Tentative Suggestions for Missile Rebalancing by Tweaking Launcher Size Rules

[nuclearslurpee (OP)]

However, I am a little nervous on agility in general. It's something that missiles have that ships don't and the mechanic of how it actually works is not obvious (beyond the maths). I was considering removing it entirely as something of an anachronism.

I like that idea a lot and I think many of the veteran players would (cue Jorgen  ). I do think it needs to be paired in an update with something to keep missile builds interesting, the ECM/ECCM rework would be a good candidate. Currently the complexity in missile design comes from balancing hit rate (speed * maneuver) and PD evasion (speed), so if we remove agility the main design decision would be warhead size vs speed which is pretty close to having a trivial optimal point (since you can calculate expected PD losses easily by assuming an enemy fleet composition, then set WH and engine size to optimize damage).

[Steve Walmsley]

I've been revisiting Starfire (the unpublished 3rd edition Unified Rules) for some ideas on improving missile warfare. The first area for consideration is laser warheads.

One of the things that concerns me in Aurora terms for laser warheads is the interaction of inbound missiles and point defence. A simple option is for laser warheads to ignore Final Defensive Fire, because that is only applied just before impact and they would be firing from further out. As a result laser warheads would only be hit by area fire, which is a messy mechanic in general and rarely used. I suspect that in reality, tactical officers would learn to recognize laser warhead missiles and adjust final point defence fire to engage sooner. That is not possible under the current rules.

Starfire has the Laser Torpedo, which is analogous to laser warheads in Aurora. There are several versions, but the base mechanic is converting the standard warhead into a lower amount of laser damage and applying a penalty to hit for PD (to simulate attacking from further out). I am tempted to use a similar idea for Aurora.

There would be two new factors involved in missile design: the conversion rate of the 'normal' warhead into laser damage (based on a new tech line) and the distance from the target at which the warhead would trigger (player decision). I would also have to apply some form of 'range modifier' to determine how the combination of range and base damage was converted into impact damage. To avoid making laser warheads dependent on the laser tech lines, I think it would best to assume bomb-pumped laser warheads would all be x-rays (that appears to be the case in reality) and therefore have a consistent range modifier irrespective of the other factors. This would be a lower range modifier than actual ship-mounted x-ray lasers.

For point defence, I am tempted to remove area defence entirely, as it is confusing and not that useful, and instead allow a fire control with Final Defensive Fire to be assigned a maximum range. This would then engage any missile attacking a target, or using a laser warhead, within that range. The actual location of the laser warhead detonation could be tracked and the point defence range would be calculated from the firing ship to that location (as the firing ship may not in the same location as the target ship). Because laser warhead missiles would be engaged at greater ranges, the chance to hit would be generally lower. Larger fire controls could be used to provide more accurate long-range point defence coverage, but that increases cost and reduces the amount of hull space for defensive weapons. The attacking player could choose a greater detonation range in the missile design at the expense of impact damage (to reduce PD accuracy) and laser warhead missiles could also employ ECM to further complicate the defence. Both of these options are easier with larger missiles.

I am working my way through some other missile-related Starfire concepts and I will add them in subsequent posts.

[nuclearslurpee (OP)]

I suspect that in reality, tactical officers would learn to recognize laser warhead missiles and adjust final point defence fire to engage sooner.

A useful ancillary change might be the ability to recognize different missile types on the Intel window as we already do for ship classes. Currently all we know when we see missiles incoming is the size, speed, thermal signature, etc. but there is no way to recognize the difference between two size-6 missiles with the same speed but different loading (or types, with the proposal here), for instance. On the other hand that could be an important possibility for deception - but if we can tell apart two ship classes of the same size and speed why not missile types?

For point defence, I am tempted to remove area defence entirely, as it is confusing and not that useful, and instead allow a fire control with Final Defensive Fire to be assigned a maximum range. This would then engage any missile attacking a target, or using a laser warhead, within that range. The actual location of the laser warhead detonation could be tracked and the point defence range would be calculated from the firing ship to that location (as the firing ship may not in the same location as the target ship). Because laser warhead missiles would be engaged at greater ranges, the chance to hit would be generally lower. Larger fire controls could be used to provide more accurate long-range point defence coverage, but that increases cost and reduces the amount of hull space for defensive weapons. Larger laser warhead missiles could also employ ECM to further complicate the defence.

I have found area defense to be useful exactly once, and that was because I was testing a heavily-modified DB with engine speeds reduced by 80%, so missiles would move slowly enough that area defense fire could engage them multiple times on approach. Which is not a sparkling recommendation for area defense, if it requires such a drastic change to be useful.

Laser warheads with a standoff distance would be interesting for making laser (and meson) turrets a viable PD factor as well, which I think is a good thing.

[Droll]

(at MaxTech it is possible to design a size-1 AMM with 100% hit chance and ECCM with space left over, but MaxTech is its own weird and completely unbalanced part of the game).

Yes, I will start fixing that at some point. It's just I have never got close enough to worry about it

I personally have found that tweaking the missile agility techs to increase by ~25% per level like most other techs has worked well. Currently the tech levels are something like 20, 32, 48, 64, 80, ... and I tweak them down to 20, 25, 32, 40, 50, ...

This pushes back a bit the point where agility-spec AMMs start to dominate, lowers the maximum agility tech to (IIRC) 250 which precludes a "perfect" AMM at MaxTech, and doesn't really affect the NPRs very much since their missile designs use very little agility anyways.

However, this is a thread about missile buffs so I should stop talking now. 

Speaking of missile agility, one option I was considering was allowing agility for evasion purposes, as well as interception. However, I am a little nervous on agility in general. It's something that missiles have that ships don't and the mechanic of how it actually works is not obvious (beyond the maths). I was considering removing it entirely as something of an anachronism.

Missile agility has always been weird in the "lore" of aurora as well, given that ships can canonically turn on a dime, it's weird that missiles can but also cant at the same time. It never made sense from that perspective to have two factors like that determine hit chance.

[xenoscepter]

 --- Quick and probably dumb idea but... what about shielded missiles? Like... they could have shields that scaled off of Shield tech much like how missile ECM/ECCM does. Mesons would ignore missile shields. These shields, unlike ship shields, wouldn't recharge and would only be good for so much damage. So a 3 damage shot versus a missile with 2 shields would destroy the missile, but a 2 damage shot would not. Three one damage shots would destroy it though.

[nuclearslurpee (OP)]

--- Quick and probably dumb idea but... what about shielded missiles? Like... they could have shields that scaled off of Shield tech much like how missile ECM/ECCM does. Mesons would ignore missile shields. These shields, unlike ship shields, wouldn't recharge and would only be good for so much damage. So a 3 damage shot versus a missile with 2 shields would destroy the missile, but a 2 damage shot would not. Three one damage shots would destroy it though.

This is an interesting thought... of course, Steve would require any kind of missile shield to remain consistent with shipborne shields, which poses a potential issue:

Shipborne shields have a power rating equal to

Code: [Select]

P * HS * sqrt(HS / 10)which is the famous size^(3/2) scaling we all know and, um, "love". Since 1 MSP = 0.05 HS, for missiles this would come out to

Code: [Select]

(P / 20) * MSP * sqrt(MSP / 200)or just

Code: [Select]

P * MSP^(3/2) / 283approximately.

So say we want to put a 2-MSP shield generator into a size-6 missile (1/3 of the total size, probably a good benchmark point). At Epsilon Shields (P = 3) this gives us a shield of strength...0.03. I suppose we could round that up to 1, but that would mean any shield generator smaller than, like, 27 MSP (yielding 1.5 strength which would round up to 2) is equally useful, so rounding up is probably not the solution here, which leaves us with basically a useless shield. This is a similar problem to why fighter shields are not viable. I think reworking the entire shields mechanic is probably out of scope, so this idea is probably not one that will make it off the drawing board sadly.

[Jorgen_CAB]

The general issue with agility is how big of an impact it has on general AMM efficiency... in real life missile interception is less about missiles being manoeuvrable but speed and how early you can track and target the enemy missiles and calculate the best intercept trajectory. Sure manoeuvring has some impact but not that much.

For missiles there could be a tracking sensor or part of the fire-control of point defence AMM fire controls that increase the missiles ability to track and intercept instead of missile agility... this can also be related to ECM and ECCM to some degree. So.. the longer you track a missile the more bonus you will get to not only beam but also AMM interception... or some such mechanic. This would make larger missiles easier to hit but they also should be more likely to carry counter measures as well. This could also result in missile with a booster package and a smaller missile that detach for final approach to the target.

I think that agility work decently well if it is restricted to a very limited range... I normalize agility in all my games between 80-140 roughly... too low and AMM is nearly worthless and too high they are too effective... between 80-140 is what I find a sweet spot of balance of roughly 25-35% hit rate against same level of fast ASM missiles.

When it comes to beam point defence I think that they should always be able to fire multiple times if they can outside the final-defensive fire range. That is.. if the weapon can fire two times outside their set final-fire range they should fire... there should be a margin of error for calculation and perhaps the player can decide what that is as things can change between shots.

In general I like area point defence as a concept and use it occasionally in my campaigns, laser weapons certainly can perform it in peer battles if you invest some efforts into it.

[Steve Walmsley]

The general issue with agility is how big of an impact it has on general AMM efficiency... in real life missile interception is less about missiles being manoeuvrable but speed and how early you can track and target the enemy missiles and calculate the best intercept trajectory. Sure manoeuvring has some impact but not that much.

For missiles there could be a tracking sensor or part of the fire-control of point defence AMM fire controls that increase the missiles ability to track and intercept instead of missile agility... this can also be related to ECM and ECCM to some degree. So.. the longer you track a missile the more bonus you will get to not only beam but also AMM interception... or some such mechanic. This would make larger missiles easier to hit but they also should be more likely to carry counter measures as well. This could also result in missile with a booster package and a smaller missile that detach for final approach to the target.

I think that agility work decently well if it is restricted to a very limited range... I normalize agility in all my games between 80-140 roughly... too low and AMM is nearly worthless and too high they are too effective... between 80-140 is what I find a sweet spot of balance of roughly 25-35% hit rate against same level of fast ASM missiles.

When it comes to beam point defence I think that they should always be able to fire multiple times if they can outside the final-defensive fire range. That is.. if the weapon can fire two times outside their set final-fire range they should fire... there should be a margin of error for calculation and perhaps the player can decide what that is as things can change between shots.

In general I like area point defence as a concept and use it occasionally in my campaigns, laser weapons certainly can perform it in peer battles if you invest some efforts into it.

The problem with agility is that it is a 'special rule' that only applies to missiles. One of my goals with C# Aurora is to eliminate most 'special rules' in favour of an internally consistent physics framework. I do accept that AMMs without agility are less effective, but I would like to replace agility with something that doesn't break the framework. One option is to allow fractional warheads. These would deal full damage against shields but any excess fraction beyond a whole integer would be lost against armour. More importantly, they could destroy missiles which had a size in HS equal to or less than the fractional damage. This is consistent within the framework but allows AMMs to be more effective against missiles than ships. In fact, AMMs intended solely for the anti-missile role would generally be useless against ships, leaving a role for the 'dual-use AMM', with a strength-1 warhead.

For example, an AMM with a 0.5 warhead would be able to destroy missiles up to size 10. A 0.3 warhead would be able to destroy missiles up to size 6. Neither would be able to penetrate armour.

[Steve Walmsley]

For v2.20, I've removed missile agility and implemented fractional warheads.

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13090.msg164041#msg164041

[Jorgen_CAB]

I still think you could use the missile tracking bonus for AMM as well to make AMM a bit more effective. It make sense for the same reasons it make sense for beam PD. You also would need to add tracking bonus against normal targets too I guess to be consistent though... but that also compensate for not having access to agility for ASM either. Against normal targets you would basically allways get the full tracking bonus as you always be able to track them long enough.

You also have to look at how effective ECM is if you lower the overall hit rate for AMM against ASM. If the general hit rate are 10-20%... then a gap of 10-20 of ECM will make a huge difference.

That is why I think you need some ability to increase the AMM to roughly 25-35% hit rate for peer battles. There is otherwise a risk of AMM quite often having a zero chance to hit even if they use ECCM, as the ECCM module is 0.25 MSP it also negatively impact AMM hit rate disproportionally too as only speed is used to calculate interception. In order to intercept missiles with ECM you must have ECCM on them or their hit rate plummet close to zero or actually get to zero. So AI AMM designs also now must use ECCM to be effective at all.

Perhaps add more speed levels for missiles is another way to solve the hit rate probability which make them shorter ranged but have a higher hit rate against missiles too.. although this would effect fighters allot too.

Really close range torpedoes with extreme speed also now will be very effective, especially if they carry ECM and your ECM level is just one higher than the opponent, two levels higher and only beam PD will be able to intercept them for sure. This will make fast reloading launchers a new niche in throwing many short range high yield large laser warhead missiles, who are able to engage beyond beam range and possibly also beyond PD range... seems like a fun change though.

Overall... you do need some additional ability for missile to hit their target as only using speed also diminish ASM ability to hit quite allot too... even for larger missiles as you add ECM/ECCM and warheads... it all will reduce the hit rate too disproportionally. Designing an anti-fighter missile might become a nightmare.

[Shuul]

Fraction warhead makes sense, though i dont see how it will make building larger ASMs more efficient to be a match for energy weapons, you can still just use size1-warhead AMMs, or im missing something and changes to launchers/launched missile size also made it in?

[Steve Walmsley]

Fraction warhead makes sense, though i dont see how it will make building larger ASMs more efficient to be a match for energy weapons, you can still just use size1-warhead AMMs, or im missing something and changes to launchers/launched missile size also made it in?

Fractional warheads are not intended to influence overall missile size. They are intended to replace Agility as a mechanism for increasing AMM to-hit chances, create a more consistent curve between AMM and ASM across different tech levels and add a new missile design decision, which is whether to have pure AMMs intended only for missile interception, or dual-use AMMs that can also be employed against ships.

[Steve Walmsley]

I've updated point defence in preparation for stand-off missiles.

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13090.msg164060#msg164060

[xenoscepter]

 --- What about guidance packages? They'd do more or less the same thing as agility, and it'd make sense that only missiles needed such things so it's less of a special rule? Maybe have them tied to sensors?

 --- Having the right firing solution is great and all, but the ability to steer the missile into that trajectory while also maintaining a high speed is surely a thing which must be considered?

[Shuul]

which is whether to have pure AMMs intended only for missile interception, or dual-use AMMs that can also be employed against ships.

Ah, thanks for explanation, it make sense now.
As one of the possible way to give larger missiles more usage, maybe change how warhead damage is applied, thus increasing the damage output of larger missiles less lineary?
Or making ECCM more efficient on larger missiles in some way.