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[Avanitia]

Missiles having limited ammo is a very large balance factor.
If launcher holds 2 missiles, they can be very powerful and deal large amount of damage.
Missile weapon with unlimited ammo aren't limited by ammo (duh), so they can be massed more easily.
Which means they would have to be heavily nerfed.

Diable Avionics mod is a good example of unlimited ammo missiles, they deal rather small amount of damage and work best in large numbers.
As side effect, mixing these Micromissiles and Thrushes with limited ammo missile weaponry lets their limited ammo counterparts to deal damage more reliably.
And they still have missiles limited by ammo.

Bombers can reload missiles, but obviously need to be used carefully.

I'm not sure I would count bombers as needing to be used carefully. Even without longbows you just sledgehammer the enemy until they die. Which is extremely easy to do against every enemy target. Nothing careful about them.

If anything they can be used even more carelessly then your ballistic weapons with bombers like piranhas filling the void with bombs and torpedo bombers blowing their HE loads through shields. At least with normal guns you have to care about your own flux build up, bomber fleets are some of the strongest in the game.

AM blasters aren't as worth using due to being a small weapon where on larger ships you might as well just stick to medium sized weapons and leave the small for PD. Making them hard to use outside of the same role as a missile from very short range. So you, a frigates best job. Not that Medusas with AM blasters isn't effective, and I highly recommend trying it.

I still use missiles all the time, I never understood why people suggest never bothering with them as they are VERY good at flipping a situation around or hammering down an advantage. One or two sabot launchers can easily turn whole battles around and are well worth the price.

That's the point of missiles limited by ammo. They require a bit of skill to be used for maximum effect.
Two Harpoons fired at enemy ship can finish it off from safe distance.
Sabots can instantly overload enemy ship for your fleet to finish it off.
And you can give more examples.

[Plantissue]

Antimatter blaster requires the ability to close in range, so either phase ships or very fast ships with survivability.  I've had quite a bit of fun with Wolf, Scarab and Aurora with AM blasters, though you have to accept the high risk of losing the ship. Phase ships of course trounces all in using AM blaster. I also suppose AM blaster with the Monitor is possible, though I've never tried doing so. AI controlled ships rarely uses such ships to its full potential, though once I had a missileless AM blaster AI Aurora run straight up head to head to a fresh Dominator and immediately destroy it without any damage whatsoever, though I've never been able to replicate that since. But ultimately it's not the ammo count that makes AM blaster a niche weapon, it would be niche even with no ammo restrictions at all.

As for the Doom, it does seem strong in many circumstances. If the purpose of deployment cost (which it may or may not be) is to balance out the widely differing designs of ships, then a simple fix would simply be to increase the deployment cost to something more reasonable. Like 40 for example. Alternatively increase the flux increase of mines, or decrease the radius, but deployment points is the simplest, though may not solve the problem of being widly effective in some situations.

As to whether missiles should have limited ammo or not, missiles don't cost any flux to fire, so things like Annihilator Rocket Pod would be obscene, especially when the best tactic vs it is to either take out the ship holding it immediately, or just wait till it runs out of ammo, so missiles like that should have a flux cost to fire, taking away 2 unique characteristic of missile types. I guess i don't like the design of Annihliator weapon pods. Anyways, personally I don't like any of the large missile mounts; I usually find that I leave them empty unless there is a lack of weapons otherwise.

[Shad]

As to whether missiles should have limited ammo or not, missiles don't cost any flux to fire, so things like Annihilator Rocket Pod would be obscene, especially when the best tactic vs it is to either take out the ship holding it immediately, or just wait till it runs out of ammo, so missiles like that should have a flux cost to fire, taking away 2 unique characteristic of missile types. I guess i don't like the design of Annihliator weapon pods. Anyways, personally I don't like any of the large missile mounts; I usually find that I leave them empty unless there is a lack of weapons otherwise.

Annihilators? I just normally ignore enemy ships with them as they are so weak they go to the bottom of combat priorities. Any ship with decent shields (basically any high-tech with officers) can tank annihilators indefinetely. That's before considering PD.

Unlike rocket sleds, that have mobility and burst and reloads and can come when the ship is close to overload or venting and dump 60-100 annihilators in the space of 2 seconds, ships with missiles do not have the luxury.

If anihillator pod would regen, say 10 missiles every 100 seconds, it would not become OP. It would just make them a little more flexible.

The only large missile from vanilla I even use is the Squall.

[Thaago]

Missiles are currently, by far, the most powerful weapons in the game. No thanks to unlimited ammo, which would either require a complete rework or be totally broken.

[RawCode]

ATM we have CR system in place, ammo limits are redundant to CR.

ship already can't just fly around forever.

ammo regen for everything will make combat much more interesting, as player will be encouraged to use missiles as soon as possible to get second set before CR run out.

[Euphytose]

Missiles are currently, by far, the most powerful weapons in the game. No thanks to unlimited ammo, which would either require a complete rework or be totally broken.

I'd say bombers are the most powerful weapon right now. They're smart, tougher, infinite missiles. Load an Astral with 6 Tridents, select your target, "fighter strike", and watch as it evaporates. Bombers should get nerfed in some way.

[Megas]

I use Perdition instead of Tridents.  Perditions are cheaper and hit harder than Tridents Daggers (was thinking of Daggers, so I do not know about Tridents), and more reliable than Cobras.  Perditions are strong enough to replace Piranha for battlestation killer duty.

Bombers are only overpowered with Astral with carrier officer.

ATM we have CR system in place, ammo limits are redundant to CR.

Which was probably why ballistics became unlimited in the first place.  Like to see the same for missiles and AM Blaster.

[Plantissue]

As to whether missiles should have limited ammo or not, missiles don't cost any flux to fire, so things like Annihilator Rocket Pod would be obscene, especially when the best tactic vs it is to either take out the ship holding it immediately, or just wait till it runs out of ammo, so missiles like that should have a flux cost to fire, taking away 2 unique characteristic of missile types. I guess i don't like the design of Annihliator weapon pods. Anyways, personally I don't like any of the large missile mounts; I usually find that I leave them empty unless there is a lack of weapons otherwise.

Annihilators? I just normally ignore enemy ships with them as they are so weak they go to the bottom of combat priorities. Any ship with decent shields (basically any high-tech with officers) can tank annihilators indefinetely. That's before considering PD.

Unlike rocket sleds, that have mobility and burst and reloads and can come when the ship is close to overload or venting and dump 60-100 annihilators in the space of 2 seconds, ships with missiles do not have the luxury.

If anihillator pod would regen, say 10 missiles every 100 seconds, it would not become OP. It would just make them a little more flexible.

The only large missile from vanilla I even use is the Squall.

Mods and hyperbole have no place in a discussion about balance.

[Embolism]

Unlimited missiles is already kinda-sorta done with Salamanders and Pilums. For small missiles, most of them could probably be balanced by reducing their ammo count to 1 (i.e. remove all the racks) and giving them a reloading time that's a bit longer than the Salamander (since the Salamander is meant to have a special "combat-rated autoloader"), or significantly longer for torpedoes. It should still be ammo-based instead of recharge-based so ammo-boosting hullmods still work.

When you take into account CR balancing this way doesn't actually add that many missiles over the course of a battle, and comes with the downside of not able to fire multiple missiles from a mount at once for a big burst.

My main issue with limited missiles is it makes no sense at all lore-wise when Salamanders and Pilums can autoload (what stops this from being used in other missile systems?) and bombers can have infinite reloads (but a much larger starship can't??).

[Goumindong]

Missiles can have unlimited ammo when Harpoons cost 1000 to 1500 flux to fire

[DatonKallandor]

Giving them a decent refire time makes 0 flux reloading missiles a non-issue.

[Ranakastrasz]

Mods and hyperbole have no place in a discussion about balance.

Hyperbole, I agree. Mods on the other-hand have everything to do with balance. You can make changes, test them, and determine what works. If a mod appears balanced and has regenerating missiles, then it is clearly relevant.

[Plantissue]

Mods and hyperbole have no place in a discussion about balance.

Hyperbole, I agree. Mods on the other-hand have everything to do with balance. You can make changes, test them, and determine what works. If a mod appears balanced and has regenerating missiles, then it is clearly relevant.

Modded game balance has no relevance to unmodded game balance. Who cares if some mod has an weak or strong weapon or ship system of hullmod? It still bears no relevance to the base game.

[DatonKallandor]

The point being is that mods are very much worth talking about when talking about balance if those mods are directly trying to improve on or emulate vanilla balance. 0.91 is just a mod for 0.9 that we all agree to install. Mods testing potential balance changes are a classic tool when tweaking or discussing balance - empirical testing to complete the pure theorycrafting.

[Goumindong]

Giving them a decent refire time makes 0 flux reloading missiles a non-issue.

No. Zero flux is too big of a deal even with a "decent refire time". Ballistics which have decent refire times like the Hellbore Cannon... and less range... and inaccuracy... still cost 750 flux to fire. Even with long refire you cannot balance zero flux missiles with refire times unless they were so long you would prefer to use the ammo counts.