Point Def. too tough against missiles-change it.

[Cranex]

I'd like to play a game using Missiles on
my ships instead of the same old thing,
Shields/Beams/Combat Sensors/ECM. This combo
can take out a Missile 5 equipped equally sized ship easily. In my opinion, the numbers on the point defence weapons should be decreased so they do less damage against missiles.
Also, on the main screen when you look at a system with for ex, 5 planets, several different enemy ships, (just a lot of things cluttering up the view, time and time again I have to strain to find the planet I want. I know it has a border around it. Why can't the border pulse or flicker. And why can't the planets spin slowly. Neat oooo
I LOVE THIS GAME!! It just need tweaking.
========================================
I read all your thoughts (as of March 27), and boy, am I impressed! Good ideas guys (and girls) BTW, any girls play SE4?
[This message has been edited by Cranex (edited 26 March 2001).]

[This message has been edited by Cranex (edited 27 March 2001).]

[Baal]

I agree completely. Even a PCD I can take down hordes of missiles. I was thinking though that we could change the hit points on the missiles so that they can withstand more PDC punishment. It would take more hits to kill a missile. And have the hit points progressively increase with the tech levels.

If PDCs act the same with missiles as they do with fighters they will try to take out one missile and then move on to the next. So that while not all the missiles get through, at least some are getting through.

In my opinion this is not unbalanced as PDCs also increase in damage dealt with each level. This moddification would definitely make Seekers a viable weapon in the late game.

Just my 2 cents.

[Suicide Junkie]

Try adding a new string of components:

Mini-missiles. They would be say 10Kt, do 1/5 th the damage, and be otherwise equivalent to CSMs

Thus, you can overload PDCs with volume, while still having a reasonable damage factor.

[Deathstalker]

MiniMissiles is a great idea, just don't try adding them as a CompEnhancement mount. It seems the damage is hardcoded, I added the mount that is 1/2 size, 1/2damage and +2 range, adding cost for the range advantage and it seemed to work fine, till I looked at the damage it was doing. The missiles said 30 points of damage but were really doing 60. I don't know if this would be the same for newly created componants. And yes, trying to modd the mount for more damage dosn't work either. But on a second note this could work just as well, just use the mount for 1/2 size, add more cost and then it could overwhelm the pd cannons, and as a mount the AI would use is as well (just change the ship size restrictions for mounts, and leave out normal mounts.) Or maybe its just 3am and I am babbling and need sleep. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

------------------
"The Empress took your name away," said Chance.
Owen smiled coldly. "It wasn't hers to take. I'm a Deathstalker until I die. And we never forget a slight or an enemy." -Owen Deathstalker.

[Possum]

death stalker, suicide_junkie, you guys got some great ideas there!

[Griffin]

I think the extra speed missiles are getting will help with this issue, will generally mean that PDC only get one shot off at missiles rather than the average two they get now.

[Arralen]

Dunno where the problem is, really - have blown up lots 'n lots of AI ships using missiles .. no matter if the AI ships have PD or not http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

I wonder how you're using the missiles .. shooting all of them at one ship at once should really help .. especially if you move your ships away from the enemy .. the AI never knows if to fire allguns at the missles or get at least some shots at your distant ships http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

And concerning upping the missile damage resistance - the CSM1 has resistance of 30, while the PD1 only deals 25 damage, so it needs 2 shots to take down the missile already ?!

As it was said, the higher speed will shurely help, too, and if this isn't enough, just make the range of all missiles (don't forget plasma, shards and these bio-thingies) +2.

While this seems counter-intuitive at first, it would have a big effect on combat .. it will make the enemies beam weapons utterly useless .. so while you'll score few hits, he won't get any !!

A.

PS: I forgot - o.c. you could always use more than one missile component on a ship, but you already thought about that, don't you ?

[This message has been edited by Arralen (edited 26 March 2001).]

[Nitram Draw]

I use a lot of AAA destroyers and cruisers. Each usually has between 12-20 PD weapons. Very few missles or fighters get through in a fleet with 2-3 of these attached.
One problem with missles is the rate of fire. Firing every 2-3 turns makes it easier for the PD weapons to do their work. As Arralen points out the key to attacking with missles is to overwhelm the defenses. Perhaps a lighter damaged/shorter range missle with a rate of fire of 1 would help balance it out.

[DirectorTsaarx]

As of patch 1.27 or 1.30, the hit points for seekers DO increase for higher tech levels. (Especially for Plasma Torps).

I think they also tweaked supply usage for seekers...

[Baron Munchausen]

The simplest way to make the missile/pdc situation more balanced is to remove the built-in BONUS to hit from the PDC. They have a 50 percent modifier in the components.txt files, so as things are now they are at 100 percent to hit at full range of five. Remove the 50 percent bonus and they are only 50 percent likely to hit at full range. Unless you have Combat Sensors, and then the CS bonus is added to your PDC just as it is to other weapons. So, you'll actually see pdc MISS once in a while. Amazing! http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif Now that's realism. I also wish MM would add some way to modify the 'ecm' value of seekers so you can have better protected missiles at higher techs but this is a start. Another good change would be if missiles could actually MISS themselves once in a while. Missiles and mines need a real 'to hit' chance instead of this infallible damage.

[mac5732]

before 1.30 the AI was sitting duck for missles because that's was all you needed to take him out. Now its somewhat harder as the AI has better missle defense. I think if you reduce PD again the AI will again be handicapped. Now you launch your msls and then you have to close with beams etc weapons
and slug it out. The AI defense now makes you put these weapons types on your ships besides just loads of missles. If you mix ftrs & missles together some will get thru, but PD's should stop a good portion of msls,
or ftrs, I would look more at changing battle tactics and possibly designing an armored missle with a slight increase in defense against PDs, but to decrease PDs In my opinion would hamper the AI and a human player would just pound it again with waves of missles. Just my opions Mac

[DirectorTsaarx]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
The simplest way to make the missile/pdc situation more balanced is to remove the built-in BONUS to hit from the PDC. They have a 50 percent modifier in the components.txt files, so as things are now they are at 100 percent to hit at full range of five. Remove the 50 percent bonus and they are only 50 percent likely to hit at full range.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I think that bonus 'to hit' is to counteract the defense bonus on fighters. Without the bonus, PDC will ALWAYS miss fighters at range 5 (in absence of combat sensors and ship experience, of course...).

[Trancejeremy]

What I'd like to see, is something like you could do in Moo 2. Missiles could be armored, fast, had ECM, etc.

And what about decoy missiles? That would help

[Puke]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Trancejeremy:
What I'd like to see, is something like you could do in Moo 2. Missiles could be armored, fast, had ECM, etc.

And what about decoy missiles? That would help<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

the se4 system is a little more abstract. what you could do is offer missiles with higher damage resistance at higher tech levels. it could represent any of the above things you wanted. of course, increasing speed would be a benifit in of its self.

[Q]

There is a very simple possibility to increase the power of missiles:
Reduce the "Tonnage Space Taken".
It is now 50kT for CSM and Plasma missiles. If you reduced it, may be gradually according to the tech levels, you get more missiles in your ships and it will be harder for the point defence cannons to destroy all of them.

[Suicide Junkie]

For another solution, but some fighters in your missile ships, make 'em all shields & engines.

The fighters will absorb 5-6 PD shots each, and your missiles will devastate the enemy ships. Then, with crippled enemies, use beams to finish em.

Or, put a long-range tractor beam on your missile ship. You pull the one enemy in, and hit 'em point blank with missiles, giving them no chance to use their PD effectively.

[Nitram Draw]

Can you put PD on fighters?

[Windborne]

For armored, ecm using missiles just create fighters with explosive warheads and a kamakazi tactic, granted you have to build each "Missil" seperately but they do tons of damage.

[Suicide Junkie]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Nitram Draw:
Can you put PD on fighters?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>


Not in the original game, but it is easily modded. (just set a PDC to be placed on fighters too)
Unless you make a new component, though, only the large fighters would be able to cram in a full-fledged PDC http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

---------------
As for armored/ECM missiles, just add a new missile type (copy the entire CSM tech thread) and add more hitpoints & cost to the missiles.

[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 28 March 2001).]

[Baron Munchausen]

There is an image for a small PDC in the components directory. You just need to edit the components.txt file to create it for fighters. Now if MM will just get DRONES into the game so we can put them on drones, too. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

[Baal]

One of my missile solving problems was to make a flare/decoy missile that could absorb 2 or 3 PDC hits and place it as the first weapon on your ship with normal missiles after. Since the weapons fire left to right the flare missile would absorb the hits of 2- 3 PDCs and leaving the path fairly clear for the other CSMs to hit the ship.

This would be a neat support tech to add. It would help keep fighters alive as well.

[Suicide Junkie]

In my mod, I went with splitting PD into two techs.

1) PDCs - same as before, but range reduced by 50% or so & limited at 3. This means that the PDC is only gonna protect you, and maybe the guy right beside you.

2) PDLasers - long range, up to 7, but damage reduced to 50%. These guys can protect your entire fleet, but you need a LOT.

So, what you have is a tradeoff, either take PD that defends you well, or take PD that defends the entire fleet, but not as effetively

[Nitram Draw]

Thats what I like. No one component is the answer you need the right mix.

[Jourin]

I disagree. I think that the PD's are fairly balanced. Maybe a slight increase in missile speed is warranted. What I like is the external missile pod (ala David Webb's Honor series) component. It is a one shot deal in combat because it has a reload rate of 30, but it only takes up 1 space (10KT). Usually I Put these on smaller ships with some continuous weapon like a DUC or MB, or APB. I now get one shot to overload the PDs. Add a mix of missile ships with normal 3 reload missiles and I have an effective mix. One turn of massed fire to overload the PDs, then a mix of missiles and continuous fire. I think this balances out very well.

[KiloOhm]

Now that sounds like a cool idea. Have you posted it? Are there other changes?

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by suicide_junkie:
In my mod, I went with splitting PD into two techs.

1) PDCs - same as before, but range reduced by 50% or so & limited at 3. This means that the PDC is only gonna protect you, and maybe the guy right beside you.

2) PDLasers - long range, up to 7, but damage reduced to 50%. These guys can protect your entire fleet, but you need a LOT.

So, what you have is a tradeoff, either take PD that defends you well, or take PD that defends the entire fleet, but not as effetively<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>



------------------
Regards,
KiloOhm

[Nitram Draw]

I still think the biggest problem is with the accuracy of both PD and missles. If they both were about half as accurate as they are now I think it would reduce a lot of the complaints.

[Suicide Junkie]

It just happens to be a part of the Pirates mod I made. Check out the "A pirates Life for me" thread for details & files.

PS: I only created the mod, most of the ideas are from others who posted in the thread.

[Deathstalker]

check out the new 1.33 list, #25 &27, speed for seekers is up but the bonus for pdc has been increased to. I find that my crystal torp are useless as it is (to easy to shoot down) with a rof of 2, this may hurt seekers even more.

------------------
"The Empress took your name away," said Chance.
Owen smiled coldly. "It wasn't hers to take. I'm a Deathstalker until I die. And we never forget a slight or an enemy." -Owen Deathstalker.

[Suicide Junkie]

As long as the PDC can't shoot down more than 1 at a time, you're in the same boat as any other missile system, but you get 50% more shots! If you're really stuck, try flying towards the enemy firing. You can almost keep up with your missiles, so you can get two loads of them to hit at the same time.

[Nitram Draw]

I think we are in a viciuos cycle; faster seekers, more accurate PD, more damage resistent missles, smaller size, faster reload etc.
If seekers were affected by ECM 3 , -60% to hit, would you build lots of missle ships?
If PD missed 70% of the time would you build PD ships?
I think they can be balanced but not necessarily by mods. Can you change seeker or PD accuracy?

[Suicide Junkie]

What I think we should do is take the seekers, take the PD, and compare them to beams & shields+regenerators.

Perhaps, One PDC should be very roughly equal to enough regenerators to recharge the shields in 3 turns from the missile damage.
The missiles' damage should be set to get a damage factor of about 1.0 (average), since they have long range & 100% accuracy, but can be stopped by PDC/shields)

given a missle damage of about 120, we need a regeneration of about 40 pts/turn. With regenerators, you need 2 SRIVs so the PDCs would be 2x the size they are now.
given a missile damage of about 120, and a shield with 360 (rounded) hitpoints, you need 1/3rd of a shield to block 1 missile, making the PDC a one-shot deal @ 13kt

------------------
Ok, clearly doubling the size of PDCs to match them up to regenerators & shielding is not ideal. Since they only protect against missiles, and not beams, they should be reduced in size compared to regeneration.
Thus, we end up with PDC like they are now.

Answer: use strategic genious to outwit the enemy.
Ie. If the enemy has no PD, use missiles. If the enemy loads up on PD, then he skimped on weapons and/or defences, so rip 'em a new one with beams.
With a mixed fleet, tell beam ships to attack PD ships, and missile ships to attack beam ships.
With mixed ships, going extreme either way can get you the win.

[Atraikius]

I happened to notice that through the various Posts that it seems that the missile/point defense issue bounces back and forth on which is too tough. To me this seems as it is causing more problems that what may have been in the game to begin with. First we saw mods to increase the amount of PD on AI ships, now the updates of what is on the beta test Versions indicate that the speed of missles is going to be increased. Is there going to be another demand for increaseing the effectiveness of PD after the next Version?

Part of what makes this such a great game is the ability to customize it to make it how you want it to be, but after making some massive mods for SE3 right after the capibility to modify the components and facilities was included, I realized the many of the changes I had tried actually took away some of the uniqueness of the game, and made it more generic feeling since items that were once useful to some extent now were realitively useless. I found that you really needed to sit back and look at how each change would effect other items in the game, otherwise any mod was pointless. In a way I see this starting to happen to SE4, point defenses were improved, now missles are improving; APB's had their damage and range increased, the damage is understandable, but to me the range increase seems to make meson bLasters worthless, and coupled with the fact that phased shields are easily available eventually this tends to take away a lot from the phased polaron beams. Those two used to be the long range beam weapons with the highest levels of the phased polaron beam having a slight edge in range over the APB at the cost of decreased damage with its abiltiy to ignore shields being offset by its increased research cost, and the meson bLaster having a longer range at the expense of damage. Now with APB having a range of 6, to give the meson bLaster some worth it would either need to do heavier damage than the APB (at the expense of ripper beams), or bump its range to 7, but then it would start effecting the usefullness of the long-range heavy weapons.

I apologize for the rambling, but I don't want to see all the urging for fixing one type of weapon cause an arms race that makes this game loose its enjoyment value.

To return to the topic, I agree that there is an issure between PD and Missiles, but instead of just increasing thier abilities (speed, damage, etc...), couldn't a change be proposed to MM to change missiles to be worked similar to fighters? A basic structure to support that is already in place from the fighters, then missles could be costomized and tailored to each race, sacrificing armor or damage for extra speed or ECM abilities. Also, instead of being a weapon itself that fires every three turns, now the missle component would be a cargo component, and you would have to construct the missles like fighters. This way, missles could be as dangerous as anyone would want, yet would not take away anything from the PD effectiveness because the effectiveness of the missiles is also compensated by a limited supply and a cost to build them.

[Nitram Draw]

Atraikius,
You have a great point about how changes affect the game. I am one of those who would like to see more added to the game but I realize you just can't add without changing the balance of the game. That is the hardest part of creating a component, not what it will add but what will it take away too.
MM has done a great job in creating the large number of components and having most of them be useful. The large number also lets you play your favorite style, everything has a counter. This is why I like the game so much.
I think that every patch will see some component tweaked, like the PD and missles seem to be in the upcoming patch. They must have a good group of testers because so far they have kept the balance with each patch.
I'm not sure how to balance the PD question. I have found that missles are ineffective against massed PD, 1-2 destroyer with only PD on it seems to protect my fleets from all missle/fighter attacks and that seems wrong. On the other hand missles always hit so maybe the problem lies with the accuracy of the two weapons. Make each less likely to hit each other and it may balance itself out.

[This message has been edited by Nitram Draw (edited 30 March 2001).]

[KiloOhm]

Ok, that's just plain nasty putting point defense on fighters... you sick little monkey. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon12.gif

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Nitram Draw:
Can you put PD on fighters?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>



------------------
Regards,
KiloOhm

[Nitram Draw]

Hey whats wrong with a little air superiority http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

[Arralen]

Another thought:

- make PDC have range 1 .. this way they'll only protect the ship they're mounted on, any maybe a neighbouring ship. With enough missiles you could still flood the defences and do some serious damage .. but you'll only be able to do this every 3 turns ..

- make PDM which have range 5..8, and reload time of 2; tell the AI to build "Aegis Cruisers"

Have tested this setup with the Olesen Techset in SE3, and it worked quite well !!

A.