Missile Prototype 3

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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.

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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).

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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.

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Walt So far the weapons that are able to accomplish this as I know are the rail guns, nukes, and EMP missiles (a little buff please?). All of them are expensive and have quite some limitations. I am guessing most people can live with that?

Dalas120

Walt Some thoughts on nukes:

Right now, missile launchers don't factor in ship velocity when deciding when to shoot. This would be nice to have for all missiles, but is especially important for nukes because of their very slow projectile speed. Maybe remove nuke guidance, especially if it makes this easier to do.

I also suggest having nukes shoot out from the launcher at a high speed, then slow down to "cruising speed" over a couple of seconds.

What would you think about the name "Sub-nuclear Torpedo"?

Armor currently makes nukes completely worthless, but that will change if explosion mechanics change.

I really like how nuke explosions expand. It looks really cool.

Is it still planned to have a separate unloaded storage and loaded firing tube for missiles? IMO that's very important to make nukes interesting.

Dalas120

I'm still in favor of the raycasts method of doing explosions (or an approximation). So a shield would block 100% of damage as long as it's up, but if the missile kills the shield then the remaining explosion damage gets through. If there's any way to make that work on the technical end, I think it's by far the best option (for armor and internals as well).

Walt

Dalas120 I'm still in favor of the raycasts method of doing explosions (or an approximation). So a shield would block 100% of damage as long as it's up, but if the missile kills the shield then the remaining explosion damage gets through. If there's any way to make that work on the technical end, I think it's by far the best option (for armor and internals as well).

I'll think about this some more. My main issue with the raycast method, assuming I can get it performant enough, is that it doesn't really work with projectiles (unless I greatly increase the number of raycasts, which would impact performance).

I have another idea that's kind of a hybrid of both, which I'll continue to think about.

Dalas120 Right now, missile launchers don't factor in ship velocity when deciding when to shoot. This would be nice to have for all missiles, but is especially important for nukes because of their very slow projectile speed. Maybe remove nuke guidance, especially if it makes this easier to do.

Factoring in ship velocity for guided weapons is weird, not sure how that'd work.

Changing nukes to unguided is something I'm totally open to. (In which case, ship velocity would definitely be factored in.)

Dalas120 I also suggest having nukes shoot out from the launcher at a high speed, then slow down to "cruising speed" over a couple of seconds.

I'm not opposed to this, but why?

Dalas120 What would you think about the name "Sub-nuclear Torpedo"?

I don't mind calling it a torpedo (especially if it has no guidance), but I don't like the "Sub" part, sounds underwatery. How about "Tactical Nuclear Torpedo", or "Tac-Nuke" for short?

Dalas120 Is it still planned to have a separate unloaded storage and loaded firing tube for missiles? IMO that's very important to make nukes interesting.

I dunno, there's not a lot of room in the existing launchers without decreasing the size of the missiles. And I don't think I want to do have a "queue" with different missile types either, that's a bit complex in terms of design and very complex technically, it's not sitting right with me. I'd rather figure out a fast-loading solution that's simpler.

I wonder if missile storages could be used somehow? Like somehow a missile launcher could fast-load from an adjacent storage? Not sure.

Dalas120 I think that the number of shards per mine is very small, and their penetration (10!) is way too high. I would suggest significantly increasing the # of shards per mine, and decreasing their penetration from 10 to 3.

Wasn't the point of the mines to start fires deep in enemy ships?

Dalas120 The way mine attraction works also feels very odd. First off, they don't always aim for the closest part of the enemy ship. There's also no way to dodge or avoid a mine once it's locked on - they accelerate very fast and hunt you forever. I suggest making mine acceleration work like gravity. So they would be attracted rapidly to a very heavy enemy, but would be barely attracted at all to a very small enemy. Small, fast ships might be able to get through a minefield without taking hits.

Making mines attracted to the closest point on a ship is probably easy. Making mines realistically attracted to a ship depending on its size and shape is not feasible, that's too complex a calculation to run performantly. Making mines more attracted to larger/heavier ships is easy, but then you have strange edge cases like what if only a long skinny part of an otherwise large/heavy ship is close to a mine, realistically the mine wouldn't be strongly attracted to the ship, but without taking the actual mass distribution of the ship into consideration, the mine would be attracted strongly towards the ship.

Dalas120 Is it still planned to have mines spread out automatically?

Not sure. One of the reasons I didn't do that in this prototype or make mines repulsed by their own ships was so that you could potentially build ships to physically manipulate the mines, like building bucks to release a bunch of mines on the enemy, crazy (maybe OP?) strategies like that.

Dalas120 Also, I noticed that mines don't time out. Is that permanent, or will they eventually have a time limit/per-launcher limit?

Also not sure, need to test what the practical limit is.