Author Topic: Missile-ssistance?  (Read 6902 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Online nuclearslurpee

  • Admiral of the Fleet
  • ***********
  • Posts: 2960
  • Thanked: 2222 times
  • Radioactive frozen beverage.
Re: Missile-ssistance?
« Reply #15 on: May 25, 2021, 06:46:08 PM »
One thought I've had in the past, which would require a lot of re-working particularly for the NPR rules, has been to remove the overboost capability for missiles (i.e. how missiles can have 6x max EP boost while other engine types get only 3x), and to make box launchers the "normal" kind of missile launchers at least for ASMs - that is, the NPRs will use box launchers instead of full-size fast-fire launchers. For AMMs the full-speed launchers would still be useful at least under some conditions.

This would help close the gap between box launcher mass volleys and gun PD capabilities, and bring NPR tactics more in line with the tactics most players have found to be optimal, plus it closes one of those weird exceptions in the rules (why do missile engines get an extra boost?). Ideally I think this would find a happy medium for box launchers, where they are still stronger than current full-size launcher volleys (trivial to defend against except AMM spam) and current box launcher volleys (completely overwhelming). AMM spam would be much less effective which elides that particular problem.

I mean to test this in a multiple-player-race campaign sometime but right now my AAR campaign takes up my playtime.
 

Offline misanthropope

  • Lt. Commander
  • ********
  • m
  • Posts: 273
  • Thanked: 73 times
Re: Missile-ssistance?
« Reply #16 on: May 25, 2021, 07:11:21 PM »
what kind of range does NPR AMM pack these days at about ion tech, anybody happen to know off the top?  ustabe instead of custom building a ship to shoot down a zillion AMMs, you could just press a big cheap freighter into service.  it would die like a dog but _all_ the waves that targeted it would be neutralized, and in vb6 that was typically the enemy's entire stockpile, since they could all be put into the air in less than travel time to target. 
 

Online nuclearslurpee

  • Admiral of the Fleet
  • ***********
  • Posts: 2960
  • Thanked: 2222 times
  • Radioactive frozen beverage.
Re: Missile-ssistance?
« Reply #17 on: May 25, 2021, 07:17:53 PM »
what kind of range does NPR AMM pack these days at about ion tech, anybody happen to know off the top? 

About 2m km.
 

Offline misanthropope

  • Lt. Commander
  • ********
  • m
  • Posts: 273
  • Thanked: 73 times
Re: Missile-ssistance?
« Reply #18 on: May 25, 2021, 09:24:35 PM »
well. railguns it is.
 

Offline lupin-de-mid

  • Petty Officer
  • **
  • l
  • Posts: 25
  • Thanked: 1 times
Re: Missile-ssistance?
« Reply #19 on: May 26, 2021, 02:15:38 AM »
why do missile engines get an extra boost?
Because this is a one-time engine, no one turns them on again
 

Offline Demetrious

  • Warrant Officer, Class 2
  • ****
  • D
  • Posts: 65
  • Thanked: 40 times
Re: Missile-ssistance?
« Reply #20 on: May 27, 2021, 12:05:16 PM »
I've been thinking a lot about anti-missile spam recently, and not only can I not think of an elegant "solution," but I find it hard to decide whether or not it's even a problem.

AMM spam is annoying. In my current game, it is annoying. But that's because my ships have, so far, rolled over enemy gunships in beam vs. beam battles... but that's more due to slight tech advantages, tonnage equivalence and picking my battles well. Their normal anti-ship missile ships didn't give me any trouble, but that's due to the NPR AI not currently favoring use of reduced-size launchers and/or currently not favoring missile doctrines that line up with their launcher doctrine (rapid-fire launchers would pair well with sensor-equipped missiles, for example.)

In other words, the game's AI settings let NPRs make bad choices, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But it's hard for AMM ships to be "bad." But is that an AMM problem... or a small missile problem?

To wit: AMM's have a problem of their own, and that is, they're damage inefficient. Penetrating armor in Aurora is interesting due to the randomization of hit locations; far as I am concerned it has a dynamic much like tabletop BattleTech, in that you want weapons that punch big holes in armor, and then weapons that scatter lower amounts of damage across the target, in order to maximize chances of hitting that hole in the armor to deal damage to internal components, which is what ultimately defeats a ship (by disabling or outright destroying it.) [This also makes me want to try Steve's original Starfire rules :) ]So assuming hostile ships with sufficient armor to stop any one-hit attack you can launch, it is more tonnage efficient to do more damage per shot, maximizing chances of follow-up shots hitting an already damaged portion of armor and reducing time under fire before you kill the target (for beams) or reducing maximum number of shots required per kill, on average (for missiles.) Missiles also benefit from shock damage, which combines with the inherent efficiencies of larger warheads to set up a direct tension between penetrating hostile anti-missile-defense (AMS) and tonnage efficiency per missile. Given that missiles are relatively big and take up a lot of magazine space, this makes for pretty good game balance and design trade-offs.

One could easily modify a size 1 AAM to lower the speed/agility and increase the warhead - at only magneto-plasma techs I've already done this to make a cluster missile for captured NPR ships with full-size launchers. A size 4 missile with three size-1, damage 2 submunitions; moving at 30km/s. But the missiles are no longer nigh-unstoppable like AAMs are and cannot do dual-duty as anti-missile defenses themselves. AMM armed ships gain that dual capability of being able to abuse beam ships for a (relatively) long time as they close to range while being AMS platforms themselves; but given that same tonnage, either ROF-5 gauss CIWS or dedicated anti-missile ships with size 4-6 launchers would pack superior firepower into the tonnage, yes? (This is an actual question by the way; I am not good at math.)

Hence the frustration of AMM ships seems focused on one issue; most standard fleet doctrines are reduced to dealing with them by brute force; either missile overkill (hard on the magazines) or tanking the damage while closing (hard on armor), which feels inelegant even though the enemy is paying for their lack of specialization in terms of damage inflicted per ton of ship in the fight, because they will do this even when the rest of the enemy fleet can't scratch you (which is the tradeoff of the tonnage inefficiency; all-round utility.) Furthermore, in games where RP is not an over-riding factor, it feels to me that a decent solution is close to hand - commercial carrier ships with obscene amounts of armor and "boarding pods" (fighter/FAC ships with boarding troop bays, no range and obscene speeds; that can leave the hangar, launch troops and dock again in the same 5s tick.) If one is irritated by AMM spam, well, the dedicated all-rounder hull can be neutralized by a dedicated counter.

Ergo I feel that the biggest problem with AMM spam - unique to AMM spam and not innate to small/large missile balance - is RP implications. Outside of this, any player/NPR doctrine matchups can play out pretty well as outside context problem culture clashes; and given the ability to gift fleets to NPRs coming in 1.14, as SM you can even hand-craft fleets/doctrines for NPRs to put to work. AMM ships have the potential to spoil things due to ubiquity. See also the post on the forums here from a chap asking if he can remove size 1 missiles from the database completely to enable his roleplay concept. Ultimately this seems to come down to a matter of NPR doctrine management. Given the roleplay-enabling aspect of Aurora it sometimes seems odd that we don't have more ways to influence NPR behavior and doctrine, but if one considers the beastly challenges innate in randomizing NPR doctrines while keeping their fleet comps internally consistent, it makes a lot more sense. NPR AI in its entirety will likely always be imperfect by some measure and a significant development challenge even against the sane metric of "fit-for-purpose." (Not for nothing has NPR AI improvements been the biggest single improvement in C# outside of fundamental rules re-balancing.) AI is hard.

There is more to be said on the larger small missile/large missile balance, but that's best put in the actual Mechanics forum, and besides, I could only raise the questions (how has C#'s ECM implementation turned out in practice?), not really answer them. That's a job for the people who can actually do math. For now I think we should be either kicking around ideas for the most cost-efficient dedicated AMM counter (I think my tanky commercial boarding ship is a good one, but I haven't tried it,) or considering the innate RP justifications for building an inefficient, but all-round useful ship for expected contact with xenos using completely unknown technology. In fact, I might add a suggestion for the next version to bias standard NPR fleet doctrines towards Gauss turret escorts and have the likelihood/percentage of naval fleet tonnage devoted to AMM ships heavily impacted by an NPR's xenophobia rating.  :)
 
The following users thanked this post: Sebmono

Offline villaincomer

  • Petty Officer
  • **
  • v
  • Posts: 23
  • Thanked: 10 times
Re: Missile-ssistance?
« Reply #21 on: May 27, 2021, 12:40:49 PM »
Would a EM/microwave bomb overcome the AMM scenarios or just add to the noise of the issue?

From a RP perspective Battlestar Galactica was the MVP against toaster missile spam. ("Are we the bad guys?")
Mass boarding attempts feel like one of the battles for Babylon 5.

As a side note I like the idea of microwave weapons but struggle with the idea of when do I know if they have worked without launching further missiles or closing in for a beam battle.

It seems better AI ship design and decision making but be the best place to start.  But that is for Steve allowing for time, energy and will.
 

Online nuclearslurpee

  • Admiral of the Fleet
  • ***********
  • Posts: 2960
  • Thanked: 2222 times
  • Radioactive frozen beverage.
Re: Missile-ssistance?
« Reply #22 on: May 27, 2021, 12:52:18 PM »
In other words, the game's AI settings let NPRs make bad choices, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But it's hard for AMM ships to be "bad." But is that an AMM problem... or a small missile problem?

I would actually say it's a missile problem in general, not unique to AMMs, which I'll explain more fully below. AMMs are simply the "poster child" for missile issues, mainly on account that almost every NPR has access to AMM spamming ships so they are ubiquitous (as opposed to e.g. box launchers which are never used by NPRs and can be ignored if the player chooses to make such a house rule).

Quote
AMM armed ships gain that dual capability of being able to abuse beam ships for a (relatively) long time as they close to range while being AMS platforms themselves; but given that same tonnage, either ROF-5 gauss CIWS or dedicated anti-missile ships with size 4-6 launchers would pack superior firepower into the tonnage, yes? (This is an actual question by the way; I am not good at math.)

The major thing that AMM spam accomplishes is overwhelming point defenses by virtue of salvo size. I will use the ship designs from my current campaign as a reference point:

The NPR I recently fought can deploy AMM escort cruisers displacing around 15,000 tons and firing 4x5 salvos at 35,000 km/s, using INPE technology and 5x EP boost. My primary point defense is from 10 cm railguns on ion drive tech ships with a fleet speed of 5,000 km/s. Running through a point defense calculation, I will require on average 40 weapons to destroy the volley from a single escort cruiser. In practice, my point defense ships are principally 10,000-ton destroyers which can mount 16 weapons each, so to match the tonnage of the enemy cruisers would give me 24 weapons per 15,000 tons, which still allows on average 8 missiles to slip through from each volley. As each escort cruiser carries about another 70ish volleys in its very deep magazines, that's around 560 damage which is more than enough to destroy my hypothetical 15,000-ton point defense cruiser unless I stack significantly more armor than is feasible at this tech level.

Were I facing an equal-tech (ion tech level) opponent, the situation would be far worse. As it stands, I can only defeat this NPR because they send mixed fleets with only a handful of AMM cruisers against which I field several squadrons of my destroyers. Now, this is a case of railguns, so decent Gauss PD turrets would probably be more effective (although Gauss ROF 4 is a tad expensive to research at ion tech level), but even then this requires an equal tonnage match of point defense ships against AMM ships which if nothing else severely constrains how one can build a fleet, short of having overwhelming numerical superiority which is rarely much fun to play out.

----

As I said above, AMM spam is hardly unique in this problem. In fact, the concept of "overwhelming point defenses by virtue of salvo size" is the same concept that explains why box launchers are patently overpowered, except even more so - for example, I can mount 20x size-6 ASM box launchers, at 45 tons each (and no crew!), on only a 3000-ton corvette. It's not hard to see how this can become an even more overwhelming situation for point defenses than the AMM spam, and why many players make a house rule against mounting box launchers.

Personally, I think this is a sad state of affairs, because box launchers are both interesting to play with and a realistic way to mount missiles (most modern naval large surface combatants mount substantial VLS batteries, after all). Thus in my opinion, the missile metagame of Aurora should be balanced around box launchers rather than full-size launchers for ASMs (AMMs still often work best from full-size launchers, given a powerful missile detection sensor and fast reloading rates). IMO, the simplest way to do this would be to remove the doubling of maximum EP boost that missiles get, which is a special rule anyways which C# ostensibly has the goal of eliminating. In theory this would allow box launchers to still be a very credible threat, but a strong combination of AMMs + gun PD + sensors should make it possible to deal with a box launcher volley, at least to the point of minimizing ship losses so that a counter-attack can inflict greater losses and achieve battlefield victory. This change would incidentally have the side benefit of halving the efficiency of AMM spam, which would bring it to the point where beam PD is ton-for-ton more effective than AMM spam.

Would a EM/microwave bomb overcome the AMM scenarios or just add to the noise of the issue?

As a weapon to fire against an AMM ship - probably not, because it would get shot down by the AMMs anyways.

As an AAMMM (anti-anti-missile missile missile), it seems likely that it would just swing balance in the other direction - wiping out an entire salvo by frying their onboard computers with an EM burst sounds like a ridiculously powerful form of PD, and I don't think the goal here is to make missiles a completely unviable weapon type. If nothing else it would be a balancing nightmare for Steve.
 

Offline Droll

  • Vice Admiral
  • **********
  • D
  • Posts: 1703
  • Thanked: 599 times
Re: Missile-ssistance?
« Reply #23 on: May 27, 2021, 01:01:45 PM »
I do remember toying around with the idea of a microwave variant that did AOE damage, with a % chance to destroy every missile within AOE range, the idea being that it is a PD weapon explicitly effective against few large salvos and not necessarily many smaller salvos. It would also incentivize using full sized ASM launchers in order to stagger missile salvos against such weapons.

However I think it is a difficult balance to hit, to some degree it makes sense that missiles perform better than beams 1 on 1 because you are essentially paying a strategic cost (logistics) for a tactical advantage.
At least this was the case until weapon failures came around and now beam weapons also deal with strategic problems in the form of MSP usage when firing, which means that now it feels like beam weapons completely falter against mass wave missile spam.

I do think that getting rid of the missile super boost is a good idea though regardless of everything else.

It's useful to note that Steve himself has said that he believes missiles are a little too weak. So yeah.
 

Offline Lord Solar

  • See above
  • Warrant Officer, Class 1
  • *****
  • Posts: 83
  • Thanked: 28 times
  • Everlasting Glory to the Imperium
  • Discord Username: Lord Solar
Re: Missile-ssistance?
« Reply #24 on: May 27, 2021, 01:59:00 PM »
I do remember toying around with the idea of a microwave variant that did AOE damage, with a % chance to destroy every missile within AOE range, the idea being that it is a PD weapon explicitly effective against few large salvos and not necessarily many smaller salvos.
I though about that too, but I think a better weapon would be something like a "flak cannon" weapon system that doesn't use AoE. It is a short range 1 damage beam weapon with a lot of shots but large power requirement. It can be turret mounted. It is more efficient against a single wave of missiles than gauss of same tech level but less effective against multiple smaller salvos. They should be balanced so even if you get the capacitor recharge to make them fire faster, gauss will still be tonnage efficient against multiple salvos.
« Last Edit: May 27, 2021, 02:50:37 PM by Lord Solar »
 

Online nuclearslurpee

  • Admiral of the Fleet
  • ***********
  • Posts: 2960
  • Thanked: 2222 times
  • Radioactive frozen beverage.
Re: Missile-ssistance?
« Reply #25 on: May 27, 2021, 02:16:03 PM »
I do remember toying around with the idea of a microwave variant that did AOE damage, with a % chance to destroy every missile within AOE range, the idea being that it is a PD weapon explicitly effective against few large salvos and not necessarily many smaller salvos.
I though about that too, but I think a better weapon would be something like a "flak cannon" weapon system that doesn't use AoE. It is a short range 1 damage beam weapon with a lot of shots but large power requirement. It can be turret mounted. It is more efficient against a single wave of missiles than gauss of same tech level but less effective against multiple smaller salvos. They should be balanced so even if you get the capacitor recharge to make them fire faster, they will still be tonnage efficient.

Something like a true rapid-fire automatic cannon that is able to engage every incoming missile with an X% chance to hit would be an interesting change to CIWS. If X% was 25%, for example, you'd be able to shoot down a lot of missiles with only a few CIWS, but stopping 99% of an incoming wave would on average require something like 16 CIWS. Drop X% down to 10% and you need 43 CIWS to accomplish the same. Obviously, X% needs to depend on tech levels and missile speed as always.

Balancing this would be...interesting.
 
The following users thanked this post: Droll, Lord Solar

Offline Demetrious

  • Warrant Officer, Class 2
  • ****
  • D
  • Posts: 65
  • Thanked: 40 times
Re: Missile-ssistance?
« Reply #26 on: May 27, 2021, 02:24:25 PM »
The major thing that AMM spam accomplishes is overwhelming point defenses by virtue of salvo size. I will use the ship designs from my current campaign as a reference point:

This is where the Hard Math comes in. In my own game I've had a very different experience with NPRs using full-size launchers... but I've also gone with a primarily beam-armed fleet using railguns, and am using 10cm railguns for my primary PD weapon until I reach Gauss 5, which is, as the nice fellows here or on the Discord have taught me, is mathematically where Gauss finally catches up to railguns for efficiency per ton (given a ship speed of at least 4,000m/s, at least.) I've been tempted to break away from this at times for RP reasons, but the absolutely titanic mass requirements of full-size Gauss have given me pause every time. I still take damage from the AMM ships - in contrast to having eaten every single sizeable salvo of size 4 missiles from their ASM ships - but at roughly the same tech disparity (magneto-plasma vs. ion) I can manage.

Going up against toasters recently (themselves at magneto-plasma) I had a different experience and broke off the engagement without trying to close. The tonnage of the spoiler AMM ships was 20,000 tons, only 5,000 shy of my heavy cruisers, which also impacted things. Randomization of ship design doctrine can also have interesting impacts. For giggles, I engaged SM mode, insta-researched up to ECM-5, and swapped out my ECM-3 modules. This produced a good 50% decrease in AMM hits - however, that level of ECM requires a research investment highly unlikely to manifest at magneto-plasma. I suspect that ECM cannot adequately impinge upon AMMs at anything equating a roughly relatable "tech level," as defined by general RP investment. However, I have not tested this.

Quote
As I said above, AMM spam is hardly unique in this problem. In fact, the concept of "overwhelming point defenses by virtue of salvo size" is the same concept that explains why box launchers are patently overpowered, except even more so - for example, I can mount 20x size-6 ASM box launchers, at 45 tons each (and no crew!), on only a 3000-ton corvette. It's not hard to see how this can become an even more overwhelming situation for point defenses than the AMM spam, and why many players make a house rule against mounting box launchers.

I wonder if they actually are. I saw your posts concerning box launcher vs. magazine-fed launcher tonnage efficiencies and it more or less tracks with my experience; magazines are more efficient per ton for storing missiles than box launchers. The tipping factor in that discussion (specifically, housing AMMs) was crew per launcher, but we should also remember the wide range of reduced-size launchers available. The most aggressive option, 0.3 size multiplier and 100x reload penalty, can, at missile reload 4, reload a size 4 launcher 25 minutes. It only requires one crewman. A size 4 box launcher would require 100 minutes in a hangar, or a staggering 16.7 hours from an ordinance transfer point of any sort, and would have to remain stationary.

This dovetails with another aspect of missile combat - targeting and overkill. It's often said that point defense vs. missiles feels underwhelming at times because it's either all-or-nothing. (There is obviously a theoretical gray zone where PD is effective but not enough to stop "leakers." I think we're not seeing it mainly due to beam fleets enjoying deserved popularity in C# and NPRs not using reduced-size launchers.) Ordinance is precious in Aurora - it takes a long time to produce and transporting it is non-trivial. Magazine depth matters, and so if you bring more box launchers than required to comfortably saturate enemy PD, you may well be operating at a magazine depth penalty that leaves you unable to finish off their entire fleet - at which point you had best have some beam ship backup, otherwise your box launcher ships will be in a spot of trouble unless your doctrine prefers many fast, small carriers. I greatly appreciate that we still have the option of using large box launchers on large ships, but the mechanics do encourage use of box launchers more on small ships that can reload in hangars, and that's okay. (If one considers the effective inability of modern missile destroyers using VLS systems to reload at sea, and the time it takes even with a dock crane, this is also fairly realistic.)

This also illustrates why this topic gives me headaches -the strategic level implications of combat are important, but much more difficult to quantify numerically for consistent analysis. Coming up with solutions - be it new warheads or PD guns as people are suggesting here, or just something as simple as an ECM mechanics rework - is almost trivial compared to solidly quantifying the dynamics as they play out in a campaign game.
« Last Edit: May 27, 2021, 02:26:50 PM by Demetrious »
 
The following users thanked this post: Lord Solar

Online nuclearslurpee

  • Admiral of the Fleet
  • ***********
  • Posts: 2960
  • Thanked: 2222 times
  • Radioactive frozen beverage.
Re: Missile-ssistance?
« Reply #27 on: May 27, 2021, 02:48:27 PM »
As I said above, AMM spam is hardly unique in this problem. In fact, the concept of "overwhelming point defenses by virtue of salvo size" is the same concept that explains why box launchers are patently overpowered, except even more so - for example, I can mount 20x size-6 ASM box launchers, at 45 tons each (and no crew!), on only a 3000-ton corvette. It's not hard to see how this can become an even more overwhelming situation for point defenses than the AMM spam, and why many players make a house rule against mounting box launchers.

I wonder if they actually are. I saw your posts concerning box launcher vs. magazine-fed launcher tonnage efficiencies and it more or less tracks with my experience; magazines are more efficient per ton for storing missiles than box launchers. The tipping factor in that discussion (specifically, housing AMMs) was crew per launcher, but we should also remember the wide range of reduced-size launchers available. The most aggressive option, 0.3 size multiplier and 100x reload penalty, can, at missile reload 4, reload a size 4 launcher 25 minutes. It only requires one crewman. A size 4 box launcher would require 100 minutes in a hangar, or a staggering 16.7 hours from an ordinance transfer point of any sort, and would have to remain stationary.

I do want to correct a misconception here: the "tipping point" in the discussion was not crew requirement (which only shifts the break-even point by a missile or two, but does not change the existence of the break-even point). The limiting factor for the full-size AMM launcher is the ability to launch as many AMMs before an enemy salvo impacts as a set of box launchers can, which in turn requires a combination of reload tech and sensor coverage far enough out to detect enemy ASMs and provide the necessary time to fire AMMs.

The same broad principles apply if you bump up the missile size, as the tonnages mostly just multiply by the same factor across the board, but for ASMs the tactical assessment isn't really important because we don't have a limited window of time to fire all of our ASMs - the issue is solely one of overmatching the enemy's point defense. This is a fundamentally different application than using AMMs to counter a large ASM salvo, which was the context of my linked post.

Quote
This dovetails with another aspect of missile combat - targeting and overkill. It's often said that point defense vs. missiles feels underwhelming at times because it's either all-or-nothing. (There is obviously a theoretical gray zone where PD is effective but not enough to stop "leakers." I think we're not seeing it mainly due to beam fleets enjoying deserved popularity in C# and NPRs not using reduced-size launchers.) Ordinance is precious in Aurora - it takes a long time to produce and transporting it is non-trivial. Magazine depth matters, and so if you bring more box launchers than required to comfortably saturate enemy PD, you may well be operating at a magazine depth penalty that leaves you unable to finish off their entire fleet - at which point you had best have some beam ship backup, otherwise your box launcher ships will be in a spot of trouble unless your doctrine prefers many fast, small carriers. I greatly appreciate that we still have the option of using large box launchers on large ships, but the mechanics do encourage use of box launchers more on small ships that can reload in hangars, and that's okay. (If one considers the effective inability of modern missile destroyers using VLS systems to reload at sea, and the time it takes even with a dock crane, this is also fairly realistic.)

This also illustrates why this topic gives me headaches -the strategic level implications of combat are important, but much more difficult to quantify numerically for consistent analysis. Coming up with solutions - be it new warheads or PD guns as people are suggesting here, or just something as simple as an ECM mechanics rework - is almost trivial compared to solidly quantifying the dynamics as they play out in a campaign game.

The point of box launchers is to overwhelm point defense with a massive volley size. That's a strictly tactical purpose, however it is extremely effective, and as a consequence of that effectiveness the strategic problems caused by using box launchers (lack of magazine depth + need to transport and reload ordnance) are greatly outweighed by the strategic gains from the tactical efficiency - you destroyed several ships or even an entire enemy fleet with no losses aside from the expended ammunition.

The relevance of AMM spam is that it is the most ubiquitous experience most Aurora players will have (especially those who don't play with multiple player races) with the concept of large volleys overmatching point defenses. The effect is much more pronounced for box launchers, however.

Ideally, a rebalancing of missiles would bring us to a place where box launcher tactics are (at least at certain stages of the game) fairly strong tactically and able to beat point defenses enough to do significant damage, but not so strong that an opposing fleet can't counter-attack with remaining forces and score a victory if they plan correctly, and not so strong that the strategic costs of using a missile-heavy strategy are eclipsed by the strategic gains of wiping out entire enemy fleets from 100m km away without a scratch.
 
The following users thanked this post: Droll, skoormit

Offline Garfunkel

  • Registered
  • Admiral of the Fleet
  • ***********
  • Posts: 2781
  • Thanked: 1048 times
Re: Missile-ssistance?
« Reply #28 on: May 27, 2021, 05:08:53 PM »
Ultimately, the complaint about AMM spam is the same as complaint about NPR home world ground forces - they are 'special' cases that break the usual rhythm of the game. From a gamist-POV, your fleet that just wrecked the NPR fleet and your army that already took over their mining colonies SHOULD be able to defeat their final defenders and then subjugate their home world without you having to change your playstyle. Except that's only because you're a gamer, playing a game, and approaching the situation from a game developer / scenario designer viewpoint.

Why wouldn't a race facing a possible extinction event throw everything and their grandma at the incoming aliens? Why would their missile stockpile NOT be eight digits deep? Why wouldn't the cradle of their civilization be heavily fortified and guarded by millions of tons of hardware? From a roleplay/storytelling-POV, having to adapt to a different situation, to perhaps pause the campaign for months or years in order to gather sufficient resources for the next phase, is a fantastic development! Having to break through different obstacles as your desperate enemy fights like a cornered rat is definitely different from a JP assault or a deep space meeting engagement.

And hey, after your first game with NPRs, you know what's waiting for you and you can prepare for it. Yeah, slugging through AMM spam can be annoying and whittling down HW Defence Corps can be worse. But that's why you play with two monitors - or if you find yourself getting annoyed and aggravated about everything, take a break - go for some fresh air or play a different game. Annoyances get worse if you let them stack and fester. Every time I get upset with Aurora or Dwarf Fortress, I go play Baldur's Gate or Doom or Witcher.

In that vein I personally don't think that there needs to be a change to either issue at the moment.

Also, just for Real World reference, in WW2 the main combatants (so not a unified Earth even) built about 300,000 tanks and about 810,000 airplanes. This does not include the millions of wheeled vehicles and the thousands of ships. At the height of the Cold War, the combined nuclear weapon stockpile (estimated) of the world was about 70,000 bombs/missiles in 1986. I would definitely expect an NPR home world - if it is industrial enough to support a stellar empire and has sufficient population - to equal those numbers.
 
The following users thanked this post: serger, skoormit

Offline Demetrious

  • Warrant Officer, Class 2
  • ****
  • D
  • Posts: 65
  • Thanked: 40 times
Re: Missile-ssistance?
« Reply #29 on: May 27, 2021, 05:54:26 PM »
The point of box launchers is to overwhelm point defense with a massive volley size. That's a strictly tactical purpose, however it is extremely effective, and as a consequence of that effectiveness the strategic problems caused by using box launchers (lack of magazine depth + need to transport and reload ordnance) are greatly outweighed by the strategic gains from the tactical efficiency - you destroyed several ships or even an entire enemy fleet with no losses aside from the expended ammunition.

This sounds good on paper, but in my experience it is overly reductionist.

My last two games I've been using carrier strike groups as my main fleet doctrine; in the current game I'm fielding 50,000 ton carriers that can deliver sixty 250 ton fighters with four size-4 box launchers apiece, generating a maximum salvo size of 240 missiles apiece, with two reloads in the carrier's magazine. So I have been unleashing some very big box launcher salvos myself. :) I have, however, encountered hostiles which are fairly resilient against even this titanic salvo weight.

The first issue I've had is one of targeting. Even after first battle contact is made, the enemy will occasionally produce a new class of ship I haven't seen before, and I'm forced to guess as to its role. Jumpship? Beam ship? Gauss? AMM? Missile ship? Despite handily saturating their point defenses with my salvos, I've found that I simply don't have enough ammo to comprehensively destroy (or even render hours-de-combat via distributed damage and/or overall effective losses inflicted) ships with engine tech a tier below mine. This forces me to choose my targets, and when some of them are unknown I can neither properly prioritize threats to let my beam ships mop up the remainder nor be sure that I am allocating sufficient, but not overkill numbers of missiles to each, since I don't know what their passive defenses (shields + armor) are like. Furthermore, RNG will have its say; both in which salvos are degraded and which ships manage to survive X number of missiles via having the hits spread across their armor instead of stacking up in one spot and/or rolls for internal damage. Those ships require follow-on strikes; which in turn impacts my targeting decisions - it is most optimal to destroy their PD ships (especially AMM ships given their dual threat) with the first deck-load salvo so the next two are more efficient. 

In theory, if I disposed with the carrier and the majority of my beam fleet entirely and went with just box launchers and PD, I suppose it's possible to achieve the on-paper "perfect salvo" in which every missile is expended at once (so the "cost" of overwhelming PD; i.e. the maximum number of missiles the PD system destroys on average, is only paid once,) and such sufficient over-match of assigned damage is achieved (50% or whatnot) that there is no chance of imperfect targeting borne of imperfect intel allowing any survivors (assuming that you don't target large tonnages with commercial engine signatures.) Since none of this is relevant to NPRs as-is, I won't say "but that's a boring way to play" and instead observe the tactical and strategic limitations - if they produce another fleet from somewhere else, and you have expended most or all of your munitions, I am in trouble. Even if I have reloads along, I'll have to stay stationary for a significant length of time to reload box launchers from a tender. Its flexibility is further limited by the need to conduct jump point assaults - box launchers tend to explode a lot more than magazines and larger beam weapons are fairly efficient at producing shock damage which might encourage such things.

Then there's the alternate case where I do have decent intel on the target and know which ships are the PD ships. If I can reasonably expect to bring enough reduced-size launchers to any roughly equal-tonnage scrap to comfortably overwhelm the defenses of the enemy's doctrinaire % of fleet tonnage devoted to PD and achieve a minimum amount of damage (resulting in effective degradation of the hostiles overall PD capability) then at some point it becomes more efficient to use multiple salvos fired from reduced-size launchers; as once the PD ships are dead, the remainder are more or less helpless. Even a beam fleet turning its main guns loose can only blunt, not stop, a serious salvo; without a significant tonnage of massed 10cm railguns they're not going to shift the needle too much. And 2/3 beam fleets will be using lasers or particle beams!

To be clear with all this, I'm not indicating doubt as to how the Perfectly Optimized Meta Fleet Matchups shakes out in terms of most efficient weapons system, but expressing real doubt that box launchers are truly dominant in an actual practical sense, in campaigns, with a theoretical human opponent playing a second empire to stand in for The Theoretical Perfect NPR AI. Other dangerous doctrine mismatches (which could be added to NPRs for balance or already exist as spoiler threats) include inverting the saturation threat - coming after box-launcher centric fleets with hordes of box launcher torpedo bombers - or for that matter, big balls of railgun fighters (with some laser/meson fighters mixed in to help punch holes in ship armor once they get close.) This is a matter of saturating the available fire controls on the box launcher ships. Yet another tactic could be large ships with commercial engines that turn out to be warships, to weaponize the targeting problem - combined with large hangars and they could also prove flexible enough to keep some surprise advantage after initial contact, as well.

I'm not advocating for any of this as suitable for NPR AI; I'm just trying to illustrate that getting down to the "real" (im)balances present in the game's rules as-written requires fully considering the strategic implications, and that those are so innately linked to the NPR's decision-making ability that our choice of comparative baseline in that matter could well result in situations where even a significant tactical advantage could be rendered moot. (This is in part due to the inherent one-trick-pony problem that any strongly biased fleet design doctrine will have, of course.) It's convenient to use terms like "roughly equal tonnage" when comparing things, but even that doesn't account for production effort invested into filling magazines or hangars (or god forbid, both!)

To get down to numbers which can start to give us a roughly objective picture to compare to our necessarily subjective experiences playing campaign games is a daunting task and will involve adding up a lot of mineral costs. It's a complex enough issue that we may have to write an entire simulation program just... to...

.... wait. I believe we HAVE one!

... now I just need to find the time to use it in that fashion. And perhaps a set of generic empire starting parameters to use...

Ultimately, the complaint about AMM spam is the same as complaint about NPR home world ground forces - they are 'special' cases that break the usual rhythm of the game. From a gamist-POV, your fleet that just wrecked the NPR fleet and your army that already took over their mining colonies SHOULD be able to defeat their final defenders and then subjugate their home world without you having to change your playstyle. Except that's only because you're a gamer, playing a game, and approaching the situation from a game developer / scenario designer viewpoint.

This is precisely why the mechanical questions are important - the answers will illustrate whether AMM spam only feels like a special case due to contrast with the limitations of NPR fleet/ship design doctrine as they now stand, or if they are inherent to the mechanics and will always manifest at a level that over-rides even large outside influences like strategic production, operational flexibility, and significant fleet doctrine mismatches.

If it is the former, it means that AMMs are exactly what they should be given the general thrust of the overall game rules; all-round weapons who's flexibility comes at the cost of tonnage efficiency against warships. Frankly, the RP considerations take care of themselves from there. When contemplating the tension between game rules and RP, it's worth remembering that real-life naval combat theorists, tasked with the same challenge Aurora players have (making irrevocable decisions years in advance that will determine the fighting abilities of entire national fleets for decades to come) built mathematical tabletop wargame models very much like Starfire and intensively gamed out various scenarios. These games took into consideration both statistical lessons and real-world strategic limits (in larger wargames, the staff officers of various ships would isolate themselves in separate rooms and runners would deliver messages on slips of paper to simulate orders being given by radio, for instance; so even the human element of staff teamwork and efficiency was considered.) This produced the theory of more, smaller guns being able to defeat fewer larger guns by steady degradation of the hostile's fighting efficiency without penetrating a main armor belt. This theory was put into practice at the River Plate, and proved successful - though some crewmen on the three British cruisers who's ships caught some massive 11 inch AP rounds viewed the results as less clear-cut. ;D

In short, when dealing with mathematical models of simulated reality, the numbers always matter; but how and why depend entirely on what your goal is. If your goal is the existential survival of your nation-state, then you will never, ever stop tweaking. If your goal is to produce a reasonably consistent and plausible simulation of Space Empires Going Pew Pew In Space, then sufficiently ovoid cows will be good enough. You still want as good a grasp on The Numbers as possible to make life easier, but you'll pass the threshold of "perfectly fit for purpose and practically perfect" within a human lifetime, which is a good thing.  :)
 
The following users thanked this post: skoormit