The need for maximized salvo sizes itself stems from the fact that missiles in Aurora are "dumb;" they beeline for the target without a thought as soon as they clear the tube and there's no way to delay one or two (vectoring them towards outlying steerpoints that are staggered) to ensure a simultaneous time-on-target arrival.
This actually used to be possible in very old VB6 versions and it was possibly the most OP thing that has ever been in the game. You can still read about this tactic in Steve or Kurt's oldest AARs for instance.
I can see why the feature was removed - it belongs to a level of complexity a step above what Aurora has been trying to model so far. Without the rest of that complexity there's not much point to having it.
Can you explain how this would motivate size-2 AMMs? Assuming that Steve would keep the maximum standoff of laser warheads at 5 LS (1.5m km) to be consistent with every beam weapon and BFC in the game, and knowing that current size-1 AMMs comfortably exceed 2m km range after very low tech levels, I'm not seeing the logic here.
I'm presuming that ECM/ECCM will be given more depth past the current mechanic of (if I recall correctly) 0.25MSP fixed cost to include either, as well as higher-speed AMMs to ensure they can reach intercept range of the laser warhead in time. (To keep it consistent with ship rules, perhaps we'd have the option of 0.25MSP to get our racial Compact ECM/ECCM tech in, and pay .50 MSP for our non-compact ECM/ECCM?) It's also possible that the nature of the weapon (a single-use bomb-pumped x-ray laser) will result in maximum ranges
greater than what a ship powered laser can manage (if one uses a
significantly large missile and warhead,) creating a niche case for a 1.2 or 1.6 or 2.0 MSP AMM.
I think many of the discussions around missile balance are related to all-or-nothing, without realizing it.
This is an insightful comment. We've all been trying to work within the one dynamic we have, without trying to move outside it, and one reason for that, I think, is that defense saturation is a
real life concern for missile defense; with striking at range (AAMs) and ECM (jammers) both ways to mitigate the problem. But due to various simplifications necessary for a game (especially one originally based on tabletop rules) and the ongoing re-balancing process as the game is re-invented from its VB6 self, there is effectively only one way to stop missiles: to shoot them down with energy based point defense.
The problem with ECM/ECCM is that it's mostly reliant on strategic resource allocations made over the course of years (i.e. current state-of-the-art in related tech) and presents no serious design choices at the ship design stage except for the lightest of warships (it's only a few hundred tons and the benefits are usually well worth it.) It should be noted that this is fairly true to life; there's sharply diminishing returns for simply increasing the power output of a jammer, as a jammer that's
too loud just becomes a homing beacon (home-on-jam.) In my experience, since the (much, much needed) improvement in energy weapons in C# there's little to no reason to bother with AMMs - even accounting for NPR's not learning of reduced-size launchers till recently, my all-raingun armed ships have been able to wade through fire with ease, and enemy fleets with few dedicated escorts can still soak up an impressive number of missiles due to the contributing fire of primary batteries. Though I haven't tried to quantify this with Numbers, it really feels like AMMs are just not worth the tonnage. Ergo why salvo mass is paramount in turn; to break through that all-or-nothing final-defensive-fire flak screen. (Larger guns cycle slower but if NPR's knew to set them to area fire the longer reach could make up for that, and in either case if you push the limits you're still right back to 10cm rail and gauss turrets, at
best.)
Of course, I could be wrong. There could be a wide space in which a certain ratio of energy defense to AMM defense could fare much better against incoming salvos than just energy alone - it'd take analysis skills beyond my own to investigate. But I think the fact we're having this conversation at all is testament to the fact that we're not encountering that space often enough in play to satisfy us; there's not many engagements where the salvos break through and do
some damage, but not
decisive damage. And even if they
did there seems to be a paucity of engagements that start with such an exchange, and are then continued by the gunships closing for direct combat. I don't think we can blame NPR's for that, but ourselves. We'll always be able to out-optimize NPR's because they're dumb. AI is dumb, and people with multi-million dollar budgets have tried and often failed to make them less dumb. So it's up to us to design "reasonable" ships that don't bully the NPR's too much so we can have interesting fights. Fair enough.
... but those ships themselves feel boring. As someone else in this thread lamented, having a few big "torpedo launchers" on a ship to complement beam weapons is effectively useless. This goes for entire fleets, too. Just a little energy or a little missile isn't going to make the difference in most engagements. So you're back to that theoretical missile engagement --> follow-up energy engagement, so what does your reasonable, non-NPR bullying fleet look like? Well, 70% missile, 30% energy? 60-40, maybe? That's it. That's what the decision space boils down to for you - a ratio. And you're always keenly aware that you may end up like Yamato at Midway, holding a bunch of limp battleships in your hand as you charge around looking for a battle-line engagement after the enemy carriers have slam-dunked you hard. As that example shows, that's a realistic danger - further incentivizing an all-or-nothing approach in either missiles or energy weapons to maximize the return on investment and ensure every ton of hull is contributing towards success of the overall strategy instead of risking being dead weight (perhaps literally.) Real-life navies optimize as best they're able, too! But their conflicts are still fraught with uncertainty and danger because they don't have the nice, predictable sterility that the high levels of abstraction of a tabletop rules-set provides.
In sum, we need a wider design space.
Standoff missiles
definitely help provide that by allowing for effective anti-ship attack
outside the energy point-defense envelope. This immediately presents new choices to both attacker and defender by introducing a whole new possible paradigm for missile attack; one governed by much smaller salvos of much larger missiles, which themselves are countered by rapid-fire AMM launchers and/or dedicated long-range energy weapons, like turreted lasers (which, due to their nature, will also have a dual anti-ship role, much as batteries of 10cm rail or gauss turrets do against fighters or in very close brawls.) Now both sides have to weigh their offense and defense more carefully, it's not just "bring as much of X or Y as possible," but "how much do I devote against saturation attack by old-fashioned nukes, and how much do I invest in ranged defenses?"
This is still only two options, of course. Utilizing ECM more dynamically would go against how it's used for ship vs. ship combat (it's either present or it isn't and its efficacy is determined by long-term investment, not design-time choices.) But we do still have decoys - and this is in fact how Nebulous decided to complicate matters. Currently the game has three sizes of missiles - size 1 (much like an Aurora AMM, usually used for point-defense but also capable of light anti-ship work en-masse,) size two (your solid, reliable all-rounder missile) and size three (big, slow, but devastating torpedoes.) It also has two
types of missiles - standard and hybrid, the latter being staged missiles. Unlike Aurora, the second stages are of unique design, being "sprint" missiles moving much faster than you can get the base weapon to move, but having severely constrained release range. This leads to a dynamic where sprint missiles that stage are very, very hard to stop, but if you invest in expensive niche capabilities meant to counter those expensive niche missiles, you can quite readily pop these weapon's slow cruise boosters
before they stage. But it's effectively impossible to adequately protect against all
potential threats within the point limit - long-range energy weapons to pop those hybrid missiles, AMMs to knock down heavy armored torpedoes, and rapid-fire CIWS to fend off Aurora-style old fashioned SARH saturation attack. One class of threats almost always has to be covered by less effective means, and for me that typically means decoys - and due to a variety of seeker options, it can be hard to carry a sufficient array to reliably spoof every potential attack!
Nebulous is a more complex game on the tactical level than Aurora, so we needn't import all that, but
one more paradigm, something to give us a kind of "rock-paper-scissors" set of choices in offense and defense, may prove ideal in recreating that realistic dynamic where you have too few resources to robustly guard against every possible threat your foe's fleet doctrine may have, so you have to use tactics and strategy to mitigate those risks. For instance, we
could just make missiles much more dangerous so they can generally swamp any point defense if they get a good, solid alpha strike in, and then make Aurora "carrier battles in space;" first one to get a shot off typically wins and the real work of interception happens at a good distance by carrier launched fighters. And that dynamic would work. It'd even feel a bit less arbitrary than the one-time shooting match of PD vs. alpha strike. But soon we'd be back to optimizing things to the limit, like two duelists shuffling in a straight line along an elevated plank, even if the plank was a bit wider than before. I think it'd be much more interesting, and suited for Aurora's intended use as an RP tool, to have the aforementioned uncertainty dynamic, where you can never adequately guard against all threats in the tonnage you have, and if you do, you leave yourself vulnerable to someone who focused their offense keenly on one area. The key, then, is to either specialize, or generalize, and use other tactics (stealth, scouting, distant pickets, clever tricks with sensor-equipped missiles, whatever else we can think of) to cover one's disadvantages and play to ones advantages (for the generalist, that means finding the enemy's disadvantage and positioning to exploit it.)
I'm bad at game design. I have no idea what the best way to implement this is. But there's plenty of people in here who
could... if it actually would advance Steve's overall development goals for Aurora.
