Centurion isn't the most exciting ship, even though it does fill an unexplored niche and is ridiculously hard to kill for a frigate. I can see the overarching idea behind it, but the end result is that you'll probably outfit it as a long range tac laser/gyro/ipdai ship almost every time, unless it's at the very start of the game. Need to test more though, it might be a funny unflankable point capping ship with a set of long-range ballistics on it, or as a "tank" with an aggressive officer to generate flanking opportunities.
What's the deal with the missile power creep, by the way? Missiles offer lower TTK and a higher degree of randomness than a few years back, and most patches have continued the trend in some way, although the Locust and Squall are good. (is the squall supposed to have 750 proj HP?)
Missile Specialization is the biggest culprit, but there are a few other changes too. The new Atropos isn't really fun to deal with, and it feels fairly brainless to use. If the enemy fleet has a few, you basically can't overload near those ships ever, or you die, forcing you to play extremely cautiously. This was already the case thanks to Harpoons and missile specialization, but now there's an added dimension to it. They're thankfully quite rare in vanilla, but I find it tedious. I wonder if the idea of a homing torpedo is inherently flawed.
Harpoons have become better against frigates over time. Frigates like to use Harpoons as equalizers against bigger ships. Bigger ships can never dodge harpoons reliably anymore due to the veering, but even frigates can struggle due to the fact harpoons will flip around and accelerate back if they miss on the first run. Maybe harpoons should commit more to their heading and instead try to predict based on the target's current vector, so that a frigate that reads the incoming missile's projected hit location can pull off a last-minute dodge, and to make the initial firing position more important.
The best defense against missiles is to crush the enemy ship so hard that you're never vulnerable in the first place.
The redesigned Hurricane MIRV is also not very interesting. It tends to mostly ignore PD except for flak, leaving you shielding the submunitions until the ship runs out of ammo, because it's too risky to engage while it's still launching them unless you vastly overpower the enemy. In the end, you just game the ammo out, and if you can't, you'll probably get punished hard for it. Might be a side effect of how liberally the AI uses the weapon.
I would like to expand upon this, I strongly dislike the entire flight profile of most vanilla missiles.
Evasion is essentially ineffective as the missiles have so much acceleration and turn ability that they just loop around and then hit the rear of the ship. Even more bizarre is how often they weave and sidewind around a stationary target effectively missing on purpose then hitting the rear! I would prefer a flight profile that relies on interception rather than massive maneuverability, where the weapon is fast and sets up a pass at the intercept point, if you evade it? Kudos, it is unlikely to be able to make a return pass on all but the largest targets. The weaving behavior would also taper off as it approaches the target at a faster rate than it does now which would fix the missing on purpose issue.
I feel that Salamanders are ok, Locusts are ok, Swarmers are ok, Annihilators are ok, and Squall are ok but every single other missile weapon uses distasteful mechanics. In the previous paragraph I described what I do not like about the agility and AI of standard guided missiles. But what of the others?
Why is the Sabot second stage projectile essentially hit scan?
So that mod missile weapon has a reasonable second stage, the primary missile actually aims the shot at an intercept point so its accurate while retaining a "fair" speed for the submunition. This is similar in a way to what I mentioned before about normal guided missiles, that a system that is smart instead of just boosting all the stats like crazy makes for a far more fair and balanced game.
What of torpedos and rockets? Same issue really, the AI is terrible at aiming them so to fix that they all have insane acceleration and top speed. You cast the finger of death and there is almost no possible way to defend against it via simple movement and PD has almost no response time. If the AI actually aimed rocket weapons properly then they could have reasonable speed and acceleration.
Bassically, I believe in the theory that every play should have a counter play but with how most missiles work right now there are few options to deal with them and they
just are not fun. The way the AI works I don't agree with, most all of them are too agile and too fast, and the alpha strike is completely out of control and I am only talking about level 0.
A bit of a rant there, but it is what it is. Most mod missiles that use custom AI work similar to the theory I described that I believe makes for a better game.