonus at reasonable sizes.
Fuel decrease. Very significant at long ranges, irrelevant at short.
Sensors. Highly tactical.
Granular allocation efficiency.
Small missiles:
MASSIVE increase in effectiveness against active defenses.
Armor isn't an advantage, you can put it on small missiles too. Agility, same. They're just percentages of the missile.
One more comment:
Small missiles do NOT equal AMMs. Repeat: Small missiles are NOT always AMMs, they're NOT always 'defensive missiles'. Changes to AMMs don't fix the problem of size 1 ASMs. Now, there are a number of functions small missiles can't really perform. However, outside of those situations (like if you're outranged one way or another), and assuming any significant active defense (what designer doesn't have that?), there's no competition. If you're building a plain short range ASM, it should be size 1. Some people, now including me, think this limits design, and makes the game less fun. Take that as you will.
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I think it might be valuable to point out that, at least from my POV, the knock on offensive size 1 missiles isn't that they are size 1, but that they are the smallest possible size.
From a strategic / design perspective, the appropriate response to being spammed by size 1 ASMs is to build size .2 AMMs, with a reload rate of 1 second, that can successfully engage an incoming salvo multiple times across the anti-missile envelope. Which would mean (reductio ad absurdum) then the enemy would make size .2 ASMs, and I would build size .04 AMMs, until eventually we have space mosquitos chasing aether wasps who're battering their wings against an armored warship.
It is not the size of the missile, but that the missile sits against a boundary, and that boundary condition causes these things to happen. It's the fact of the boundary itself (which is a necessity in the programming, of course, I'm certainly not arguing for 4 decimal granularity of missile size. Good god, the spreadsheetery that would ensue . . .) that argues for mitigation in some sense, either through a non-liner progression, or a similar boundary condition in effectiveness, or something else that someone smarter can think up.
Apologies if this is overly reductive or has already been beaten to death by someone else.
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Let's list the advantages of each:
Large missiles:
Effective warhead increase against armor. Up to ~50% bonus at reasonable sizes.
Fuel decrease. Very significant at long ranges, irrelevant at short.
Sensors. Highly tactical.
Granular allocation efficiency.
Small missiles:
MASSIVE increase in effectiveness against active defenses.
Effectiveness is really situationally dependent. As in, what are the comparative differences between opposing techs, offensive systems, and defensive systems. At an even tech and weight of ship the balance point between opposing missile users is the offensive/defensive ratio more than whether one force is using small higher cyclic rate missiles vs large lower cyclic rate missiles. As the charts posted earlier show, there is actually a slight advantage to the large missile/warhead vs the small missile/warhead when the weight of launcher and magazine is roughly equal.
Don't really see a problem here.
Armor isn't an advantage, you can put it on small missiles too. Agility, same. They're just percentages of the missile.
You might want to review how missile armor functions. It lends a segnificant advantage to larger missiles. The reason being smaller missiles really have to trade engine space for the same benefit level larger missiles get from trading warhead space. Missile armor is currently fixed a 1 point per msp.
For the most part agility doesn't aid large missiles in the anti-shipping role. At least not mine. It's not uncommon for me to have my ASM's at or near a 100% baseline vs the ship speeds I'm encountering. AMM's are a different story. Not really an advantage one way or the other, but the counter missile role uses it more often.
One more comment:
Small missiles do NOT equal AMMs. Repeat: Small missiles are NOT always AMMs, they're NOT always 'defensive missiles'. Changes to AMMs don't fix the problem of size 1 ASMs. Now, there are a number of functions small missiles can't really perform. However, outside of those situations (like if you're outranged one way or another), and assuming any significant active defense (what designer doesn't have that?), there's no competition. If you're building a plain short range ASM, it should be size 1. Some people, now including me, think this limits design, and makes the game less fun. Take that as you will.
Hmm The foundation complaints have revolved around running into Precurser defense bases and thier segnificant salvos of size 1 missiles. In this case they are AMM's. In the case of all the NPR's I've looked at in the databases size 1 missiles are exclusively named for defensive roles. This has been true for several years. Players have been the only ones proposing purpose designed size 1 missiles in the anti-shipping role.
Funny thing is, haven't really read any battle reports of player v player, much less player v NPR, battles where ASM size 1 missiles have been used. Only reports of using AMM size 1 missiles in an emergency role for anti-shipping.
Don't really see a problem here.
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Funny thing is, haven't really read any battle reports of player v player, much less player v NPR, battles where ASM size 1 missiles have been used. Only reports of using AMM size 1 missiles in an emergency role for anti-shipping.
Don't really see a problem here.
I've only used AMM in an anti-shipping role when I fire my ASMs dry and the opfor is nearly dead, or on the ropes.
I've seen precursors use AMM in anti-shipping roles though.
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Oh yeah, sorry, my statement about requiring twice the amount of AMMs was a bit of a brainfart. I was referring to the situation of using twice as many size 1 launchers as size 2 launchers, hence twice as many missiles in the air.
In the end, I must admit I am getting more and more convinced that small offensive missiles are okay. Its not that small missiles are overpowered (in fact I read somewhere that somebody doing a ton of math showed that a 4pt WH was the most optimal, not 1pt), but that larger missiles are intercepted wayyyy too easily, and therefore underpowered. But I complain too much.
I do have a question though, Erik, why do you feel that larger launchers need an even slower cycle compared to the smaller ones? And what sizes specifically are you referring too? About size 4 or about size 40?
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Effectiveness is situational, yes. But relatively, a fast missile is better than a slow one, and several small missiles better than one big one.
"The reason being smaller missiles really have to trade engine space for the same benefit level larger missiles get from trading warhead space."
Mmm, no. At least not if yout have 5/msp warhead tech or better. In any case, 1 point of armor on two missiles is the same armor as 2 points on one missile. It's still not worthwhile on small missiles, but that's because smaller missiles have such high htk/msp to start with.
Agility doesn't help small missiles much in anti-shipping either. Using agility becomes more worthwhile at higher tech levels in general though.
As for who uses size 1 ASMs, that would be me. Tests against the AI have mostly shown that the AI is too stupid to put their res 1 sensors on. Tests against myself show smaller missiles being much better. Practically all of my fleets have lots of active defenses though. Testing against other players has proven problematic.
Eh, none of that matters. Conclusions:
I'm not convinced small missiles are overpowered either. The situation they're clearly superior in (short range, bypassing active defenses), isn't a good situation for missiles. The problem is, they ARE clearly superior in that situation. One clear choice is boring. I'd rather have several, or even have the clear choice be the biggest missiles you can build.
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Missile armor doesn't actually scale directly in terms of effectiveness.
If 1 missile hits a size 3, armor 0.5 missile it has a 33% chance of surviving.
If 2 missiles hit a size 6, armor 1 missile it has a 25% chance of surviving.
If 4 missiles hit a size 12, armor 2 missile it has a 20% chance of surviving.
If 6 missiles hit a size 18, armor 3 missile it has a 18% chance of surviving.
(if 1 missile is shot at 3 size 1s with 0.16 armor... /sighhhh :p)
As you can see, larger missiles are only mildly more vulnerable to AMMs than an equal weight of smaller ASMs. It's only once you go below size 3-4 that the system starts to break down.
In the end, I must admit I am getting more and more convinced that small offensive missiles are okay. Its not that small missiles are overpowered (in fact I read somewhere that somebody doing a ton of math showed that a 4pt WH was the most optimal, not 1pt), but that larger missiles are intercepted wayyyy too easily, and therefore underpowered. But I complain too much.
Task force defenses can generally handle or take out a significant percentage.of MSP4+ missiles from missile groups of similar tech and BP. In the same scenarios versus size 1-2 missiles, active defense is akin to pissing in the wind. That missile defense works against larger missiles but not smaller missiles suggests that small missiles are overpowered, rather than larger missiles being underpowered. I believe most people are against gimping small missiles, (even if you're for gimping AMMs), since a wide variety in viable missile design is a good thing.
What this really kills is beam warships. AMM Mutually Assured Destruction engagements at 10mkm mean beam ships rarely get a chance to fight. By their very nature, AMM ships tend to have deep magazines; there's pretty much no downside.
I'm not convinced small missiles are overpowered either. The situation they're clearly superior in (short range, bypassing active defenses), isn't a good situation for missiles. The problem is, they ARE clearly superior in that situation. One clear choice is boring. I'd rather have several, or even have the clear choice be the biggest missiles you can build.
You can get the best of both worlds with extreme range MIRVS. Design a size 5 high efficiency engine and put it on like a size 15-16 missile. Tada, long range with a payload of 7-8 MSP of short range attack missiles.
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One problem with armour though is that values lower than 1 is currently not working. I have actually tested this. I think it is suppose to work but it doesn't. So I always use whole numbers of armour since I'm not sure fractions work at all.
And in bigger missiles you can gladly sacrifice some engine (speed) to add more armour instead to make them even more durable. Especially in very large missiles.
A size 24 missile with two size 5 engines can have quite some armour and a huge warhead to boot. These launchers are usually miniaturized to 0.25 so they take up space as if they were a size 6 missile. The reload time is not that important on them since you usually have two maybe three salvoes in the magazines anyway.
Another important thing about the bigger armoured missiles that I argued before is that they are cheaper to build than as smaller faster missile. That is also an important fact in the equation.
This make bigger missiles more effective against well armoured ships and lethal to low armoured ships where they punch through the armour in the first hit.
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First a pet peeve that I haven't addressed in quite some time....MIRV (Multiple Independently guided Reentry Vehicle) is not part of Aurora. For some reason misuse of this acronym really bugs me from time to time. It probably has to do with growing up under threat of them and then a 23 years in the US Army Aviation where proper use of a whole host of acronym's is a way of life. MWM (Multi-Warhead Missile) just fits better.
There, that's been done again. I really don't care if the term is misused or not by others. Back to using whatever is your preference.
I still don't see small missiles as overpowered. Yes, it is easier to design larger salvo spreads that swamp active defenses designed to handle salvos of larger missiles in lower quantity. Here's the kicker, what is the return fire doing? It's still back to which side is getting more damage through.
What's even more important are the decisions that go into deciding missile speed, powered range, and the supporting active sensors/missile fire controls. If you've designed your fleet for extreme range open space, is it flexible enough to prosecute a warp assault? If the design is optimized for middle or short range and can it function in open space against an extreme range OPFOR? If you've decided to rely on a single ship for your long range sensors can you successfully defend it? etc etc etc.
In final analysis no two players are going to come to the same conclusions, the test is whether your's are superior to the ones you face.
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My tuppence worth - Turn the problem on its head make larger missiles more difficult to intercept. Add penetration aids. For every 0.25 missile point (or whatever) a decoy is carried and released, so your salvo of seven size 5 missiles suddenly becomes twenty-eight, but only seven are real. The decoys can be launched when AMMs are launched, all it needs is an IR detector as part of the penetration aid package to detect the launch flare of AMMs. Thus the ability will not be revealed until you field AMMs. Might not be too difficult to code for?
This doesn't solve the Size 1 AMM conundrum but could be fun anyway ;D . I would also like Precursors etc to have their active sensors on, or they are just to easy to take down without firing a shot in their own defence, but I guess that's a whole different discussion.
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My tuppence worth - Turn the problem on its head make larger missiles more difficult to intercept.
I don't like solutions that are counter intuitive. If anything smaller missiles in their nature more difficult to intercept compared to large ones, although aurora ignores this and only checks speed of target missile.
Instead I prefer solutions that make sense, adding a bit off damage resistance to armor/shields that can make certain types or advanced armor/shields immune to low damage small missiles and gauss gun pea-shooters make more sense IMHO.
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My tuppence worth - Turn the problem on its head make larger missiles more difficult to intercept. Add penetration aids. For every 0.25 missile point (or whatever) a decoy is carried and released, so your salvo of seven size 5 missiles suddenly becomes twenty-eight, but only seven are real. The decoys can be launched when AMMs are launched, all it needs is an IR detector as part of the penetration aid package to detect the launch flare of AMMs. Thus the ability will not be revealed until you field AMMs. Might not be too difficult to code for?
This doesn't solve the Size 1 AMM conundrum but could be fun anyway ;D . I would also like Precursors etc to have their active sensors on, or they are just to easy to take down without firing a shot in their own defence, but I guess that's a whole different discussion.
I like the idea of reactive decoys, but without a complete change of the sensor rules I don't see it working as described. I've played around with a different but related concept, Countermissile buoy. The problem is that any missile/buoy mounted sensor (active or thermal) is just way to myopic without a exponential tech advantage.
Example of the sensor problem: Assuming Ion drives and related level tech a counter missile can be expected to travel 33k/kps or better and the game sequence requires detection at greater than 5seconds for an intercept chance, in this case well over 150k/km. Said sz 1 missile also only has a thermal signature of less than 2. Equal level thermal sensor sensitivity is 11 netting a strength of only .55 for 1 msp of missile/buoy mount. That can only see a thermal signature of 5 at 2,750km. An equal sized active sensor only has the ability to see size or smaller missiles at 12,578km.
Deployment in response to a detected launch is problematic at best. If Steve is willing to pursue, it might be reasoned that a last ditch effect along the same vein as the CIWS systems ability to ignore the detection sequence could be used.
Instead of decoy deployment being reactive to missile launch, it would be simpler too preset deployment at x range from target.
I don't like solutions that are counter intuitive. If anything smaller missiles in their nature more difficult to intercept compared to large ones, although aurora ignores this and only checks speed of target missile.
Instead I prefer solutions that make sense, adding a bit off damage resistance to armor/shields that can make certain types or advanced armor/shields immune to low damage small missiles and gauss gun pea-shooters make more sense IMHO.
Not counter-intuitive at all. It actually shows imagination and insight into game mechanics.
Nor does Aurora ignore target size in relation to intercept. It is handled in a relatively simple manor though, TCS and sensor resolution, if you can't see it you can't shoot it.
At some point Steve may add differential damage profiles between weapons, armor, and/or shields. But because of existing system performance issues with VB6 I don't see him making changes in that direction anytime soon.
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even if you improve larger missiles you're still going to have problems with uncounterable swarms of small missiles.
I still don't see small missiles as overpowered. Yes, it is easier to design larger salvo spreads that swamp active defenses designed to handle salvos of larger missiles in lower quantity. Here's the kicker, what is the return fire doing? It's still back to which side is getting more damage through.
What's even more important are the decisions that go into deciding missile speed, powered range, and the supporting active sensors/missile fire controls. If you've designed your fleet for extreme range open space, is it flexible enough to prosecute a warp assault? If the design is optimized for middle or short range and can it function in open space against an extreme range OPFOR? If you've decided to rely on a single ship for your long range sensors can you successfully defend it? etc etc etc.
In final analysis no two players are going to come to the same conclusions, the test is whether your's are superior to the ones you face.
Small missiles make most of your ship design decisions pointless. Pretty much the only thing that matters is whether you outrange the enemy AMMs. if you do you might win if you don't you lose. the only exceptions are extreme defensive tanks and very rare cases where you have similar AMM range to the enemy.
this is because AMM ships usually pack far more than enough missiles into their magazines to completely destroy an equivalently sized ship.
it's not hard to design 50mkm range AMMs
The worst part is that AMMs get better at higher techs.
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If your task group is built with good enough beam PD then most AMM barrages should not be much of a problem. Most AMM ships do not have that many launchers and fire-controls, but rely mostly on deep magazines, thus beam PD can usually take care of most of the AMM directed at you.
The biggest problem with small missiles are when you design size 3 and below as ASM and design ships around these weapon systems. It will become problematic to devise a good enough AMM/PD defensive screen without having a larger fleet and a much more expensive fleet. The math sort of break down below size four missiles as real ASM for game balance. The only benefit larger missiles have in this regard is better fuel economy and thus better range.
You can get very good results with big missiles and armour versus AMM, down to equalling a barrage of size 3 missiles but with a stronger punch once they hit. The problem is that big armoured missiles is easier countered with also using lasers/meason PD or AMM with size 2 warheads (later tech). There are no real effective beam PD defence against huge swarms of very small ASM missiles.
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Konisforce's talk of a granularity arms race got me thinking... What if, beyond the simple measure of warhead strength, we had a 'warhead spread/scatter/subsubmunitions/focus' factor as well? Basically some way to allow a missile to hit multiple targets in the same location at the cost of sheer power. For anti-missile work, it would be optimal to maximize your spread in order to better handle salvos of missiles. It would be useless against an armored warship because the penetration profile of a fractional strength hit is, well, nothing, but that's the price to pay for specialization. If you want flexible AMMs that can double as a last-ditch offense in a pinch then you can design those too, they'll just lose out on the increased salvo handling ability.
For larger missiles with room to play, this opens up some fun options. You can stick to standard and apply your full wallop to a single target, or you can divvy up your still-sizable punishment to try to force the enemy out of formation.
Not sure how said extra targets would be picked, though random seems as good as any. Maybe just have some set fraction increments, 1/1 to just the target, 1/2 to the target and somebody else in the same spot, and so on. If you've got crowd control missiles loaded against a single dreadnaught, well, sucks to be you.
Now adding in fractional damage that only effectively affects missiles might seem a bit sloppy in and of itself, the options such a change would open up seem interesting.
Hm, and if you continued the damage attenuation of beam weapons down between one and zero it would be a range buff to PD as well, though not sure the effect that would have.
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-Good Idea-
This is actually a pretty good idea and it does allow for some interesting game options.
Now adding in fractional damage that only effectively affects missiles might seem a bit sloppy in and of itself, the options such a change would open up seem interesting.
I wonder if you could base damage on MSP rather than HS. I'm not sure how difficult that would be, but I could see it working out that if the damage per MSP was less than the missile size, or something along those lines. Or this might just be a horrible idea altogether.
I was thinking about the idea of having armor penetrating missiles with a different damage pattern which would actually go along quite well with what Gary was saying. Not sure how that would effect balance though.
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even if you improve larger missiles you're still going to have problems with uncounterable swarms of small missiles.
In most cases an tech improvement helps larger missiles also helps smaller missiles. Yes, small missiles can be a problem to defend against, but certainly not "uncounterable".
Small missiles make most of your ship design decisions pointless.
This may be your experience, but it is not mine. A lot has to do with how the ship firing the small missiles is designed. Is it truly a missile defense platform or is it designed to swamp ship defenses? Are the missile volleys in few high volume salvos or many low volume salvos? Does the opposing ship use organic active sensors or is it dependent on a "scout" platform? The decisions to address these questions are far from pointless. whether you make to correct decision is always the question.
Pretty much the only thing that matters is whether you outrange the enemy AMMs. if you do you might win if you don't you lose. the only exceptions are extreme defensive tanks and very rare cases where you have similar AMM range to the enemy.
Couldn't be further from the truth. As with all aspects of ship combat what matters most is who hits hardest and fastest while taking the least damage. Whether you use small fast missiles with a high cyclic rate and small warheads, or large slower missiles with lower cyclic rate and large warheads is only a portion of the decisions.
this is because AMM ships usually pack far more than enough missiles into their magazines to completely destroy an equivalently sized ship.
True. So do dedicated ASM ships, it's back to who can put more metal on target faster. That has a lot more to do with launcher/MFC ratios and total hullspace per ship allocation than just magazine depth. This is balanced by how well the various ships/fleets can thin incoming missile volleys.
it's not hard to design 50mkm range AMMs
To a certain degree size 1 missiles can have the same range as any larger missile. What's your point? Even at Nuclear Pulse tech levels I commonly have much greater ASM ranges than that.
The worst part is that AMMs get better at higher techs.
All missiles can get better as tech advances. It's how you develop it that makes the difference.
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Not counter-intuitive at all. It actually shows imagination and insight into game mechanics.
So you think it's entirelly logical, intuitive and makes sense to introduce a game mechanic where it's easier to hit a 2.5 ton missile then a 50 ton missile both travelling at the same speed? ???
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So you think it's entirelly logical, intuitive and makes sense to introduce a game mechanic where it's easier to hit a 2.5 ton missile then a 50 ton missile both travelling at the same speed? ???
Really? Out of that whole string of posts that's the only thing that stuck in your craw? ::)
In and of itself, no a smaller missile shouldn't be easier to target. But that is not what I infer from Ian's post, the operative word is decoy. It is quite logical to envision a small platform that when deployed for a short time is able to generate an active return that looks very much like its larger host to confuse targeting. Variations of the concept have existed in real world systems since WWII and are very common is military sci fi fiction, no reason that it can't eventually become part of Aurora in the future.
The main reason I think Steve will be hesitant to add it anytime soon is processing overhead.
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Perhaps the best way to limit smaller missiles based on logical mechanics that make sense would be to put alot higher demands on Magazines that are supposed to deliver 20 small missiles every 5 second compared to those Magazines that only need to deliver one big missile every 100 seconds? A missile spam magazine should need huge reloading mechanics (similar to how really fast turrets require alot of space devoted to gears).
By punishing the effective space available in Magazines that need to deliver quick reloads to many launchers (due to complex reloading systems) we could achieve a much better balance.
Carriers, Coilers and slow firing bombardment ships that don't have demanding requirements of reload times could then also use a much bigger part of their magazines to actually carry payload, which is something I feel have been lacking in Aurora.
Why should a Magazine that only has to services FTR box launchers onboard a Carrier that takes 30min to reload each have the same size reloading mechanism as a Magazine delivering 20 missiles per 5 seconds?
This change should probably also come with a change to how long time transferring missiles between ships take. A fleet collier probably doesn't have to be able to reload ships in an instant (or at least it shouldn't be possible).
It might even be possible to allow multiple kind of Magazines on the same ships, one for stowage/effective transport of many missiles (with lousy reload times) and one to feed the launchers, or could even open up allowing transport of missiles in standard cargo holds (but with appalling time penalties to reloading).
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I can pretty much guarantee that you're not building ships that counter AMMs with similar tech levels and BPs. Every time I've run on-paper sims and in-game battles the results are the same: AMM ships can't counter AMMs, and neither can beam ships. Any defence that even makes a meaningful dent in an AMM assault renders conventional cyclic missile attacks useless, which again illustrates the drastic difficulty of stopping AMMs. I'm not even talking about small missile ships designed for anti-ship work. If I was doing that I would use box launchers to have a truely uncounterable attack.
I mean we've all pretty much settled that the counter to anti-missiles is missiles, and how messed up is that? Not that I disagree, but when the only practical defence against AMMs is to never have them fired against your ships something is wrong.
Couldn't be further from the truth. As with all aspects of ship combat what matters most is who hits hardest and fastest while taking the least damage. Whether you use small fast missiles with a high cyclic rate and small warheads, or large slower missiles with lower cyclic rate and large warheads is only a portion of the decisions.
It's pretty rare to get slugfests. Usually one side can pound the other, and if side B lives through it either side A runs away or side B administers an unanswered drubbing in turn. Cyclic rate is also not that important in 'competitive' design, as box launchers are pretty much just better even for size 1s.
Aurora open-space fights go like this at the moment, typically: ASM from side 1, ASM from side 2, then remaining AMMs decide the fight. That is, if one side doesn't manage to disengage. ASMs have counters, AMMs do not.
ps. IMO, people should stop tossing around processor overhead for in combat stuff. Combat overhead is a tiny part of the time you spend processing aurora, it's all about them industrial cycles in my experience....*shrug*
EDIT:
More depth in magazines would be cool, especially since the 'safety' tech line is kinda lame (less magazine explosions pfffft). Might also be a way to balance box launchers in there ssomewhere.
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I can pretty much guarantee that you're not building ships that counter AMMs with similar tech levels and BPs. Every time I've run on-paper sims and in-game battles the results are the same: AMM ships can't counter AMMs, and neither can beam ships. Any defence that even makes a meaningful dent in an AMM assault renders conventional cyclic missile attacks useless, which again illustrates the drastic difficulty of stopping AMMs. I'm not even talking about small missile ships designed for anti-ship work. If I was doing that I would use box launchers to have a truely uncounterable attack.
Hmm, I regularly shutdown AMM ships with tech at or even a little below the tech I'm facing.. at least against AI designs. Against NPR's I'm controlling it's much more difficult, and should be. The primary counter is to maintain a standoff engagement and have more magazine depth. At near parity of tech it is difficult, not impossible just difficult, to have ASM's (without armor) that require an average of 5-6 AMM's to intercept. At that ratio it is quite easy to run AMM ships magazines dry long before the ASM's ships run dry.
Another factor has to do with whether the AMM ship is designed to intercept at extended (30 seconds plus) ranges or not. At extended ranges they run dry faster, but the short range variants tend to be overwhelmed quicker.
So far, the best counter is missile fighter groups. When designed to engage shipping from extended range the volleys you can produce swamp most defenses hands down. This of course can be countered by fighters/gunboats/small warships/etc that are designed to rundown said missile fighters.
There is no such thing in Aurora as an uncounterable attack. Just because you haven't thought of one, or built and deployed one doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I mean we've all pretty much settled that the counter to anti-missiles is missiles, and how messed up is that? Not that I disagree, but when the only practical defense against AMMs is to never have them fired against your ships something is wrong.
Actually, at near of parity tech levels hullspace for hullspace the best counter to any, non-armored, missile is the 10cm railgun with C3 capacitors. At least until gauss cannons reach 5 shots per mount. I was a bit shocked by this when I turned this one up. On a mount per mount basis GC's outperform at 3 shots, but when analysis shifts to hullspace usage railguns takeover. They do require the that you invest in max tracking bonus to offset the speed differential penalty.
Nor do you need dedicated escort ships for this to work. With a percentage of each warship dedicated to point defense and your fleets mutual defense is much more effective.
It's pretty rare to get slugfests. Usually one side can pound the other, and if side B lives through it either side A runs away or side B administers an unanswered drubbing in turn. Cyclic rate is also not that important in 'competitive' design, as box launchers are pretty much just better even for size 1s.
Versus the AI it tends to play out like that, but against player controlled NPR's it can be a very different story.
Aurora open-space fights go like this at the moment, typically: ASM from side 1, ASM from side 2, then remaining AMMs decide the fight. That is, if one side doesn't manage to disengage. ASMs have counters, AMMs do not.
See above
ps. IMO, people should stop tossing around processor overhead for in combat stuff. Combat overhead is a tiny part of the time you spend processing aurora, it's all about them industrial cycles in my experience....*shrug*
Your experience is different from mine. AI NPR v AI NPR conflict by far bog down the game the most in my experience. Granted that is the AI routines loading the system. Even when I'm running combat between two races I'm controlling the processing time escalates. When combat is not occurring, my games tend to run fairly smoothly.
EDIT:
More depth in magazines would be cool, especially since the 'safety' tech line is kinda lame (less magazine explosions pfffft). Might also be a way to balance box launchers in there ssomewhere.
Personally I find the Magazine Ejection tech quite useful. It's quite annoying to have a warship taken out by a single armor penetration that hits a loaded magazine.
Variable magazine depth is already in the game, Magazine Feed System Efficiency. It starts at 75% of magazine hullspaces for missile storage and goes to 99%. That's a starting point is 27msp to 31.8msp per hullspace. Doubt anyone is going to convince Steve to allow magazines to store more.
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I mean we've all pretty much settled that the counter to anti-missiles is missiles, and how messed up is that? Not that I disagree, but when the only practical defence against AMMs is to never have them fired against your ships something is wrong.
I've put this out out to Steve over the years, and never gotten traction on it, but I'll throw it in again:
Have each missile require a fixed-cost "guidance package" (or "bridge" :) ) of e.g. 0.25 or 0.5 HS. This will devastate the scaling for small missiles - for 0.5 HS, a size-2 missile will have 3x the usable volume (1.5 HS) than a size-1 (0.5 HS). Since this would also have a big impact on AMM performance, this should probably be coupled with a return to "str 0 warheads can kill missiles".
If he went with the size-0 idea, then something would have to be done about missile armor. I think a reasonable thing to do would be to treat missiles as a tiny ship. If I missile size point is really 1/20 of a HS, then why not calculate armor mass appropriately, with each point of missile armor equal to a 1/20 point of ship armor (in size, cost, and damage absorbtion). So a AMM with a 1-pt warhead could kill an armored ASM with armor level 20 or under - unarmored missiles would be obliterated. A size-0 warhead could be str-0.05, i.e. enough to kill level-1 armor on a missile but not enough to do significant damage to a ship or heavily armored missile.
One final note: the guidance package size could be a tech line, allowing higher tech folks to eventually build "brilliant pebble" missiles.
John
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Why not something adapted from what I did in Astra Imperia?
Each ship has a number of control channels. I use the channels to track targets for offensive fire, incoming missiles for defensive fire, and each missile.
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John the guidance package idea has some merit.
Personally I'd rather see a change to the MFC's that limit the total number of missiles that can be controlled. Have it scale both with tech an installation size.
edit: I see that Erik beat me too it. ;D
As far as missile armor goes...I'd rather see it completely dropped. Damage that takes out a point of ships armor should destroy a missile.
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Why not something adapted from what I did in Astra Imperia?
Each ship has a number of control channels. I use the channels to track targets for offensive fire, incoming missiles for defensive fire, and each missile.
I don't think that one makes much sense.
If military computers of today can track hundreds of targets/missiles, why should fictional computers based on advanced TN technology be significantly worse?
Also sounds fairly easy to circumvent by just building more small ships (if each ship has limited amount of missiles/launchers it can control). I can't see how it helps defending against size 1 missile spam either since the defender has to track say 100 enemy missiles + 100 friendly missiles while the attacker only need to track 1 target ship at a time + his own missiles.
As far as missile armor goes...I'd rather see it completely dropped. Damage that takes out a point of ships armor should destroy a missile.
Which brings us back to the popular suggestion that 1 point of damage shouldn't always be enough to take out 1 point of armor. Damage resistance is a surefire way to stop size 1 missile spam in it's tracks.
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It's a lot more than just the processing power. It's also the "physical" systems for two-way communication with the missiles.
Don't know how "popular" that damage/armor suggestion is. It appears to be restricted to a minority that dislike size 1/1pt warhead missiles.
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IIRC, Steve's said there's avionics requirements in Newtonian Aurora.
Newtonian also probably is aiming at much lower numbers of bigger missiles though.
Hmm, I regularly shutdown AMM ships with tech at or even a little below the tech I'm facing.. at least against AI designs. Against NPR's I'm controlling it's much more difficult, and should be. The primary counter is to maintain a standoff engagement and have more magazine depth. At near parity of tech it is difficult, not impossible just difficult, to have ASM's (without armor) that require an average of 5-6 AMM's to intercept. At that ratio it is quite easy to run AMM ships magazines dry long before the ASM's ships run dry.
Err well here's the thing. If there was a beam weapon that did 1,000,000 damage at 2,000,000 km, it would still be shutdown/countered by shooting enemy ships with missiles. Said beam weapon would still be imbalanced.
In otherwords, countering AMMs with ASMs doesn't matter to whether AMMs vs ships are balanced. I don't think anyone believes AMMs are too good at missile interception.
Don't forget the important "same BP" qualifier. Equivalent-BP equivalent-research AMM ships can usually knock down every missile an attack group can throw up with AMMs to spare, but they arn't usually left with enough AMMs after to really go to town.
P.S. You have to have pretty imbalanced tech to get '5-6' AMMs per missile. Space 1899's "Whitehead II" AMMs have only about 18% chance to hit versus "Whitehead" missiles. But that's because the British have 30000 RP in Max Engine Multipliers, 35000 RP in Ion engine tech, 7000 RP in missile warheads, and only 3000 RP in Missile Agility. So they have very fast missiles and crappy AMMs. And that's without taking Grade into account.
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Don't know how "popular" that damage/armor suggestion is. It appears to be restricted to a minority that dislike size 1/1pt warhead missiles.
Not so "popular" at all. It just happens to be the starting point for this entire thread...
On reducing damage done by missiles Steve wrote the following:
Only a percentage of damage would be applied. This would remove the advantage of having missiles of certain warhead sizes.
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IIRC, Steve's said there's avionics requirements in Newtonian Aurora.
Newtonian also probably is aiming at much lower numbers of bigger missiles though.
True as far as I know. I really think that controls on total missile handling through the fire controls will be simplier to implement though.
Hmm, I regularly shutdown AMM ships with tech at or even a little below the tech I'm facing.. at least against AI designs. Against NPR's I'm controlling it's much more difficult, and should be. The primary counter is to maintain a standoff engagement and have more magazine depth. At near parity of tech it is difficult, not impossible just difficult, to have ASM's (without armor) that require an average of 5-6 AMM's to intercept. At that ratio it is quite easy to run AMM ships magazines dry long before the ASM's ships run dry.
Err well here's the thing. If there was a beam weapon that did 1,000,000 damage at 2,000,000 km, it would still be shutdown/countered by shooting enemy ships with missiles. Said beam weapon would still be imbalanced.
In what way is that relevant to the conversation?
In other words, countering AMMs with ASMs doesn't matter to whether AMMs vs ships are balanced. I don't think anyone believes AMMs are too good at missile interception.
Didn't say that was the only counter, just the most obvious one. The balance is that there are several ways to counter a system. It would only be imbalanced if there wasn't one.
Don't forget the important "same BP" qualifier. Equivalent-BP equivalent-research AMM ships can usually knock down every missile an attack group can throw up with AMMs to spare, but they aren't usually left with enough AMMs after to really go to town.
Haven't forgotten a thing. The discussion is about systems performance not industrial capacities. Even so, when comparing roughly equal cost ships I find that well designed dedicated ASM ships outperform dedicated AMM ships. In the first couple of tech advances AMM's do have an advantage. but once both warhead and reload rate advance past this level the advantage swings to the ASM platform. They can simply deliver more concentrated damage faster.
P.S. You have to have pretty imbalanced tech to get '5-6' AMMs per missile. Space 1899's "Whitehead II" AMMs have only about 18% chance to hit versus "Whitehead" missiles. But that's because the British have 30000 RP in Max Engine Multipliers, 35000 RP in Ion engine tech, 7000 RP in missile warheads, and only 3000 RP in Missile Agility. So they have very fast missiles and crappy AMMs. And that's without taking Grade into account.
I'm not going to reverse engineer the 1899 missiles (in detail) for this discussion, but your cost figures are off.
For demonstration purposes the tech available for missile design is (all 4th level):
Ion Drive .6ep per msp (24,000rp)
Fuel Consumption: 0.7 Litres per Engine Power Hour (7,000rp)
Maximum Engine Power Modifier x1.75(x3.5 for missiles)(7,000rp)
Fusion-boosted Fission Warhead: Strength: 5 x MSP (14,000rp)
Missile Agility 64 per MSP (14,000rp)
With this tech I commonly have a:
With this tech I commonly have a:
size 4 ASM speed 29,400kps/warhead 5/500l fuel for a range of 75.5m/km and tohit of 98% vs 3,000kps* targets. (BP cost 2.72)
size 1 AMM speed 29,400kps/warhead 1/34.75l fuel for a range of 8.1m/km/agility 6(manuover rating 16) and tohit of 16% vs 29,400kps targets. (BP cost .7277)
*3,000kps being the speed of ship with 25%hs to ion engine without a max power modifier applied
That's roughly 6 AMM's to intercept the matching tech ASM. Both are optimized for speed. The ASM can actually be tweaked for a higher speed than the AMM can match at the expense of operational range.
Leaving the ASM alone and optimizing the AMM for a better % leaves it with a tohit of if 19.7% (roughly 5 missiles to intercept) but has it slower than the ASM, meaning that there is enough of a speed gap that the will be whole salvos of ASM's that don't get intercepted at all because of Aurora movement mechanics.
This is the basis of the 5-6 AMM's per ASM. No, it doesn't take crew grade in as a factor, only ship systems.
Tech being used is a long way from being "imbalanced".
Not so "popular" at all. It just happens to be the starting point for this entire thread...
Last time I checked, fewer that 10 have commented in this topic in favor of this and the majority of them have been on the forum less than a year. That's a very low percentage to be claiming it as a "popular" notion.
On reducing damage done by missiles Steve wrote the following:
Only a percentage of damage would be applied. This would remove the advantage of having missiles of certain warhead sizes.
alex you have a very bad habit of taking a small portion of a post to quote out of context to make your point.
Missiles are very good tactically but they are weak strategically. If you play any long campaigns against substantial enemies, you are going to need beam ships.
Even if missiles are overpowered tactically, that doesn't necessarily means you have to correct it. In modern naval warfare, which is the basis for Aurora, missiles are the primary weapon, although there are many different types, just as in Aurora. They are backed up by guns and point defence systems, as well as shorter-range anti-missiles. A hundred years ago, large calibre rifled guns were the primary weapon. A hundred years before that it was large cannon broadsides. There is always going to be a primary type of long-range weapon.
Armour already requires extra weight per layer, as each extra layer uses a surface area measurement for the ship that includes the previous layer.
I have been considering a different way of dealing with the small vs large warhead question. It's possible ships could suffer shock damage, which would result in a chance of a system being damaged without the armour being penetrated. The chance of shock damage would increase with larger warheads, with the increase being greater than just linear. Another potential change is to increase warhead strengths but have missiles detonating some distance from the target. Only a percentage of damage would be applied. This would remove the advantage of having missiles of certain warhead sizes. Proximity of detonation could be a tech line, with better proximity detection resulting in a higher percentage of damage.
Steve
When looked at in context of the entire post Steve is not talking about reducing damage applied to armor at all.
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Perhaps fixing beam ships would be a better way to balance AMM spamming. Some ideas:
1. Have smaller sized calibre weapon systems that only have a chance of dealing damage. For example, a railgun's lowest calibre which gives a guaranteed 1 damage is 10cm. If there were an 5cm railgun, it could instead only have a 40% chance of causing 1 damage per hit. On the plus side, there could be a lot more railguns mounted on a ship and thus giving a larger rate of fire. Going even farther, there could be 2cm or even 1cm railguns mounted 8 to a 100t fighter.
2. Multifire. Allow lasers to store more energy in it's capacitors than normally required for a single shot, thus allowing even large lasers to fire every 5 seconds, even with a low tech capacitor rating. The laser could then recharge it's capacitor and fire in the normal way, or save up for another burst for use against large missile swarms.
3. Give beam weapons limited ammo. While this might seem like a disadvantage given to beam weapons, this would actually allow for upgrading the effectiveness of beam weapons without destroying balance and making them too overpowered. There wouldn't even need to be a mineral cost associated with ammunition to maintain this, just a restock when orbiting a base or docked in a hangar.
Some ideas for missiles:
1. Cloaking devices, allowing larger missiles to escape detection for at least a short while before coming into the MCR. Any missile under size 6 would not benefit from a cloaking device.
2. Enhanced sensors for missiles. There could be two types of sensors, one scan and one track. Scan would be like ship missiles and used in buoys. Track could be used by ASM missiles which scans a small arc of space where the missile is pointed, and no where else. Since all the sensors are facing one direction, the range would be much better than shipboard sensors. This ties into...
2a. Passive launching of missiles. Launch a missile based on data from passive sensors, with the missile making last minute course corrections with it's own passive sensors, or with an active sensor system that turns on at the final approach.
Mini rant on Electronic countermeasures.
While in the game already, a missile's ECM and a ship's ECM both have different objectives. A ship's ECM is tasked with keeping the enemies' combat ability at a closer range than they would normally require, namely by increasing the difficulty of locking onto a target at long range. A missile's ECM is tasked with keeping the missile alive until it reaches it's target. Because the missile is closing on the target and most of the AM systems are close range, a missile ECM must protect the missile even at close range. This could be done in several ways:
1. Increase the 'apparent' speed of the missile to increase the agility requirements of the AMM to intercept, which would be great versus AMM but not that good against beams (which would have ship board ECCM.
2. Attempt to blind or dazzle any FC currently locking onto the missile, thus giving a chance for a FC to lose the lock on the target. It would give a reason to try attacking the missile at longer range, or a reason to mount ECCM on escort ships.
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Last time I checked, fewer that 10 have commented in this topic in favor of this and the majority of them have been on the forum less than a year. That's a very low percentage to be claiming it as a "popular" notion.
More people have commented in favor of armor/damage reductions to missile damage then has commented against it, that is my definition of popular.
I'm guessing by your elitist attitude that your definition of popular only takes into account the people who been active on the forum for at least 5 years?
alex you have a very bad habit of taking a small portion of a post to quote out of context to make your point.
When looked at in context of the entire post Steve is not talking about reducing damage applied to armor at all.
And you have a very bad habit of focusing on semantics to try to make your point...
My point is that no matter if you reduce damage missiles do by adding armor resistance or do it through another mechanic (like distance detonation) the result in game will be very similar. The result will be that you can't trust a damage X missile to actually apply X damage to it's target, therefor limiting use of 1 damage missiles (and square damage missiles aswell like 4/9).
I want the same thing Steve want in this case, making more powerful missiles worthwhile, and I support his ideas of shock damage and damage reduction of missiles through distance aswell since I believe they would be good improvements.
The only minor problem I have with reducing damage as a percentage is that it hits all sizes of missiles fairly equally (depending on how rounding is applied), reducing damage by absolute amounts is more effective if the goal is to limit smaller warheads.
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I engineered those same techs up to 20% tohit against that speed. Which is lower than I expected, admittedly. But the next tier of techs got me to 25% tohit against 40,000 km/s. AMMs only get better from there. "5-6" can only said to be ion-pulse-thermal with no grade or tracking bonuses.
In what way is that relevant to the conversation?
The point is that soaking AMMs with ASMs is irrelevant to AMM performance versus ships. It doesn't matter how much damage AMMs do - they could do zero or a million, if you exclude talking about their damage because you can just use ASMs.
Countering anti-missiles with missiles sounds silly because it is silly. Soaking AMMs with ASMs is 'meta balance'. Which is not actual balance.
or to put it another way, if Rock cost half as much as paper or scissors, it's not balanced just because you can take Paper instead of Scissors.
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I think I'm shutting this one down. Neither side is convincing the other and the same stuff is being rehashed.