Missile Prototype 3

Equalizer

At the moment the minigun sound something like the 6"/47 caliber Mark 16 gun from WW2, which could either fire AP rounds as a primary weapon or anti-air projectiles.

To me it would make more sense that the characteristic of the minigun and PD were flipped:
I.e.

Minigun being slow to target, relatively long range and causing area damage to missiles.
PD being short range and fast to target to clean up missiles that leak through the outer anti-missile fire.

This would also resolve the issue that small ships look like they wouldn't have an effective anti-missile defense with the current version (PD being ineffective at the range that small ships attack their target and miniguns being too expensive to mount on a small ship just for defense).

SpaceCat

Equalizer ... more controversy about the minigun ...

tending to agree with EQ ...

Tobi-wan_Kenobi

Walt UltraBlast It doesn't really make sense that the same ammo has different attributes and does different effects upon ingame objects.

Less sense than the large cannon fusing together four rounds of ammo? 😉

Fair point, though.

It totally makes sense! The ammo produced by an ammo factory isn't ready-made shells and bullets. It's powdered nano-mass or something that is in a drum, which is formed into compressed rounds in the breech and fired with a chemical explosive that is imbued into the nano-mass and ignited with an electrical current. This is why cannon shells start fires on impact - the nano-mass continues to burn up after being fired. This is also why cannon shells disappear - they burn up and disintegrate. 🙂

Tobi-wan_Kenobi

Testing 3.1 currently. Now that the HE missiles aren't bugged I can properly test them.

Result: I like them. Part of the problem I had with missiles is that they did quite a lot of sustained damage through shields. I felt like I couldn't fit enough PD and shields to prevent damage entirely (which is really annoying in single player). They might not get you in the first salvo, but they could take out your PD and weapons through attrition. Now they behave more like the other weapons. They might hit more often with the weaker anti-missile defenses, but they don't do as much bleed damage through shields, so it feels less frustrating. I think they might do a bit too much direct damage to shields though. Even light missile fire seems to take down double shielding with ease. That deserves a lot more hours of testing though.

So I like the way HE missiles feel now, however I think the PD are still too ineffective. Even if a missile is fired from max range, the PD barely has time to achieve lock before impact. If the missile is fired from a forward facing launcher, the PD often doesn't have time to get a lock, especially if it has previously wasted lock time on a lock it couldn't complete. Even against light missile fire, less than 25% of missiles are being destroyed with a 1:1 PD to launcher ratio. Against heavy missile fire, I estimate less than 10% of missiles are destroyed. I feel like it should be at least 50% destroyed with a 1:1 pd to launcher ratio, and at least 25% with a 1:2 pd to launcher ratio.

I love the way HE missiles path around stuff now. Their guidance seems much more sensible.

EMP missiles feel nice as well. They seem to be balanced, though that too would require much more testing. I think taking 4 shield energy on impact is a good spot for them.

Nukes feel both OP and useless. The ships I use are highly nimble - they dodge most cannon fire - so they are immune to the even slower nukes. Against the typical cannon wall, I think a salvo of nukes is ridiculously strong. Against most ships the fight would be over in one salvo of six nukes. Then again, if the salvo misses, it's a long wait for another one. I'm starting to like the concept and the method of implementation, however I hope they will be a larger missile sprite. That might require variable launcher art though. And could we call them torpedoes? 😃 I mean they feel like torpedoes...

I think if nukes are as slow as they are now, they need to have a longer flight time, maybe double.

Miniguns definitely have too much damage now. I think their role should be as a moderate damage sustained fire weapon. RIght now they shred parts. Earlier with the 3.0 prototype, I said they did too little part damage if they were going to be unable to damage shields. Since now they do damage shields, I think that the old part damage is fine. Obviously it's going to require a lot of tuning since we've never considered balance for a turreted sustained damage weapon, but I think considering the situation in relation to the damage of ion beams should give you a better idea of how to balance miniguns. Maybe something like 1/4 to 1/2 of the sustained damage of ions, considering miniguns can be focused, but also considering their short range.

I like the range they are set at, but I still feel like they need an increased field of fire if they're going to have that range. Definitely not a laser field of fire, since we don't want tons of them to be able to focus fire, but only being able to focus fire with a few of them is lame.

samepage

I like it that the shields protect against AOE and the AOE can damage multiple shields at once. It's a slightly nerf to shields-stacking strategy. However, the HE missiles become too effective against shields now that there is no point in using EMP missiles. Perhaps the anti-shield damage of HE missiles can be reduced by half. This would give non-stacking shield designs a better chance when dealing with missiles.

Tobi-wan_Kenobi

samepage However, the HE missiles become too effective against shields now that there is no point in using EMP missiles.

Agreed, they're much too strong against shields now. As an example, they seem to do more damage to single shields than a large cannon shot, and they also do tons of AOE damage to stacked shields... and they're guided, and fast. So yeah. That's legitimately OP.

But nukes... nukes are silly OP.

@Walt Here's a little slideshow of what nukes can do. I think they are much too powerful.

Walt

samepage However, the HE missiles become too effective against shields now that there is no point in using EMP missiles. Perhaps the anti-shield damage of HE missiles can be reduced by half. This would give non-stacking shield designs a better chance when dealing with missiles.
Tobi-wan_Kenobi Agreed, they're much too strong against shields now. As an example, they seem to do more damage to single shields than a large cannon shot, and they also do tons of AOE damage to stacked shields... and they're guided, and fast. So yeah. That's legitimately OP.

Hmm, I'm not convinced that missiles are OP against single-layer shields. Reason being, they don't do any more damage against shields than they do against parts. An HE missile hitting a shield will typically do less total damage than when hitting a unshielded ship.

As for missiles being OP against stacked shields... I'm not convinced that's a bad thing?

CGDW

PD is too ineffective, even at longer range.

How about PD will begin locking onto every missile that flies into range simultaneously, queuing them up. Once the first missile is destroyed (or leaves the area covered by the pd that has a lock on it), re-targeting to the next in queue is very fast. Then you can balance the chance of a single missile getting through with the time it takes to lock on, and balance pd against multiple missiles by adjusting the delay between targeting different missiles in the queue.

Alpha

Tobi-wan_Kenobi I wonder, what if missile explosions hit other missiles, so destroying a missile would destroy every missile nearby.

Walt

Tobi-wan_Kenobi Here's a little slideshow of what nukes can do. I think they are much too powerful.

I'm not seeing any slideshow.

Walt

Alpha I wonder, what if missile explosions hit other missiles, so destroying a missile would destroy every missile nearby.

This could be cool, though I'm skeptical it'd have much practical impact on game balance.

samepage

Walt Hmm, I'm not convinced that missiles are OP against single-layer shields.

No they are not. But currently it's like "missiles OP vs stacked shields" and "missiles OK vs single-layer shields". By reducing the shield damage of missiles it becomes "missiles Good vs stacked shields" and "missiles Weak vs single-layer shields". Which is one way to promot the use of single-layer shields covering the whole ship for effective defense. Because I believe we have already seem enough of ships that's basically just walls of stacked shields, and ships that just skip the use of shields and turn to armor for defense simply because single-layer shields are not cost-efficient. Another concern is that missiles are already quite good against hulls. Making them good against stacked shields is reasonable, just to disencourage people from overly stacking shields. But they should never be OP. Being OP against shields should always reserve for specilaized weapons like EMP missiles.

Tobi-wan_Kenobi

Walt By slideshow I meant a series of screenshots, not a gif. You have to scroll through them.

Alpha

Walt Or, perhaps a chance to destroy them, like 30%? This value could differ depending on the type of missile exploding. A nuke would have a higher chance, for example.

Walt

Tobi-wan_Kenobi By slideshow I meant a series of screenshots, not a gif. You have to scroll through them.

For some reason that wasn't rendering of my desktop but I can see them fine on my phone.

I think step one is fixing PD, and then we can reevaluate nukes.

Zachary

how can I disable the test mode?

Walt

Zachary how can I disable the test mode?

Just download and install from the website.

Walt

samepage So one thing I could potentially tweak is how the shield's 75% AOE reduction is calculated. Right now, that 75% percent is reduced as the shield takes damage, and if a missile hits a stacked shield, the first shield will be damaged, reducing that 75%, and then the 2nd shield will take damage with the reduced 75%. I could either change it so that the 75% isn't reduced as it takes damage, or change it so that the reduced 75% doesn't take effect until the next hit. Either way, that would be a game-wide AOE change that would affect more than just HE missiles (most notably it'd also affect nukes).

samepage

Walt I could either change it so that the 75% isn't reduced as it takes damage

Honestly I prefer this one simply because it seems to allow ships with single-layer shields last longer under missile fire. Unlike in the rail gun's case where shields have to be taken down first before rail guns start dealing damage, missiles always deal some part damage through shields. If the shields' explosion resistance reduce as they take damage than things behind them will get destroyed too quickly. And it's really weird to see everything behind the shields getting destroyed before the shields were taken down, even if they were just single-layer shields.

Lafiel

This is a similar case with railguns vs. shield and armor. Keeping reduction per shield would allow powerful explosion against unshielded ships. One-time reduction would only add a minor building requirement change but won't be game changing or or forcing a new kind of strategy. So I lean toward the powerful explosion and per shield reduction. Simply said explosion and shield would be their own matches.

Walt

samepage I think that makes sense, the only catch is that then a weapon that can take down a shield in one hit could potentially do much more damage than a weapon that leaves the shield with only a sliver of health left.