Point Defenses have major balance issues. Dalas explains it better than I could, so I'll let him do the talking:
@Dalas120 In my opinion, PD is in a very awkward spot. If the enemy brings missiles (costing 75% of their ship) and you bring PD (costing, say, 10% of your ship), you're almost guaranteed to win. But if you spend 10% of your cost on PD and your enemy brings cannons, lasers, railguns, or anything besides missiles, you're almost guaranteed to lose. And, it's possible to beat missile ships without using any PD at all - fleets and shield-heavy ships can go toe-to-toe with a missile barge without needing PD. So when you balance all of that out PD ends up being on the weak end, because while it's extremely good in one situation, it's useless most of the time and you can survive vs missiles without PD anyway
The core issue is that PD is only good against one kind of weapon, and I don't think any amount of tweaking numbers is going to make PD balanced without making PD more-or-less equally effective against everything. This basically means there are two possible, polar-opposite solutions:
- Make PD good against almost everything.
- Make PD good against almost nothing.
Dalas suggested solution #1 in his own post:
Dalas120 I suggest changing the role of PD from a dedicated anti-missile to a wide-area defense option. PD would be able to defend against all/most weapons at varying effectiveness, with better coverage area but less cost-efficiency compared to shields/armor.
My primary objection to this solution is it just doesn't make a lot of sense from a lore perspective to have point defenses be able to shoot at energy and non-mechanical projectile weapons. (I also have lesser concerns about PD becoming like a less-interesting version of shields and about the performance implications of having so many more targets for PD to shoot at.)
So, I propose solution #2: Make PD good against almost nothing.
But, Walt, then why would I ever build PD?
I said ALMOST nothing!
My proposal is to make PD primarily effective vs missiles that are fired from long range. Specifically, I propose significantly increasing the range of PD while also requiring PD to "lock on" to a missile before shooting it, which will take a second or two. Missiles fired from long range would have plenty of time to get locked-on and shot down, but missiles fired from medium or short range would have much less time and be harder or, if close enough, impossible to shoot down.
Essentially, PD will become primarily an anti-kiting defense useful mainly on slow ships and space stations that are worried about being outranged by missiles. They will be much less effective on ships that are designed to fight at a closer distances. Yes, this makes PD less useful (or even useless) on most ships (especially multiplayer ships), but I think this is basically okay, and arguably makes more lore-sense than the current PD. (It seems like in most space fiction, PD is mainly used on very large, slow ships, carriers, and space stations, not so much on close-combat ships.)
Yes, this also means that the existing and upcoming missiles might need to be rebalanced a bit so that they're not OP in a world without close-range PD, but that's okay. And in the future, once fighters and/or drones are added, this change is likely to have little impact on PD's effectiveness vs those, since fighters and drones will be flying for a much longer time than missiles and there will be plenty of time to lock on to them.
What do you think of this proposal?
If you like the above proposal, then I have a second sub-proposal for you:
I propose that the lock-on be done not by the PD itself but by a separate "targeting computer". Each targeting computer (probably a 2x2 internal part) would be able to lock on to any enemy missiles within range. Once a missile is locked-on by a targeting computer, any PD on the same ship in range and line-of-sight of the missile would then be able to shoot at that missile.
I mainly just think this would be cool and makes a bit more lore-sense than PD being able to lock-on themselves. It also adds some potentially-interesting decisions about how optimize the number of PDs per targeting computer.
The downsides I can think of are that it likely relegates PD to larger ships that are big enough to fit/afford a targeting computer (but PD are probably only worth it on large ships anyway) and could be potentially confusing for players who build a PD but not a targeting computer and don't understand why their PD can't shoot (but this can probably be solved with good U.I.).
What do you think?