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Author Topic: All missiles should cost 0 ordnance points.  (Read 24407 times)

Wapno

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Re: All missiles should cost 0 ordnance points.
« Reply #30 on: November 21, 2017, 09:15:34 AM »

@ 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.
« Last Edit: November 21, 2017, 09:29:58 AM by Wapno »
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Ranakastrasz

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Re: All missiles should cost 0 ordnance points.
« Reply #31 on: November 21, 2017, 09:40:06 AM »

As a side note, although I have no idea how you might do it dynamically, it is actually trivial to make a mod that causes missiles to regenerate.
The hardest part is determining how fast they should regen. I think my attempt was just to set the rate to 50% of the sustained fire rate due to cooldown/volly size, and had to fudge it with the harpoon and sabots (because cooldown of 1 second) and just scaled down the large 12 with 4 volly racks.

It had an interesting effect, but made them significantly more powerful, and I haven't really experimented a lot.
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FooF

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Re: All missiles should cost 0 ordnance points.
« Reply #32 on: November 21, 2017, 10:31:39 AM »

@Wapno@

We're talking past each other at this point. My further contribution will be minimal.

Quote
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.

I wholeheartedly disagree with this. It's the law of diminishing marginal utility. There comes a time where you've maxed vents, got the ideal weapons, and the margin to gain by pressing this further is minimal. You simply can't hit any harder at that point. Missiles break deadlocks, win flux battles, are aces in the hole, and/or are equalizers. Standard guns, save a few, can't do this and the vast majority can't penetrate armor like missiles. The armor mechanic is weighted far too heavily toward high damage per shot. Missiles excel at this for little OP and 0-flux. They allow ships to punch above their weight when they have no other recourse (and most don't). I absolutely disagree that having flux-neutral or flux-positive loudouts is typical so I can't follow your logic that adding more guns or vents is better than adding 0-flux missiles. The vast majority of ships are unable to reach parity with their weapon flux costs without taking sub-optimal weapons that have drawbacks of their own -or- taking SO, which also has its own drawbacks. I love SO but I don't argue that it's normative of regular combat.

Could missiles be improved? Yes, but the system is not fundamentally broken. I have a lot of fun using missiles and having missiles used against me. I prefer to have specialized missiles to open up shields or a hole in armor but I know I only have a few opportunities to use them. It creates meaningful decision-making both in loading out a ship and in battle and while I would like to have more missiles at my disposal, I also see the wisdom in keeping them very limited.
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Serenitis

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Re: All missiles should cost 0 ordnance points.
« Reply #33 on: November 21, 2017, 01:49:20 PM »

The hardest part is determining how fast they should regen.
Not really based on anything more than my desire to play with missiles more freely, and a vague feeling of what I wanted to achieve.
Spoiler
R = (M/D)*S

Where:
R = The regen rate entered into the weapons table.
M = A global multiplier. Higher gives faster regen for everything. 36 is the figure I used that "felt" right.
D = The damage output for a single missile round (MIRVs use the sum of all warheads).
S = Mount size multiplier. Again based on "feeling" small is 1, medium is 1.5 and large is 2.

This could be further subdivided by damage type (or any other identifiable category) if you really wanted to.

I used the Harpoon as my baseline and aimed to get a regen rate of approx. 20 seconds per missile. - Actually ended up being 20.8s (This would be 0.048 in the regen column of the weapon table).
Works fairly well and imo seems to make battles feel much more active with missiles flying back and forth more frequently, and completely removes the tedious metagame of trying to tease out limited ammo so you can attack with impunity.
The notable flaw being you can use HE missiles to brute force shields if you want to, while the AI as it stands cannot.

This does not address reload times at all, as puking out all your missiles with 0 delay will still punish you by making you wait for more missiles so I never considered it worth the effort to do anything about as regen still enourages you to be mindful about missile use. It just no longer punishes you (so harshly) for making a mistake. This also applies to the AI which makes it somewhat more dangerous.
This has always been something of a contentious issue, and I'm sure there will be someone along shortly to tell us all why I'm wrong. But people like different things, and I like flinging missiles around like cheap fireworks because the fun explosions please the primitive lizard part of my brain.
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jupjupy

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Re: All missiles should cost 0 ordnance points.
« Reply #34 on: November 21, 2017, 07:34:08 PM »

I don't see why we have to go into the "0 OP" territory with every missile. Like, I personally think the big torpedo launchers like the Cyclone suck, and would never use missiles on my Astral, but at the same time, 0 OP Hurricanes/Squalls/Whatever would just encourage Astral/Mora/Legion spam even more than they do now.

The only 'free' weapon in the game right now is the Talon and Mining Pod. Mining Pod aside, the Talon is alright for a 0 OP fighter squadron, though your actual bill comes in the form of crew lost from all those dead fighters, as well as the opportunity cost of mounting something better in the first place.

I'd much rather the missiles themselves go back to basically removing everything in existence that they touched, with maybe a cap on their fire rate instead. I don't think you need to change Missile Spec as a skill, just up damage a little bit (just not for Sabots), travel speed, and turning. There was a time when the Reaper touched cruisers and they vanished into thin air. I'd like that time to come back.
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Wapno

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Re: All missiles should cost 0 ordnance points.
« Reply #35 on: November 22, 2017, 01:38:04 AM »

I wholeheartedly disagree with this. It's the law of diminishing marginal utility. There comes a time where you've maxed vents, got the ideal weapons, and the margin to gain by pressing this further is minimal. You simply can't hit any harder at that point. Missiles break deadlocks, win flux battles, are aces in the hole, and/or are equalizers. Standard guns, save a few, can't do this and the vast majority can't penetrate armor like missiles. The armor mechanic is weighted far too heavily toward high damage per shot. Missiles excel at this for little OP and 0-flux. They allow ships to punch above their weight when they have no other recourse (and most don't). I absolutely disagree that having flux-neutral or flux-positive loudouts is typical so I can't follow your logic that adding more guns or vents is better than adding 0-flux missiles. The vast majority of ships are unable to reach parity with their weapon flux costs without taking sub-optimal weapons that have drawbacks of their own -or- taking SO, which also has its own drawbacks. I love SO but I don't argue that it's normative of regular combat.

Could missiles be improved? Yes, but the system is not fundamentally broken. I have a lot of fun using missiles and having missiles used against me. I prefer to have specialized missiles to open up shields or a hole in armor but I know I only have a few opportunities to use them. It creates meaningful decision-making both in loading out a ship and in battle and while I would like to have more missiles at my disposal, I also see the wisdom in keeping them very limited.

True, there are situations where you max out vents, flux hullmods etc, but even then there are other things you can spend OP on to give you a tangible, lasting advantage, instead of a weapon that's practically a gamble. After maxing out my vents, installing flux distributor, resistant flux conduits etc. on my Conquest, I still don't want missiles on it. Automated repair unit is a better option, or even Hardened Shields. After maxing out my Astral, I don't install missiles - I give it unstable injector, so it can get to battle faster. There's always something more reliable than missiles on offer - something that's going to give you a tangible advantage throughout the entire battle, rather than high risk, mediocre reward weapon that the missiles are, which may or may not give you an advantage in a very specific hypothetical situation that may never even come during a battle.

I don't need missiles to break deadlocks if I bolster my ships and don't let deadlocks to happen in the first place. It's not the missiles that win flux battles - guns, vents and flux distributor do. Also, considering that 99% of vanilla ship variants come pre-equipped with missiles, I'd say scrapping missiles and using their OP to reinforce ships is the actual equalizer that's turning the tide of battle. Bottom line, no matter the scenario - guns+missiles are good, but guns only are even better.

I actually had a bright idea to put the missile strategy to use by including some support ships in my fleet - those supports putting heavy emphasis on missile use. That strategy however did nothing but cost me money, as those missile ships were usually the first to die, usually by rushing at the enemy for no apparent reason and promptly getting torn to shreds, all the while my gun-only units and carriers were delivering a carnage.

I can agree that mechanics that encourage wise decision-making are good. I just don't want to have anything to do with a weapon that revolves around gambling, because when competing over resources with more reliable weapons in a loadout screen, it's mostly going to lose.

Also, missiles don't cost "little OP" (with exception of Reaper torpedoes maybe). 2 Harpoon racks on a Wolf is 8 OP. Harpoon pod costs 10 OP, put it on Odyssey and that's 30 OP. Squalls are 20 OP each - 2 of these on a Conquest cost 40 OP. In every one of those tiers, that's a large amount of OP that could otherwise give you a significant boost in flux vent rate or a useful hull mod. Vents and hull mods never run out of ammo.

I don't see why we have to go into the "0 OP" territory with every missile. Like, I personally think the big torpedo launchers like the Cyclone suck, and would never use missiles on my Astral, but at the same time, 0 OP Hurricanes/Squalls/Whatever would just encourage Astral/Mora/Legion spam even more than they do now.

The only 'free' weapon in the game right now is the Talon and Mining Pod. Mining Pod aside, the Talon is alright for a 0 OP fighter squadron, though your actual bill comes in the form of crew lost from all those dead fighters, as well as the opportunity cost of mounting something better in the first place.

I'd much rather the missiles themselves go back to basically removing everything in existence that they touched, with maybe a cap on their fire rate instead. I don't think you need to change Missile Spec as a skill, just up damage a little bit (just not for Sabots), travel speed, and turning. There was a time when the Reaper touched cruisers and they vanished into thin air. I'd like that time to come back.
"0 OP" is just a proposed solution. Might not be the best one, but the actual purpose of my post was to get your attention to a problem that exists with missiles. There are definitely better solutions. The best one would imo be taking the ammo limit off by making all missiles regenerate, but considering how controversial that is, I've lost hopes of this ever happening, so I'm proposing something else to address the situation.

And no, upping the damage (or other stats) on missiles is not going to solve anything. It's the fact that they are ammo-limited weapons that have to compete over ordnance points with ammo-unlimited weapons. No matter how much you buff the damage, using missiles is still going to be a gamble.
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Megas

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Re: All missiles should cost 0 ordnance points.
« Reply #36 on: November 22, 2017, 06:49:20 AM »

high risk, mediocre reward weapon that the missiles are
Sums up the weaknesses of most non-regenerators.

Old skilled missiles were good, but it made combat too deadly for AI, and with ships and weapons difficult to replace, soloing fleets was the optimal way to play by far.  If powering up missiles is not an option either, then either cheap or regeneration is probably the least offensive solution.

For Conquest, Locusts are good because they are cheap for large missiles (under 20 OP each), nearly unavoidable, have overwhelming damage despite fragmentation (two Locusts will murder frigates and some destroyers outright if the whole burst hits), and (at least with Expanded Missile Racks) have enough ammo to last for a few minutes.  With Conquest, missiles are either Locusts or bust (or Converted Hangar and wing of fighters).

Quote
0 OP Hurricanes/Squalls/Whatever would just encourage Astral/Mora/Legion spam even more than they do now.
Astral is powerful enough to be spammed without need of missiles.  It is already a missile factory via fighters or bombers.

Legion cannot have both sufficient flak and missiles at the same time, due to Composite mounts.  If Legion gets missiles, then its PD is terrible (or offense is terrible if dual flak gets placed in large mounts).

Mora can already mount a couple Hammers or small Reaper as a cheap option.  Okay, so Mora gets ten missiles instead of two if all missiles are free.  Big deal.

Not to mention that the carriers' fighters are still better missiles themselves than real missiles.
« Last Edit: November 22, 2017, 06:57:52 AM by Megas »
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Tartiflette

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Re: All missiles should cost 0 ordnance points.
« Reply #37 on: November 22, 2017, 06:57:02 AM »

I think that carriers with unlimited fighters being currently brokenly powerful shows that regenerating missiles would be an even worse idea.
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Megas

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Re: All missiles should cost 0 ordnance points.
« Reply #38 on: November 22, 2017, 07:06:24 AM »

I think that carriers with unlimited fighters being currently brokenly powerful shows that regenerating missiles would be an even worse idea.
Not sure about this.  I find that true only for a flagship with Helmsmanship 3 and Unstable Injector.  Even then, a well built Paragon comes close to Astral, until only frigates are left.

Gunships with Converted Hangar need to be careful with their fighters or else they are effectively gone for the rest of the fight (their fighters take ages to regenerate if rate is down to 30%).

Even for carriers, they need Expanded Flight Deck (to prevent rate dropping even faster) and carrier skills min-maxed to make fighters viable late in the game.  Want to weaken fighters big time?  Remove Expanded Flight Deck hullmod from the game.  Also remove Converted Hangar so that gunships cannot become mini-carriers too.

Also, without fighters breaking the cowardly AI's stalling, how will the player deal with turtling AI that refuses to engage?  Frigate swarm?
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TJJ

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Re: All missiles should cost 0 ordnance points.
« Reply #39 on: November 22, 2017, 08:39:48 AM »

We're drifting off topic a little, but re fighters, I think one of the big problems with them is that their effectiveness scales quite differently to all other ships.

Frigates, all the way up to Capital ships have their force concentration strictly regulated by their speed, maneuverability, firing arcs, and the hesitancy of the AI.
Fighters on the other hand are fast, highly maneuverable, minimal firing arc issues (due to their ability to overlap one-another), and suicidally aggressive AI.

This poses a problem as there are very few weapons that effectively counter & punish fighter death balls.
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jupjupy

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Re: All missiles should cost 0 ordnance points.
« Reply #40 on: November 22, 2017, 08:45:45 AM »

I actually had a bright idea to put the missile strategy to use by including some support ships in my fleet - those supports putting heavy emphasis on missile use. That strategy however did nothing but cost me money, as those missile ships were usually the first to die, usually by rushing at the enemy for no apparent reason and promptly getting torn to shreds, all the while my gun-only units and carriers were delivering a carnage.

I don't usually have a problem with this, probably because every ship in my fleet has an Officer on board with the relevant personality type - Missile Boats tend to end up being Cautious (or even Timid, should they be LRM Boats, but Pilums suck too much to ever have this see use). That being said, I have not played a true vanilla game in a long while, the filled-with-mods runs I do see missiles being used a lot, from the common Hornet to the Voidspear to the absolutely *** Clarent.

And no, upping the damage (or other stats) on missiles is not going to solve anything. It's the fact that they are ammo-limited weapons that have to compete over ordnance points with ammo-unlimited weapons. No matter how much you buff the damage, using missiles is still going to be a gamble.

I think it does. The Atrophos is a good example of this, back in the day at least. You used to get more mileage out of the dirt-cheap dual rack than from your increased, what, 4 vents?
The Templar Clarent is the other extreme. Impossible to shoot down, flies at the speed of light, cannot miss. Torpedo-level damage. I would not want something like that to be 0 (or cheaper, anyway) OP.

So perhaps all missiles should simply be unavoidable/invulnerable, but then they'd just be different versions of the original Ballistic weapons. Doesn't seem very fun to me.

It's not like I don't agree to an extent, I'd rather have sustained firepower than ammo-limited ones that I have to manage and choose when to fire. But I see the point of missiles. Lowering their costs in terms of OP would force a significant rebalancing between every ship (again, not that I am against this), as well as the missiles themselves.

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Megas

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Re: All missiles should cost 0 ordnance points.
« Reply #41 on: November 22, 2017, 10:40:51 AM »

Once mods get included, all bets are off.  Blackrock has some nice regenerating missiles (that are not overpowered) - the sort of stuff I like to see in unmodded games.  Templar ships exploit typical AI swarm behavior (Priwen Burst nukes frigate swarms that destroy nearly every non-mod ship).

Quote
I think it does. The Atrophos is a good example of this, back in the day at least. You used to get more mileage out of the dirt-cheap dual rack than from your increased, what, 4 vents?
Before 0.8, Atropos were worth 3 OP for singles and 6 OP for dual (-1 to OP cost if player had Optimized Assembly, which is safe to assume).  They were expensive, but at least they were worth it in 0.7.2 for being mini-(pre-drunk-)Clarents.  (Before 0.7.2, Atropos were a joke for being too slow and clumsy.)  Today, they are just merely slightly beefier Harpoons that are a bit overpriced (at least the single shot).  Good for the Daggers they were redesigned for, but not so great for playership use.

Pre-0.8 Missile Specialization was extremely powerful.  Without it, only Salamanders and 0.7.2 Atropos and maybe restored Sabots were useful.  With old Missile Specialization, missiles became deadly and worth using, especially Reapers and Harpoons, perhaps too hard to defend against.
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Linnis

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Re: All missiles should cost 0 ordnance points.
« Reply #42 on: November 22, 2017, 03:19:15 PM »

I think that carriers with unlimited fighters being currently brokenly powerful shows that regenerating missiles would be an even worse idea.

As of right now, either fighters ( bombers in particular ) needs to be weakened. Or missiles need to be improved.

Honestly i am for the bombers and missile being a threat, before bomber buff there was no real threat to an player battleship, but now is much more exciting.
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jupjupy

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Re: All missiles should cost 0 ordnance points.
« Reply #43 on: November 23, 2017, 07:32:40 AM »

Once mods get included, all bets are off.  Blackrock has some nice regenerating missiles (that are not overpowered) - the sort of stuff I like to see in unmodded games.  Templar ships exploit typical AI swarm behavior (Priwen Burst nukes frigate swarms that destroy nearly every non-mod ship).

Of course, I'm not saying that the mods are how the game is by default, I'm simply quoting examples of how just changing stats -can- make a difference even without regenerating ammunition.

Pre-0.8 Missile Specialization was extremely powerful.  Without it, only Salamanders and 0.7.2 Atropos and maybe restored Sabots were useful.  With old Missile Specialization, missiles became deadly and worth using, especially Reapers and Harpoons, perhaps too hard to defend against.

IMO, missiles should be the deadliest things around, but with the option to be defended from within reason. And when you don't defend against them (or can't), you or your ships deserve to get violently deleted. The AI being unable to handle it back then seemed like a reason to improve it, not to downgrade missiles.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: All missiles should cost 0 ordnance points.
« Reply #44 on: November 23, 2017, 10:49:19 AM »

I think that missiles really should be balanced on a case by case basis. Sabots don't need help (although I think changing the medium sabot pods to regenerating with a slow rof would be more of a nerf, and thus a pretty good idea). Reapers are in a good spot. Harpoons and atropos are pretty weak, they definitely need some help. I think even with regeneration they might not be that good, they just don't do enough damage. Swarmers should definitely be regenerating. In terms of large missiles, squalls are pretty good, they generally go through PD through sheer numbers and build a lot of hard flux on the enemy for no flux cost, if they were regenerating they might be to strong. I personally have found locusts to be ineffective but I haven't used them in the way Megas described so I can't really say. The big reaper launcher is just bad because there are no ships that can use it properly.

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