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Author Topic: sorry to ask a noob question about missile  (Read 18565 times)

SamXjones

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sorry to ask a noob question about missile
« on: January 22, 2017, 02:29:41 AM »

At first, I don't see why missile cannot be reloaded during combat just like energy or ballistic weapon. Then I come across something called 'missile cruiser' which said to have the ability to reload all missile mid-combat at the cost of a high-flux. I was like 'OKAY, I can finally spam missile and reload all of them in the middle of a fight' so I save up hard like never before and bought myself that missile cruiser. It turns out that ability is a single use each combat, making me a very sad fleet captain.

So, would any of you not mind if I ask, 1) why missile cannot be reloaded during combat just like other types of weapon? and 2) if missiles stay to work as it now, does it implies that missile cruiser is just unworthy by itself? or am I playing the game wrong?
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Grievous69

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Re: sorry to ask a noob question about missile
« Reply #1 on: January 22, 2017, 03:27:59 AM »

Well they are really high impact weapons that can turn a battle around and they cost absolutely no flux to fire, so having unlimited ammo would be very broken. They'd have to be completely reworked in order to be balanced that way. I never really used the Gryphon much so I can't say how useful it is in the campaign but I remember people saying it can outright murder Dominators (maybe Onslaughts too) with torpedoes.
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DatonKallandor

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Re: sorry to ask a noob question about missile
« Reply #2 on: January 22, 2017, 05:12:53 AM »

Currently only a few missiles are worth using and then only in very specific circumstances.
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StarSchulz

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Re: sorry to ask a noob question about missile
« Reply #3 on: January 22, 2017, 08:20:17 AM »

Some missiles like Pilum LRM's and Salamander MRMs can reload during combat, but they are in more of a support role than the strike / assault role of most other missiles.

SamXjones

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Re: sorry to ask a noob question about missile
« Reply #4 on: January 22, 2017, 09:08:08 AM »

Currently only a few missiles are worth using and then only in very specific circumstances.

@.@ what are those missile, and why they are useful over other.

Some missiles like Pilum LRM's and Salamander MRMs can reload during combat, but they are in more of a support role than the strike / assault role of most other missiles.

yah I have tried Pilum LRM, equip them on all my available ships, and everytime the battle start, a few wave of missiles have launched before any real hostile engagement occur lol. The view of enemies busily defending themselves from the overwhelming (but slow) missiles is just spectacular. And the most important thing about Pilum LRM is, it have unlimited ammo.

Well they are really high impact weapons that can turn a battle around and they cost absolutely no flux to fire, so having unlimited ammo would be very broken. They'd have to be completely reworked in order to be balanced that way. I never really used the Gryphon much so I can't say how useful it is in the campaign but I remember people saying it can outright murder Dominators (maybe Onslaughts too) with torpedoes.
I see. Well looks like I have to better manage my usage of missile then. However, that Gryphon missile cruiser was built to shoot missile/ rocket, I still don't see why its ability have to be designed to have only one go per battle. Couldn't it be designed in a way that, it generate flux base on the OP and size of the missile pod that require reloading?
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Grievous69

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Re: sorry to ask a noob question about missile
« Reply #5 on: January 22, 2017, 09:46:12 AM »

Well they are really high impact weapons that can turn a battle around and they cost absolutely no flux to fire, so having unlimited ammo would be very broken. They'd have to be completely reworked in order to be balanced that way. I never really used the Gryphon much so I can't say how useful it is in the campaign but I remember people saying it can outright murder Dominators (maybe Onslaughts too) with torpedoes.
I see. Well looks like I have to better manage my usage of missile then. However, that Gryphon missile cruiser was built to shoot missile/ rocket, I still don't see why its ability have to be designed to have only one go per battle. Couldn't it be designed in a way that, it generate flux base on the OP and size of the missile pod that require reloading?

Actually when the ship was first released its ability worked so when you activate it, your CR would decrease (can't remember by how much) allowing you to use it multiple times during a battle. Of course that was broken so it got nerfed.

And I'm not sure how your suggestion could work in practice, some missiles have low-ish OP and would be broken with multiple reloads as their main weakness is ammo. And high OP missiles would be crap because it'll probably overload the Gryphon if it generates flux based on OP. I really don't know how it could be changed so it works the way you want it and still be balanced. I'm not a fan of missiles myself so I'd never use the Gryphon unless it is really strong. It's just a playstyle thing, if it doesn't suit you, there are plenty of other ships to try out.
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Clockwork Owl

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Re: sorry to ask a noob question about missile
« Reply #6 on: January 22, 2017, 10:35:34 AM »

I remember people saying it can outright murder Dominators with torpedoes.
Shove a couple of Reapers or two down the tailpipe and it's dead. Can pull it off with frigates, too.
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Linnis

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Re: sorry to ask a noob question about missile
« Reply #7 on: January 22, 2017, 11:23:46 AM »

2) if missiles stay to work as it now, does it implies that missile cruiser is just unworthy by itself? or am I playing the game wrong?

There is the missile + fighter tactic. Bring in a fleet with 5-6 fighters, and stick pilums on every carrier and ships you can get your hands on. Then bring a few frigates with stuff like torpedoes and harpoons to bring down really though targets.

 How it works is the fighters + missiles + frigates all can occupy the same attack area. And only the same types of weapons are good against them, when your pilums and fighters have brought the enemy flux up, you will find the AI frigates tend to dump their payload on the target around then.

Also at the end of the battle you almost never lose any ships. Just slightly more CR then if you went with cruisers and such.
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DatonKallandor

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Re: sorry to ask a noob question about missile
« Reply #8 on: January 22, 2017, 12:34:15 PM »

@.@ what are those missile, and why they are useful over other.

Salamanders and Pilums are good because they regenerate. Salamanders have the added advantage that engine-seeking missiles confuse the AI. Sabots are great because the AI can't handle them either and Harpoons are okay-ish - both of these have massive burst damage so you can kill a ship "for free" when it's flux is full and you're in a good position.

The missile skill also makes certain missiles, the ones with one or two shots of ammo, ridiculous because there is a flat ammo increase in the missile skill - and the skill also gives gigantic speed and damage buffs, making torpedoes great (they suck without missile skill). This synergizes with the flat mounting cost reduction in one of the technology skills so you get to mount flat ammo increased missiles for basically free (and sometimes literally free). In those situations certain missiles can be good.

There's a huge skill overhaul coming so this isn't going to matter in a few weeks/months.

Oh and there's also a medium mount ballistic (dual flak) that completely denies missiles, which doesn't help either.
« Last Edit: January 22, 2017, 12:36:02 PM by DatonKallandor »
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stormbringer951

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Re: sorry to ask a noob question about missile
« Reply #9 on: January 23, 2017, 04:05:51 AM »

Look at the latest Starsector tourney (players design fleets for AI vs AI battles) for some examples of missile use. I'm going to post a lot of videos from it as demonstration.

A lot of the winning fleets from the first round consisted of many cheap small fast frigates with multiple missile slots that overwhelmed their opponents very quickly. Limited-ammo missiles trade sustainable combat capability for on-demand burst damage. This damage scales very well, because missile fire can be concentrated without worrying about clear line of sight, almost all missiles cost 0 flux to fire so those ships are more flux-efficient combatants while ammo lasts, and sufficiently high burst damage deletes ships with no opportunity for reply.

Here are two fleets from the latest tourney demonstrating massed cheap missile boats abusing how well massed missiles scale:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsXMk5YCvUU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pte6zqb1M2k

The failure mode of the massed missiles is not being able to kill enough of their fleet to tip the balance in your favour before all your missiles run out, or in the worst case not being able to saturate their defences and kill ships at all because they have a ship that is tanky enough or has good enough PD to survive (grr dual flak). Additionally, in the campaign you must fight outnumbered more often and there are long-term logistical costs for fielding large fleets of cheap ships over fewer more capable combatants.

However, the principle is still that missiles are very good at deleting or crippling ships when fired en masse. You can use this with aggressive captains since they will often volley fire all their missiles at their first target at the start of a battle, which makes them very good captains to have working together. Similar results can be achieved with other captains by placing the missile weapons in a weapon group with one of the ship's main guns, linked to fire together so it will volley all of its shot as you fire your main gun (note: this may cause problems if the main gun begins firing at some worthless fighters, and your ship spends all of its precious sabots killing a few unthreatening fighters).

Torpedoes/strike missiles usually do high burst damage and many have very short reload times, while missiles with larger ammo numbers often fire in volleys with long cooldowns to prevent you from emptying the rack in one continuous volley. The smaller missiles (swarmers, annihilators, etc) are often valuable on smaller ships for stripping armour off vulnerable targets quickly and last longer, lessening the risk that the AI will immediately empty all of its missiles uselessly. The small missiles are also useful for increasing the survivability of your ships; the AI is very cautious of missiles, and may back off instead of pursuing a pressured ship that fires them. On large ships, the large annihilator pod does a continuous stream of HE damage for 0 flux and similar volley missiles will fire large volumes that will require the other ship to have good PD weapons to intercept.

Existing reloading missile mounts tend to be LRMs, intermittent weapons with low damage or some other drawback, or EMP support weapons, so require more missile mounts to reach that critical mass.

Here are some suggestions for missiles you might find useful to play around with (this is not anything close to an exhaustive list of the good stuff):

  • Sabot: Great for spamming to overload ships, great for overloading ships when they're at high flux, great for smashing a great big bloody hole in their armour if they drop their shield at high flux. Sabots launched from max range are very hard to kill with PD and require something like integrated PD AI tactical lasers to reliably stop. From the recent tournament, borgrel's fleet comp demonstrates the power of massed sabots with a very good loadout for the Archer destroyer, which has IIRC the same system as the ship you bought

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO_tK5jsPoU
  • Harpoons: Great basic finisher missiles, cheap and very common. Massed harpoons are a death sentence for everything that gets overloaded. Here they are combined with ion missiles from the Ship/Weapon Pack mod to overload/disable ships in a good demonstration of massed strike missiles.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DluyTkh1L6A
  • Reapers/Atropos: Great to break armour and do tons of damage. Reapers are especially good with the missile lvl10 perk that gives you +1 ammo, especially combined with the optimised assembly perk that gives you OP cost reductions, as that gives you two reapers for free on anything with a missile mount if you have enough of the single-reaper weapons.

Some of my favourite missiles from mods (feat. more regenerating missiles):

  • Diamonddust MRM (Spire): Regenerating missiles that split into submunitions that do kinetic damage. Very very strong, makes it easy to win the flux war even against larger ships.
  • Grapeshot (Junk Pirates): Regenerating missiles that split into a ... well, grapeshot-like blast of submunitions which do large amounts of frag damage.
  • Ion torpedoes (Ship Weapon Pack): Limited ammo, does ion damage through shields and blows up things good too.
  • Traceur LRMs (Dassault-Mikoyan): Better Salamanders, I believe a nerf is planned and might even have been implemented since the last time I played DME though.
  • Muscle LRM (Tiandong): Very long-range HE LRMs, regenerates.
  • Dart SRM (Blackrock): Regenerating small frag missiles, good for killing fighters and finishing ships that have lost their armour.
  • Clarent (Knights Templar): Regenerating missiles that do silly amounts of damage. See them being used to finish off the Interstellar Imperium Falcon cruisers by the Templar fighters here:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqrC4HPL9OQ
« Last Edit: January 23, 2017, 06:00:53 AM by stormbringer951 »
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Megas

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Re: sorry to ask a noob question about missile
« Reply #10 on: January 23, 2017, 07:58:09 AM »

Missiles are like spells in D&D.  Generally, spike damage on-demand but limited.

Gryphon in its debut had its nanoforge eat some CR instead of a single charge, and it can be used until CR ran out.  That made it much like your classic blaster wizard.  Wizard blows a lot of spells to nuke an encounter with fireballs or lightning bolts, but cannot only do it for one or few fights.  Here, early Gryphon blew all of its CR refilling missiles and killing every ship with Harpoons or Reapers, then be out of commission after the fight until it can be repaired.  Next release, that was changed to a single charge, and it works much like another Expanded Missile Racks in ship system form.

In a one-off where you only need to worry about one fight against a fleet no bigger than yours, and costs are no object, missiles can be good.  A missile storm from multiple ships will destroy almost any ship.

In a campaign where you can fight an enemy fleet twice as large as yours, and multiple fleets can combine for an even bigger fight, not to mention you probably should not use all 25 slots for warships and you need to deal with costs, limited missiles are not enough to significantly dent a huge enemy fleet, but the enemy can wipe a good chunk of your fleet out with missiles if you are not prepared.
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Dark.Revenant

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Re: sorry to ask a noob question about missile
« Reply #11 on: January 23, 2017, 10:21:47 AM »

The primary benefit of nonregenerating missiles is that it allows a ship to do something it otherwise couldn't manage.  Such as overload a much larger ship, quickly dish out damage to exploit a weakness, pressure the enemy while at high flux, etc.  You can't rely on them to win fights but they give you more options.
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majorfreak

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gratitude
« Reply #12 on: February 04, 2017, 02:33:42 AM »

thanks, Stormbringer! that was awesome.   still, the problem child of the gryphon remains for us owning our first missile cruiser. It's too bad there's no large sized regenerating (non-mod?) missile launcher in the game.
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Megas

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Re: gratitude
« Reply #13 on: February 04, 2017, 08:37:36 AM »

thanks, Stormbringer! that was awesome.   still, the problem child of the gryphon remains for us owning our first missile cruiser. It's too bad there's no large sized regenerating (non-mod?) missile launcher in the game.
No, that honor went to pre-0.72 Aurora, before its large missile mount was reduced to medium synergy, and small hardpoints were missile only back then.  It was faster and had better stats than Gryphon.  Only thing missing was missile forge, but Aurora did not really need it.  It could blast in a pinch while missiles reload.  Aurora was probably designed to be a basic high-tech warship (like Dominator for low-tech and Eagle for midline), but the only thing it did well back then was missile spam.  Now, it does nothing well for its cost other than dying (or blaster spam if a playership).

MIRVs originally did not regenerate, then they did, then they were made stronger but limited again.  The result:  AI wastes MIRVs like they originally did.  It may be a bit harder to defend against MIRV spam, but for those who can, the best tactic is to stall until AI wastes the MIRVs.

P.S.  Also, Vigilance.  It works best as a missile ship.  One cannot do much by itself, due to being frigate-size, but several of them can spam Pilums or other medium missiles.
« Last Edit: February 04, 2017, 08:41:20 AM by Megas »
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stormbringer951

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Re: gratitude
« Reply #14 on: February 04, 2017, 10:58:54 AM »

thanks, Stormbringer! that was awesome.   still, the problem child of the gryphon remains for us owning our first missile cruiser. It's too bad there's no large sized regenerating (non-mod?) missile launcher in the game.

That's not really a problem. The Gryphon is probably the best ship to put non-regenerating missiles on, because it has an autoforge which means that limited-ammo missiles are much more cost effective on it. Also, it's a cruiser and even with mods, most regenerating missiles have some weaknesses that makes a Gryphon with only regenerating missiles punch under its weight. Most large mounts are very very powerful, and you have 2x the ammo most other ships would be paying for.

I don't use Gryphons much myself, but a fun build which uses all-limited ammo that I'd suggest for the Gryphon based on 30 minutes of simulator testing in a random mission that rolled a Gryphon:



This build for a Gryphon doesn't take into account bonuses from officers or extra OP from technology and can solo 3 enforcers or two eagles under AI control. Under human control it can probably kill a large number of frigates, but piloted by the AI it tends to heavily overkill with the sabots. With missile skills, it will be even better, and in campaign you will probably have more OP than this.

Why sabots? They are a high damage single projectile (good for breaking armour) with kinetic type (good damage against shields, its type has poor performance vs armour but is somewhat made up for by the high damage projectile). The sabots are only really vulnerable during their initial drifting stage since once in the second stage where the sabot fires at high speed PD finds it very very hard to intercept them. Most AI variants and even most player-fitted PD ships can't intercept any significant number of these if you are manually controlling the ship and fire them from longer range, unless they have integrated point defence AI and tac lasers.

The keys here are that it has a long range HE weapon to restrict enemy ships' freedom of movement (they will put their shields up, hopefully this means they are less likely to swarm you) and get in some free hits if a ship survives a sabot volley, it has all of its missile racks in a group with a weapon that is linked but not on autofire to make the AI volley its sabots instead of conserving them. I chose two needlers because it means you waste fewer sabots because the needlers will drive up their flux instead of using sabot ammo to do it.

The initial volley will probably consist of 27 shots (3x4 round volleys from the medium mounts, and all 15 from the smalls), totalling around 20250 kinetic damage, with <1000 kinetic damage from the light needlers firing. The damage to hull will be lower due to armour but the initial volley will break up the ship's armour. The second volley from the mediums is ready to go just about at the point where the smalls have finished firing, so the initial sustained burst can be up to 39 sabots, which equals about 29250 kinetic damage from the sabots in a perfect scenario where they all hit (43870 with Missiles 10 on the pilot), and 2-3 volleys from the light needlers for a bit less than 1k kinetic damage each (against lighter ships the later volleys will be hitting bare hull if the ship survives; they will do almost no damage if the enemy ship armour-tanks them though) in the same time period.

This ship carries 156 sabots by default, assuming a reload from zero ammo, although the AI will tend to waste the last 15 or so sabots from the medium-sized pods by reloading early. With missile specialisation 5 on the piloting officer, it will have 12 more. The ship is more or less useless after these are spent (it is slow and fragile, and will lose battles to a line combat destroyer or even a rare strong frigate) but with this missile load it can delete a number of ships reliably from an early to midgame fleet even under AI control.

Downsides: after it spends its initial missile load its total armament is 2 needlers and a heavy mauler, which is less armament than some frigates can carry in a more vulnerable hull. Against fighters or ships with drone systems the AI will spend its precious sabots firing at them, so you might want to fly it yourself in those situations. It will lose hard to any enemy ship that has enough flux capacity or heavy armour to survive your initial sustained burst. A heavily armoured cruiser like the Dominator (especially with its burn drive to get up close) will eat it for breakfast, as will many other ships that have longer range guns, although admittedly the same is true against most Gryphon variants. Suggested uses for extra OP for this ship would be Integrated Targeting Unit and probably Unstable Injector.

EDIT: mehgamer pointed out in Discord that this sabot build isn't actually very efficient for what you're buying (which is true: flux-efficient damage builds should include more HE finishers and kinetics in the medium ballistic) and suggests that the AI is more effective with the default Fire Support variant Gryphon than this build, and recommends the Archer as a better option for experimenting with sabot-based gimmick builds

EDIT EDIT: Soren (creator of the Dassault-Mikoyan mod - check it out it's cool) suggested two good builds he's using atm, although he hasn't got ECCM/Expanded Missile racks yet due to not unlocking them in the campaign these screenshots are from:

For fleet actions, preferably with some sort of escort to watch its back if you need PD cover from many enemy missiles (he suggested a Centurion with taclasers + integrated PD AI, or LR PD):


For hunting pirates and assorted other smaller low-tech ships:


EDIT EDIT EDIT: Oh wow, thanks for the shoutout Alex :o






massive tl;dr: Consider using limited ammo missiles.
« Last Edit: February 05, 2017, 06:36:30 AM by stormbringer951 »
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