@ Wapno
Flux positive firing of weapons only occurs when a.) you have SO's bonuses (and thereby reduce your longevity and range) or b.) when you max vents and use relatively weak weapons. Most of the ships in the game, especially the low-tech ones, are extremely flux starved. You can't be flux positive on an Enforcer without going almost all small mounts or PD. The point being, the only way to stay flux positive is to gimp yourself in some way, which is the same argument being made for limited-fire missiles. "High damage, all the time" doesn't exist without a trade-off and not utilizing missile mounts to save OP is typically not enough. I'd love to see some of the non-SO builds you're using where you can achieve this. SO is an exception to the rule and has its own strengths and weaknesses. It can't be used as a "typical" build.
True, said Enforcer (and some other ships in the game, really) will struggle with bad flux economy, but I can't see how making it
even worse by wasting OP on missiles is going to fix that. In my opinion "almost zero-flux damage output" is far better than "one-shot, temporary zero-flux damage burst". The fact that a player is even given a choice like this and an entire weapons class is worth discarding in order to boost other parameters suggests that there is an issue within balance that's worth addressing.
Missiles allow for a ship to operate outside of its typical role. Or to put it another way, missiles have always been supplementary. They are not primary damage dealers nor are they intended to be so. The only ship in the game where this is the case is the Gryphon and it has a ship system to regenerate missiles. The "friggin Kite" can only hurt a Dominator with missiles. No amount of "proper vents, guns, and hullmods" will help a Kite defeat anything larger than itself. It takes the two missile slots to actually do something. Yes, the Kite is an extreme example but as I look across the board, very few ships have a ton of missile slots and most are used to supplement or compliment your primary loudout.
Apart from even said Gryphon being a joke (since its system is just as one-shot as missiles themselves and it's nothing but Expanded Missile Racks in a form of glorified ship system), a big question is whether using such "supplementary" weapon at the cost of significantly weakening performance of the main weapons is worth it or not. Most often I come up with answer
not.
And just like you pointed out, Kite is an extreme example. It's just a bad ship, lingering among the class of hulls like the Buffalo mk.2.
As I look from a "macro perspective," I don't see this as a zero-sum game. You can have hard-hitting, tough ships that also can nuke a dangerous target if the opportunity presents itself. I don't see why this has to be all-or-none. I have a very effective SO Hammerhead build that is flux positive and then I mount two Reapers up front. I could have saved 4 OP but for what? What can 4 OP get me that is better than insta-killing a highly-dangerous and tough Cruiser, even if it's only once? Had I omitted the missiles, I can whittle down the cruiser but in the mean time, it's still firing big guns at my fleet. I see eliminating the most dangerous targets as a much stronger damage-mitigating tool than adding a hull mod. But, that's the old argument of "the best defense is a good offense." 
But that's also why I oppose regenerating ammo because that Hammerhead, if given another minute or so to reload, could do that again, and again, and again...for 4 OP and 0-flux. You'd have to rework the entire missile system to account for regenerating ammo.
Actually I think Reapers are a special case, simply due to the fact how dirt cheap they are, especially for destroyer tier. 2 OP is almost nothing and yes, that 4000 dmg is sometimes worth it. I say
sometimes because more often than not AI is still going to waste it by dumping it into the blank void.
In any case, I can have a hard-hitting, tough ship that can also nuke a dangerous target
once... but why not even
harder-hitting, tougher ship that can tear that dangerous target apart without relying on a single-shot measure?
See what I'm getting at here? In almost every situation you present, taking the missiles out of the picture is a good, worth considering tactic. That's my main point - a player should not be presented with such a dilemma, because it means that a weapon type may be too expensive, impractical, unfun, or all of the above. And frankly, I think that's a good description of how missiles in Starsector currently are.
Oh, and about this: "
You'd have to rework the entire missile system to account for regenerating ammo." - Look, if it results in a weapon mechanic that is actually fun to use, then you have all of my support for reworking the missile system from the scratch. Especially since
reworking the missile system may actually take LESS effort than programming the AI to be smart about using a one-shot precious resource and stop wasting it.Finally, what kind of fleet actions are we talking about here? Early game, end-game, or...? If my early Wolf can use missiles to take out a Destroyer, that's absolutely a win, even if I can't do it again. The Destroyer was probably the biggest threat anyway. Taking out key ships is what causes momentum to shift or again, acts as a force multiplier for me. If I can't exploit temporary weaknesses with high burst damage, the bigger ship wins (with bigger guns, more vents, etc.), all other things being equal.
You still didn't explain how are you going to throw those torpedoes past the shields of that destroyer (what, a second frigate with sabots? Well, that's two frigs - two good frigs can kill a destroyer even without missiles anyway). And if your plan hinges on those two reapers making their mark, then you're turning the battle into a gamble. You are relying on a single salvo that can miss, get absorbed by shields or get intercepted by PD and has a very good chance for that to happen. None of this happens to projectiles fired by guns of a ship with buffed flux stats.
It doesn't matter much what scenario it is. Early game - even one frigate is a big chunk of your fleet and it's not worth weakening it to overspecialize it as a single-shot strike ship. Late game - even after killing that one destroyer there's several more to destroy and one frigate would be more useful contributing its firepower to the battle instead of carrying limited missiles that may not even hit their mark.
@Megas
Regenerating missiles are not the same as carriers with fighters (with/without missiles). Carriers have their downsides, namely being relatively weak in and of themselves and having a mechanic that slows down the regeneration over time. I doubt there would be any slowdown effect to the missile regeneration on a combat ship. It would likely be a fixed timer. Spamming bombers from carriers eventually gets the carrier into trouble and unlike combat ships, a carrier's "weapons" can be eliminated and thus, increase the time of regeneration.
Who said missiles on a gunboat have to regenerate as fast as it takes to re-arm fighters? Obviously they have to take MUCH longer - otherwise this would nerf carriers severely and it would be questionable if it's even worth using them. In my opinion missiles should regenerate fast enough to account for every separate fight throughout the entire battle, and allow you to use a clip at least once every such fight. Suppose your Medusa has enough CR to last long enough to kill 5 separate destroyers during a fight - then Sabots should regenerate 5 salvos during an entire battle. Now, don't take those numbers as actual balance proposal - I'm just describing what the mechanic should look like.
For as strong as carriers are in this iteration, they still have factors that work against them. Regenerating missiles would have no drawback beyond reload time which, if you don't re-work the OP costs of missiles, would have to be high enough that balance isn't completely thrown out of whack. I hope no one is suggesting that Harpoons/Sabots have anything less than 1 missile/minute reload times. For a typical frigate, that raises one 3 OP rack from 3 shots to 6-7, assuming you use them early before your CR begins to diminish.
Now, if implemented, that means your average Wolf is going to be able to spit out 12-14 Harpoons/Sabots over its CR duration. That's twice as many missiles. It would be higher as the ship size and CR limits increase. The question I ask myself is: do I want 2-3x as many missiles flying around? Or perhaps more importantly, would regenerating missiles create a situation where I no longer value the limited supply (i.e. use them with abandon)? I'm a big fan of opportunity cost so using a missile now means I can't use one later. If I could count on regeneration, that decision-making is basically eliminated. I'd rather have the AI use them more intelligently rather that use more of them, to be honest.
Please do not ignore the fact that just that missiles are regenerating doesn't mean you can dump them mindlessly. You still have to wait for them to regenerate if you dump them at a wrong time. Launch a Harpoon volley at a wrong time and you're stuck with 0 missiles for the duration of the timer to tick down. If anything,
THAT would actually promote using them at the moment of opportunity. The current system does not - it encourages hoarding for later, better occasion, which often never comes and you never use a weapon you've invested into.
Again, in my opinion any rework is welcome if it changes the situation to something more fun and interesting than gambling, literal fire-and-forget nonsense than we have now. Do I want more missiles flying around? Absolutely, I want the weapon
to be actually used and be useful. That's part of the content.
As it relates to carriers, there's nothing I can do as a player from keeping that Wolf from firing 12+ missiles but I can slow down the rate that a carrier's fighters can be replenished. They are comparable but not indistinguishable. If every combat ship had twice as many missiles at their disposal over the course of the battle (even if it slows to a trickle after the initial volley), I can't do anything about that from a mitigation perspective besides slap on more PD or hope I can disable a missile mount via damage or EMP. The question I have to ask myself is: are twice as many missiles in the game good or bad? (And I would argue this needs to be taken on a missile-by-missile level. I agree with Megas on MIRVs, for example.)
Again, if missiles are intended to be supplementary (which I think is obvious from their current use and how their mounts are placed on hulls), does regenerating ammo enhance or sabotage this role? It would make using them less of a gamble but in essence, you've just created very slow reload weapons. I'm still a fan of high-risk/high-reward weapons but I admit, the AI needs to use them more intelligently.
I don't think this is a fair comparison. Please note that at any moment that Wolf isn't going to have more than just 3 Harpoons. Once it dumps all 3 it has to wait for a long reload time before it can fire again. Meanwhile a Carrier can practically spew a non-stop bombardment, wave after wave, until the bombers start dying.
If you're concerned with being unable to do anything about the missiles, please consider that at the moment ships in the game are already coming to battle with full racks of missiles at the start. How are you mitigating this right now? If missiles get regenerations, you'll just have to do the same thing, except for longer. In fact, that change would make it so that every moment of the battle would resemble the very start of the battle in this regard. I think it's a good thing - as it is now, both sides will dump most of their missiles early and it's even possible to bait them to waste their arsenal. That tactic would no longer be applicable. Wouldn't you agree that a battle where the threat of receiving a missile salvo at all times, not just the very beginning, would be a tad more interesting?
And I also agree that with this change, every missile would have to be addressed separately. Among other things, I think Sabots would have to lose their EMP effect.
