Change Log for 6.00 discussion

[TheDeadlyShoe]

White hot fury of a hundred suns referred to, well, a hundred missiles hitting a ship, not whats needed to cause one point of damage. :p

Missiles arn't absorbing damage.  Even if you mount armor on a missile, that just gives you a chance of surviving a blast - it doesn't actually sublimate energy harmlessly the way ship armor does. In otherwords a missile is exactly as tough as any ship subsystem - it breaks when you poke it.  I like to think of it as any 'hit' being the explosion close enough for a size one explosion to irradiate or otherwise cripple/destroy the missile; armor just means the hit needs to be closer or stronger, thus the % chance.   In this scheme, a warhead less than 1 damage-point just isn't practical in terms of the range an AMM needs to detonate at to destroy an incoming missile. 

[Theokrat]

In otherwords a missile is exactly as tough as any ship subsystem

Yes: Exactly as tough - at 5% the mass.

I like to think of it as any 'hit' being the explosion close enough for a size one explosion to irradiate or otherwise cripple/destroy the missile;

If a "hit" is based on the maximum distance at which an explosion destroys a 2.5t missile, then the same size explosion at the same maximum distance should not also be able to destroy a 50t ship component. From this angle, one could also argue to change the hit-chance versus missiles on the grounds that a 2.5t missile would be affected by a size-1 explosion at a much larger distance, compared to the larger ship-component.

Anyway, I dont want to derail this thread further, in particular since this is not my main proposal, which stays at: Please make fuel efficiency heavily dependent on missile engine size.

[CheaterEater]

Would this encourage the usage of missile busses then? As an example, at tech level 3/4 I can make a size-18 drone that carries 12 size-1 missiles at two damage points each.  An equivalent size 18 missile has half the warhead for similar to-hit and cost per warhead but less range at a slightly faster speed.  Although the two-stage missiles then have equal reload times and the launchers can't double as AMM launchers, they'll still have much better chances against any anti-missile defenses.  This was, by the way, with being locked into a drone chassis.  If I could customize my first-stage engine I could improve the bus's efficiency and get the size-1 missiles on target with less waste.

[Person012345]

One question about POW.
What happens if I pick up survivors from a friendly or allied race?
Lets say my scout happens to come across some ships of my long term allies that are fighting a losing battle against another unknown race. Now I decide to do something nice and rescue their pods. What happens?

I might suggest that if a race is, or becomes, friendly or allied that when dropped off (or if they are already when the race becomes friendly) on a planet they would be returned immediately to the race in question. And that blowing allied crewmen out into space might incur a diplomatic penalty.

[USS America]

Been away from the game for around 6 months and come back to find news of a feature filled update to 5. 7 waiting to tease me.   After reading several of the 5. 7 related threads, it seems like we are about due for another "release imminent" update.   

Steve, I hope your move went well.   How is the 5. 7 progress coming?  Are we any closer to getting our hands on this latest version?   

[Erik L]

Been away from the game for around 6 months and come back to find news of a feature filled update to 5. 7 waiting to tease me.   After reading several of the 5. 7 related threads, it seems like we are about due for another "release imminent" update.   

Steve, I hope your move went well.   How is the 5. 7 progress coming?  Are we any closer to getting our hands on this latest version?   

Welcome back

[UnLimiTeD]

And no, it's "coming soon" for a while now, and whenever one would think it to be close, Steve thinks up another devious feature that everyone agrees must be in. 

[Steve Walmsley]

One question about POW.
What happens if I pick up survivors from a friendly or allied race?
Lets say my scout happens to come across some ships of my long term allies that are fighting a losing battle against another unknown race. Now I decide to do something nice and rescue their pods. What happens?

I'll be adding some way to pick up your own crews from friendly races

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

A straightforward suggestion on the missile engines:

Steve, could you please make the fuel-efficiency of missile engines heavily dependent on their size?

This would go a long way of solving the issue that size-1 ASMs are very effective and render AMM efforts essentially worthless. Essentially to overcome this issue, a size-1 ASM should have seriously reduced combat characteristics.

I would suggest heavily increasing the fuel-requirement of the smaller engines, so that smaller missiles would be much more limited in the attainable range. This would provide a good incentive to use larger missiles, against which AMMs are viable.

In your current example of an AMM, posted in the other thread, only 2% (0.02MSP) of the missile size is fuel. A player could increase this to 0.2 MSP easily at the cost of say agility and get a good size-1 ASM design of 60mkm against which AMM would be entirely futile. If you made changes such that your design would require about 0.3 MSP of fuel to go to its current range, then the size-1 ASM "exploit" would not be viable anymore.

I don't want to do anything to missile engines that isn't replicated in ship engines. I may look at other options though. For example in Newtonian Aurora missiles require an extra component to communicate with fire controls. The issue is that this would make AMMs less effective. Another possibility is to have missile use proximity detonations and inflict only partial damage. Larger warheads would become more effective because they would have a greater blast radius. The issue with this idea is that missiles become an area effect weapon, which has all sorts of consequences.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

Some other options for helping larger missiles be more viable are:

  Increased damage efficiency as your warhead gets larger. After all, you just need one fuze regardless of warhead size. Thus if a 2.0 MSP warhead was more than twice as strong than a 1.0 MSP warhead, you'd be making an actual trade off of Damage vs Chance of a Hit.

  Either a new armor tech could be added, properties could be added to existing armor or a new module could be added that grants minor damage resistance. This kind of already exists with shields, if you can't do damage faster than it recharges, you're in trouble. Something similar to Sword of the Stars 2's damage resistance could be added to armor that would negate some of the damage pattern of weapons. For example, if a missile did damage in a 5-3-1 pattern (top to bottom), one level of resistance would negate the highest row leaving 3-1. Or maybe just the lowest level leaving 5-3. Either way, unless a size 1 missile happened to hit a section of armor that had been completely destroyed, it would be ineffective. Like throwing a grenade against a tank vs throwing the same grenade inside an open hatch. Ideally this would greatly increase the mass of armor, so that smaller frigates and destroyers might shrug off AMMs, but only much larger heavily armored warships could afford to protect against larger missiles.

  Having distance based accuracy penalties that can be countered by adding small amounts of MSPs in the form of onboard AIs or better communication gear. Since any missile with no onboard sensor is reliant on the firing ship's MFC, this can be explained as the missile relying less on the firing ship to provide instructions that may be experiencing a delay due to the distance from the firing ship. This would limit AMMs to a much shorter range, while larger missiles can devote some space to maintaining their accuracy at a longer ranger. Then again, I can't remember of Aurora is supposed to have FTL communication cananocially or not. If it does, it renders this on pointless.
 
  Finally, building upon the last one, giving missile fire control's a limit to the number of active missiles they can control at a time. If your currently designed MFC can only control six missiles in flight at once, you'll probably want larger missiles that can attack from further out. Otherwise a beam armed ship might be able to realistically close the range without taking critical damage. New tech can influence the number of missiles controllable per launcher. Ideally your fire control links would be pooled together based on range, so if you had two AMM MFCs that can control 6 missiles at 60M KM each, and two ASM MFCs that can control 3 missiles at 300M KM, you attack with six missiles at a time, or the two ASM MFCs could be handed control of six AMMs to increase the density of your defensive fire. (Or likewise increase your offensive fire once you got within 60M KM).

I should have read this before posting my last reply

I have considered the limits on fire control as well. This is one of the better options, although it would add a degree of micromanagement as players would want the ability to release missiles to their onboard sensors to free up control links.

The option of having an onboard link to the fire control system is one I have mentioned, although the idea of relating the size of this system to distance is one that mnight work well, especially with the missile design changes. AMMs would still be viable because they would only need a small comm unit. I guess a new tech line could be based on comm distance per MSP. My only concern is for internal consistency. Not sure yet if this would cause a contradiction somewhere else. I'll give it some thought.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

Anyway, I dont want to derail this thread further, in particular since this is not my main proposal, which stays at: Please make fuel efficiency heavily dependent on missile engine size.

I just want to explain a little more about my earlier point re missile engines vs ship engines. They are really the same thing now and ship engines have improved fuel efficiency with size. Most missile engines though are likely to be smaller than a size 1 ship engine, so I can't really make them more efficient than the equivalent ship engine.

Steve

[sloanjh (OP)]

For example in Newtonian Aurora missiles require an extra component to communicate with fire controls. The issue is that this would make AMMs less effective.

Actually, I think it all hangs together if you go back to allowing str-0 warheads to kill missiles.  At present, an AMM requires 0.1 - 0.25  MSP for the warhead.  If you required e.g. a 0.1 or 0.2 MSP fire control component, then AMM (which don't require a warhead) would have the same or better performance as they have at present, while ASM would have this as a tax. 

You would still need to figure out what happens when a str-0 warhead hits an armored missile.  A quick thought is that you could introduce "missile damage points" (MDP), which are e.g. 10x smaller than standard damage points (the 10x factor comes from someone's observation in a different thread that 1 hull space worth of missiles absorbs a LOT more damage than 1 HS of machinery).  Then you could have the missile body itself do 1 MDP, while the warhead (or beams) does 10*str damage, and use the existing missile armor rules to see if the missiles are destroyed.  Oh, yeah - this would mean that beam point defence would have 10x further range before it became ineffective too; you'd have to round the damage done by beams in point defence mode to a factor of 0.1, so they'd be effective against unarmored missiles out to where they do 0.1 in damage.  I don't think this is a big imbalance, though, since beams are so short range compared to ASM, plus I expect fire control would probably act as the cutoff (as it typically does already).

John

[TheDeadlyShoe]

The option of having an onboard link to the fire control system is one I have mentioned, although the idea of relating the size of this system to distance is one that mnight work well, especially with the missile design changes. AMMs would still be viable because they would only need a small comm unit. I guess a new tech line could be based on comm distance per MSP. My only concern is for internal consistency. Not sure yet if this would cause a contradiction somewhere else. I'll give it some thought.

IMO, having an onboard, distance-dependent missile comm unit would also be an easy method of fixing shipboard ECM with regards to missiles.  (That is to say, the ease of overengineering fire controls to ignore ECM.)

Between that and the new missile engines missile design would be getting pretty involved.

[CheaterEater]

What would you do for submunitions then? Would you just require the submunitions to have onboard sensors or large comm units? I think it would be an interesting way to relegate multiple warheads to large missile designs, but I can see it reducing the flexibility of large launchers.

[Steve Walmsley]

Been away from the game for around 6 months and come back to find news of a feature filled update to 5. 7 waiting to tease me.   After reading several of the 5. 7 related threads, it seems like we are about due for another "release imminent" update.   

Steve, I hope your move went well.   How is the 5. 7 progress coming?  Are we any closer to getting our hands on this latest version?   

Move went well. 5.7 is at the stage where I am creating a test campaign. Two problems - one is I can't settle on the theme of the campaign (started two without really getting into them and now thinking of trying a third), and second one is that I have started playing EVE again .

Steve