Fractal Softworks Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Author Topic: Remote Controlled LRM - A sidestep experiment to avoid LRM exploits  (Read 1608 times)

Tartiflette

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 3529
  • MagicLab discord: https://discord.gg/EVQZaD3naU
    • View Profile

Remote Controlled LRM

DOWNLOAD
Mission only (though some Remote Controlled Pilums may randomly spawn in some black markets)


This is an experiment to find a solution to the Long Range Missiles exploits that makes some cheap fleets builds unstoppable. The trick here isn't to yet again nerf the pilum to the point of uselessness, but to balance risk VS reward.

The concept is simple: this new Remote Pilum Launcher "control" the missiles as long as they are in flight, preventing the launch of a new salvo until they either hit something or have been shot down. On the other hand, they got their former speed and endurance back, and a more precise guidance AI.

Here are my conclusions after a couple of hours of testing:

 - Overall, both the vanilla speed nerf or the remote control tone the old pilum down in roughly the same proportions.

 - The remote control has the distinct advantage to keep the Pilum useful against light targets. They are also much more efficient at close range compared to the slow Pilums since they can be fired when you see a ship overloading and actually hit before it raise it's shield again.

 - At long range, the remote controlled ones scale much less in numbers as fewer of them will hit at once, but the time between groups of missiles is reduced. Their better speed and tracking also means less missiles in flight at any moment, thus less friendly fires when they flameout and less annihilator-like screen blocking shots. The performance improvement could be significant too. Depending on the defense weapons, they range from a bit worse than vanilla pilums to pretty much the same.

 - Few slow pilums are almost useless since they can be kited or shot down easily. This is much less the case with the faster remote ones.

So all in all, this is a solution that provides a Pilum a bit better than the nerfed one at long range, but that scale less in large number, while retaining the efficiency of the old one up close. I may be partial but I think it's an interesting way to get rid of the missile spam problem. At least it could be explored a bit more.

Tell me what you think!

« Last Edit: May 03, 2015, 03:11:35 PM by Tartiflette »
Logged
 

Cycerin

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 1665
  • beyond the infinite void
    • View Profile

IMO a good concept for a mod weapon LRM, but I think the Pilum as the most "basic" LRM should be a true fire and forget, saturation weapon.
Logged