Tentative Suggestions for Missile Rebalancing by Tweaking Launcher Size Rules

[Steve Walmsley]

Missile costs are far too much in their current form and need to be rebalanced to have an equal equation against beam based fleets.

Current logic behind missiles being expensive is that they provide a significant advantage in range against beam foes and enable the potential of wiping out an enemy fleet without being touched yourself which is invaluable.

However with new laser warheads and other munitions + a redirection to larger missiles I believe the costs will effect the use of missiles especially if the idea is to have reloadable launchers be more viable, so I recommend the following:

Reduce the costs of all "dumb" missiles ie missiles without laser warheads, without ECCM, without ECM (Notably decoys in whatever form should be reduced as well), specifically the gallicite cost, people especially with box launchers are having to fire entire fleets worth of BP at opponents.

Keep current costs for "smart" missiles, ECM, ECCM, Laser warheads, Advanced guidance etc, the current costs being high are fine in these areas as these will be more selective missiles or you expect to pay extra for what you get, so for example an AMM which costs 50 minerals currently with no ECM or ECCM or anything would cost say 30 instead and if it did have ECM and ECCM or advanced guidance retargeting its cost would be 50.

Furthermore the main cost of missiles is the logistics of moving them around strategically, larger missiles should be reduced in cost and all dumb munitions while higher tech munitions with specialised warheads, levels of electronic warfare and additional guidance should be more expensive, IRL missiles avionics are some of the most expensive part of the weapon.

Earlier today I posted something in the OP on missile engines. They are now half Gallicite and half Boronide in terms of mineral requirements.

While missiles will be a little more expensive with the new changes, they will also probably be larger so the cost per MSP launched may not be any higher. The other changes I am making should make missiles more effective, which should create a cost reduction in overall missile expenditure, even if individual missiles are not cheaper. I need to see the new paradigm in action before I start playing with costs.

[deathpickle]

In a similar vein, we could apply the "AMMs per missile" setting to energy PD.

I. e.  right now energy PD is applied as efficiently as possible, shooting at a missile until it is destroyed then moving to the next.  More "realistic," at least for final fire, is that you would precommit how many shots to take at each missile.  For bonus points, in final defensive fire mode we should "know" what ship is targeted by a missile and allow the shots per missile setting to be based on which vessel is targeted.

Like the beam fire control: salvo modification, this would cause a dramatic increase in the variance of interception effectiveness, which in turn forces far larger resource expenditures in order to guarantee 100% interception. 

I *think* this would go a long way to mitigating the all or nothing nature of missile engagements by making leakers much more common. 

Unlike the beam fire control modification, it also would introduce a tactical choice: you can gamble on complete coverage by allocating the minimum number of shots per missile (useful for cases where you are outclassed and hoping to get a cool story), or you can sacrifice some ships to ensure others come through unscathed by upping the # of shots per missile for the important assets.  Escorts foregoing their own defense to shepherd a beam superdreadnought into range make for great AARs.

I mean really, isn't this the only change that's necessary? The new laser missile gives a nice variety in weapon choice.  The "guaranteed a hit eventually" mechanics steve just added are lovely, meaning missiles aren't strictly less cost efficient than the armor they're destroying cuz of misses + lack of agility (ignoring PD of course).  Missiles now use a much nicer spread of resources that we typically have to spare.  And then missiles tend to get a few leakers so that it's not so all or nothing, even if you have "enough PD for everything" it's perfect.  Other than the fact that volly size is still vastly superior to fire-rate problem, I don't think much else is really necessary, is it?

The changes that make big missiles/launchers more space efficient were also cool and good, but I don't feel like anyone found a satisfying solution to the submunitions problem; obviously you can proportionately and directly hurt the efficiency of splitting up munitions as was suggested, but I can't help but feel there's something off about it.  cause like. . .  it simply is not reasonable that that should significantly cost you in tonnage? I guess you're fitting little cylinders inside of a bigger cylinder, which is bound to have some wasted space but. . .  idk that only implies an increased volume not so much tonnage, and such things can be cubes in space.  Also I think it is desirable that a long-range rocket with a single munition payload has none or very little wasted space, cuz it's only cluster bombs that deserve the nerf, although admittedly it is probably fine either way.  And don't forget to account for the increased fire rate of big missiles in the munitions nerf.

The only thing I can think of as being risky for submunitions is that people are probably going to want longer range AMM's now that their ability to kill an ASM technically scales with distance and time, not just speed, which leaves the big guy more vulnerable prior to deploy, but that applies equally to any large missile, and I don't expect the AI will do a forward scouting strategy.

[Steve Walmsley]

Now this is a real change. I like it, as it gives potential for some leakers to get through and eliminates some other weirdness.

Instead of number of shots, sum of tracking speed (tracking capacity) should determine distribution of shots. To shoot down a missile moving at 20k km/s, you need a shot with a tracking speed of 20k km/s. Or two shots with 10k km/s, and so on. That way you don't have 10% to-hit gauss considered equally effective to turreted weapons.

I like the principle in theory, but I think it might be difficult for players to calculate this on the fly when working out PD assignments. Number of missiles is an easier concept. I think if I implement both FCAM (need a better name) and PD priority, it will allow players to allocate low to-hit weapons after higher to-hit and avoid mis-assignment causing leakers.

Also, this is going to make beam FC design more interesting because you will need to start thinking about potential PD allocations when designing fire controls. Ships are likely to have more mixed FC types.

[Steve Walmsley]

I am starting to code the new PD mechanics as described above, which of course means I am running into issues I hadn't considered yet

So far, I have made the following changes:

• Each Ship Class has a new attribute called PD Protection Priority, with 1 the highest, no maximum and a default of 5. This indicates which ships are the most important for other ships to protect.
• Each Beam Fire Control is assigned a Point Defence Priority from 1 to 5, with 1 being the highest and 3 the default. This is the order in which fire controls (across all ships) are checked to assign shots against inbound missiles.
• Each Beam Fire Control is assigned a Fire Concentration from 1 to 10, with 1 being the highest and 3 the default. If this many shots are already allocated against a missile, this fire control will ignore that missile for targeting purposes.

Of course, missiles aren't always fired against ships. They also target populations and ground forces. STOs can also be used for PD. That creates the question of where populations sit in term of protection priority and also how STO handle fire concentration. I think the latter is easy - they will just always fire everything. For the former, I think the simplest answer is to give the population its own PD Protection Priority. I could make that configurable, although it might be easier to assume that any inhabited world is priority 5 and any uninhabited world is priority 15, or some other number either side of the default ship priority.

Happy to hear other opinions. Below is the current Combat view for assignments

EDIT: I've decided to use the existing Colony Importance field that is used for governor assignment as the basis for population PD priority. I reversed the order so that 0 is high priority, which matches the various ship-based priorities.

[Serina]

I am starting to code the new PD mechanics as described above, which of course means I am running into issues I hadn't considered yet :)

So far, I have made the following changes:

• Each Ship Class has a new attribute called PD Protection Priority, with 1 the highest, no maximum and a default of 5.  This indicates which ships are the most important for other ships to protect.
• Each Beam Fire Control is assigned a Point Defence Priority from 1 to 5, with 1 being the highest and 3 the default.  This is the order in which fire controls (across all ships) are checked to assign shots against inbound missiles.
• Each Beam Fire Control is assigned a Fire Concentration from 1 to 10, with 1 being the highest and 3 the default.  If this many shots are already allocated against a missile, this fire control will ignore that missile for targeting purposes.

Of course, missiles aren't always fired against ships.  They also target populations and ground forces.  STOs can also be used for PD.  That creates the question of where populations sit in term of protection priority and also how STO handle fire concentration.  I think the latter is easy - they will just always fire everything.  For the former, I think the simplest answer is to give the population its own PD Protection Priority.  I could make that configurable, although it might be easier to assume that any inhabited world is priority 5 and any uninhabited world is priority 15, or some other number either side of the default ship priority.

Happy to hear other opinions.  Below is the current Combat view for assignments

EDIT: I've decided to use the existing Colony Importance field that is used for governor assignment as the basis for population PD priority.  I reversed the order so that 0 is high priority, which matches the various ship-based priorities.

This is great news, and thank you for the hard work Steve. 

I was wondering if you've given any thought in terms of the layered PD defense and how as a player, and an AI for that matter, you'd really prefer if your long range laser PD shot at the Laser warhead missiles instead of the "Dumb" missiles.  It would be cheating to simply "Know" which missiles have laser warheads as there shouldn't really be an obvious way to tell before they detonate, but at the same time, there might be variations in speed, heat given off etc, something that would allow for either a manual, or automatic targeting priority, the latter possibly being that the Long range defense mode gets an increasing bonus depending on how many missiles it shoots down within an engagement or something towards correctly targeting laser warheads.  Though, assumptions could be made that larger missiles mean laser warheads in most cases, but a player might exploit this and build size 8 dumb missiles and size 7. 99 laser warheads, and essentially use the dumb missiles as decoys. 

I believe that some kind of system here will be crucial in terms of allowing for specific counter-play against laser warheads from beam heavy/beam exclusive fleets, although it should by no means be perfect. 

Finally, I would like to suggest the possibility of adding some kind of "Kinetic" kill vehicle warhead that can be used on AMM's.  It would increase the AGI or maneuverability of AMM's to a certain point a flat or percentage bonus, to potentially offset some of the need for utter AMM over-match, increasing hit chances against missiles, while the downside would be that it becomes useless against everything except other missiles. 

As for the re-targeting device, it might be worth it to simply increase it's cost per missile so that it remains reasonable for a size 6 ASM, but it becomes unreasonable for an AMM in terms of cost.  There might also be a limited number of reattacks, an increase in size or a combination of all three. 

Thanks again for the wonderful work you've done thus far.

[Steve Walmsley]

I was wondering if you've given any thought in terms of the layered PD defense and how as a player, and an AI for that matter, you'd really prefer if your long range laser PD shot at the Laser warhead missiles instead of the "Dumb" missiles.  It would be cheating to simply "Know" which missiles have laser warheads as there shouldn't really be an obvious way to tell before they detonate.

PD systems will engage laser warheads just before they detonate. I could add tactical intelligence on missiles, but as soon as the first one exploded you would know the correct range to engage, so that seems like a lot of work for no real gameplay difference. I decided to just skip that and allow immediate engagement at the correct range.

[xenoscepter]

 --- So Missile Maneuver rating is fixed to 10, could we keep the Tech that increases it and just have it be a flat bonus? So, Missile Agility tech for 32 per msp, just ups the Maneuverability from 10 to 32, etc. Obviously it would need tweaking, but still...

 --- Technobabble could be that agility is part of engine mass, both for ships and missiles, but ships aren't trying to run into other ships in the way missiles do, so the missiles have a tech line to make them better at that.

[nuclearslurpee (OP)]

Finally, I would like to suggest the possibility of adding some kind of "Kinetic" kill vehicle warhead that can be used on AMM's.  It would increase the AGI or maneuverability of AMM's to a certain point a flat or percentage bonus, to potentially offset some of the need for utter AMM over-match, increasing hit chances against missiles, while the downside would be that it becomes useless against everything except other missiles. 

There's two big issues with kinetic kill from a realism standpoint - which I say as someone who famously says we should think less about realism:

• The damage is actually quite massive and probably exceeds what you would see from a warhead detonation. For example, a size-1 (2.5 ton) AMM with a speed of 20,000 km/s (this is quite early tech level) has a kinetic energy of 500 petajoules, which is about the same energy as a 120 megaton nuclear warhead - more than twice as much as the largest nuclear warhead ever detonated (Tsar Bomba) if I recall correctly. While damage numbers in Aurora are very obfuscated, you can do some back-of-envelope estimate of damage against conventional (i.e., steel) armor and find that one point of damage comes out to something like 100 kilotons to perhaps a megaton. This means that just one or a few kinetic-kill missiles is enough to destroy even a decent-size warship, and pretty much the only way we can handwave this away is to make some claim about very low hit probabilities at space combat ranges (which brings up some uncomfortable questions about beam weapons...).
• There is no good justification to say that a kinetic-kill missile can only be used against other missiles; any weapon which can hit a missile can also hit a ship. Which means that we have to allow those blatantly OP 120+ damage missiles to target enemy ships, there is no reasonable way around that. And I hope even the most hardcore "Aurora isn't balanced!!" zealot can readily see why this is a problem.

Again, you can try to add kinetic-kill and say that the limitation of that weapon type is poor accuracy, due to the challenge of trying to strike a physical target instead of just detonating somewhere in the vicinity; however, then you have to deal with uncomfortable questions about why railguns and Gauss cannons can hit targets reliably but a guided missile has a fractional-percentage chance to hit the same target. Therefore the best solution for kinetic-kill missiles is to glance about awkwardly and pretend they were never mentioned.

[Serina]

Snip

PD systems will engage laser warheads just before they detonate.  I could add tactical intelligence on missiles, but as soon as the first one exploded you would know the correct range to engage, so that seems like a lot of work for no real gameplay difference.  I decided to just skip that and allow immediate engagement at the correct range.

Well it's more that when missiles are the same size, and give off the same readings or similar ones, it'd be very hard to determine what it what in terms of dumb or laser pumped warheads.  That said, this might be a topic that should be reexamined if you do Ewar changes and introduce decoys and such.  With a chance that the defenders engage the wrong missiles.  That said, it does mean that the mixing of dumb and laser warheads will be less effective, which will certainly swing balance back in favor a bit towards multi layered defenses.  You could otherwise after all end up in a situation where your long range PD shoots at dumb warheads and the laser ones all go off with no issue, which would ultimately mean adding dumb warheads not as threats but as decoys and possibly fully focusing on laser warheads to avoid having even deal with final defensive fire. 

Finally, I would like to suggest the possibility of adding some kind of "Kinetic" kill vehicle warhead that can be used on AMM's.   It would increase the AGI or maneuverability of AMM's to a certain point a flat or percentage bonus, to potentially offset some of the need for utter AMM over-match, increasing hit chances against missiles, while the downside would be that it becomes useless against everything except other missiles.   

There's two big issues with kinetic kill from a realism standpoint - which I say as someone who famously says we should think less about realism:

• The damage is actually quite massive and probably exceeds what you would see from a warhead detonation.  For example, a size-1 (2. 5 ton) AMM with a speed of 20,000 km/s (this is quite early tech level) has a kinetic energy of 500 petajoules, which is about the same energy as a 120 megaton nuclear warhead - more than twice as much as the largest nuclear warhead ever detonated (Tsar Bomba) if I recall correctly.  While damage numbers in Aurora are very obfuscated, you can do some back-of-envelope estimate of damage against conventional (i. e. , steel) armor and find that one point of damage comes out to something like 100 kilotons to perhaps a megaton.  This means that just one or a few kinetic-kill missiles is enough to destroy even a decent-size warship, and pretty much the only way we can hand wave this away is to make some claim about very low hit probabilities at space combat ranges (which brings up some uncomfortable questions about beam weapons. . . ).
• There is no good justification to say that a kinetic-kill missile can only be used against other missiles; any weapon which can hit a missile can also hit a ship.  Which means that we have to allow those blatantly OP 120+ damage missiles to target enemy ships, there is no reasonable way around that.  And I hope even the most hardcore "Aurora isn't balanced!!" zealot can readily see why this is a problem.

Again, you can try to add kinetic-kill and say that the limitation of that weapon type is poor accuracy, due to the challenge of trying to strike a physical target instead of just detonating somewhere in the vicinity; however, then you have to deal with uncomfortable questions about why rail guns and Gauss cannons can hit targets reliably but a guided missile has a fractional-percentage chance to hit the same target.  Therefore the best solution for kinetic-kill missiles is to glance about awkwardly and pretend they were never mentioned.

Alternatively it could be a proximity fuse or fragmentation/flachete warhead.  Given the inability to armor Missiles, it would make sense that they'd be more susceptible to proximity nuclear detonations rather than direct ones, which are what missiles usually do.  I'm not so much interested in what exactly the tech is, it's more to find an alternative to re-targeting modules for AMM's to give them more tune-ability for their roles. 

[TheBawkHawk]

Alternatively it could be a proximity fuse or fragmentation/flachete warhead.  Given the inability to armor Missiles, it would make sense that they'd be more susceptible to proximity nuclear detonations rather than direct ones, which are what missiles usually do.  I'm not so much interested in what exactly the tech is, it's more to find an alternative to re-targeting modules for AMM's to give them more tune-ability for their roles.

(Haven't had a good chance to read through some of the recent posts, so sorry if its been suggested already)

I think the idea of a fragmentation warhead as an option would be nice. With the removal of agility, AMM's would likely be taking a hit to their performance, so I think a warhead option that reduces the warhead strength (25-50% ?) but gives an increase in the chance to hit would be a way to help them out. The bonus to hit should probably scale logarithmically with warhead size, to avoid guaranteed hit missiles with a large enough warhead. Using the fragment warhead against ship targets, either it should simply do no damage, or it should deal a number of strength-1 hits equal to the rounded-down warhead strength. If we assume the latter, then it would be basically useless against armoured ships, sandblasting away layers of armour rather than penetrating. At the same time, an increase in the chance to hit would be worth the reduced total damage and penetration when dealing with fast, lightly armoured ships (fighters, FACs, etc). I think that this would open up the design space a bit and allow for better anti-fighter missiles, that can also be used to shoot down missiles in a pinch.

[Mike Sauer]

I saw this discussion on another list and immediately thought of a similar idea.  Some type of fragmentation warhead that is better at damaging fragile missiles, but no better or perhaps ineffective vs  full size ships.
The method would be a proximity explosion rather than a near direct hit vs the target and the WH fragments or even radiation/emp having a greater chance to harm a missile that would not be very effective vs a ship.

First the anti-missile warhead only works on strength 1 warheads.  It increases the effective MR vs missiles by some amount (possibly tech dependent).  It either works like a normal 1pt WH vs ships or could even be completely ineffective.
This could even pull the teeth of those Precursor massive AMM swarms that are more dangerous then the current ASM volleys.  :)

I think it could also make sense as an anti-fighter missile perhaps a smaller MR bonus or even counted a strength 2 WH vs fighters.  And Just a normal 1 pt WH vs FACS.

[nuclearslurpee (OP)]

Alternatively it could be a proximity fuse or fragmentation/flachete warhead.  Given the inability to armor Missiles, it would make sense that they'd be more susceptible to proximity nuclear detonations rather than direct ones, which are what missiles usually do.  I'm not so much interested in what exactly the tech is, it's more to find an alternative to re-targeting modules for AMM's to give them more tune-ability for their roles.

Current missiles basically work as proximity-fuse nukes in the lore, if not quite mechanically due to the damage profile. Basically, get close to the target, explode, and hope to catch the target with at least some of the blast wave (Steve has indicated he considers missiles to use shaped charges). The trick is that when ships are sub-km size targets moving at 1,000s of km/s, even getting close enough for proximity blasts is actually quite a challenge.

Mechanically this could be represented more faithfully (broad armor ablation, random damage range, etc.) but this is the nominal lore for missiles.

[Mike Sauer]

OK so if the base is a shaped charge, then the AMM WH is some type of proximity spherical explosion.  Enough to hurt a missile an a higher probability of hit, but too unfocused to damage a ship.

[Demetrious]

In a similar vein, we could apply the "AMMs per missile" setting to energy PD.

I.e. right now energy PD is applied as efficiently as possible, shooting at a missile until it is destroyed then moving to the next. More "realistic," at least for final fire, is that you would precommit how many shots to take at each missile. For bonus points, in final defensive fire mode we should "know" what ship is targeted by a missile and allow the shots per missile setting to be based on which vessel is targeted.

Quite brilliant. The latest devlog update for Nebulous improved point-defense AI by allowing guns to switch targets once sufficient shots were already en-route towards an incoming vampire, increasing the number they could engage - i.e. even in simplistic simulations, you get the same "flight time" considerations that real-life point defense has to deal with. Moreover, by incorporating Jorgen_CAB's suggestion to let CIWS have one final whack at incoming missiles, "normal" energy-based PD firing in final defensive fire mode is clarified to be firing at some distance - because actual real-life CIWS can engage one missile at a time as they're firing at such short range there's no time to mail shells towards target A and then reorient to target B. Ergo, to use the analogy of wet navy warships: "Area defense" is 5 inch dual-angle guns engaging at significant range, "final defensive fire" is down in the 40mm Bofors range bracket, and CIWS is the 20mm cannon/Phalanx CIWS last-ditch engagement.

This change accomplishes a few things: it incorporates realistic complexities of point-defense into the game with very simple and straightforward mechanics, widens the design space, and even gives the player more tactical choices to make in combat. It also gives CIWS more utility (further expanding the design space) as right now it's a very niche tool for protecting the odd commercial hull that might see combat with a fleet (tenders, supply ships etc.) or is utilized in very niche scenarios for its unique capability of being able to fire even when under jump shock (very useful for commercial hull jump tenders used for conducting warp point assaults.) It fits the nature of the weapon perfectly and expands the number of scenarios in which it's useful, further expanding the design space.

[Jorgen_CAB]

OK so if the base is a shaped charge, then the AMM WH is some type of proximity spherical explosion.  Enough to hurt a missile an a higher probability of hit, but too unfocused to damage a ship.

No... their charge is not strong enough to damage the armour of a ship if it does not do at least one point if damage. That is why Steve added fractional strength missiles as they can destroy missiles but can never really damage ships or large space structures, their yield is just to small.

All missiles likely use a shaped charge explosion no matter is used in anti missile work or anti ship work.