[sgqwonkian]

In Drives'R'Us, I cranked up the damage of the missiles pretty significantly. Then, when I recalculated all the costs, I also included a penalty / price break on anything that could be shot down.

For example:
Fission Missile in the default game: COST 126, DAMG 1800
Fission Missile in Drives'R'Us 4.0: COST 100, DAMG 3000

So it's about 25% "cheaper", yet does nearly twice as much damage (enough to knock out a fully-charged Electron Matrix Shield and still get 1/3 of it's damage through to the hull).

It's still kinda rare that a missile gets through, but when it happens it can really wreck you. So, point defense becomes a lot more important... and thus I increased the COST on the point defense weapons. One of my stated goals with Drives'R'Us was to make the COST values (and thus the coin/star ratings) on the weapons indicative of their potency, and largely I feel I achieved that.

However, you made a compelling argument that there's still plenty of non-point-defense ways to take out missiles. Clearly the missiles are much better against the aliens/AI than against a skilled human player. Off the top of my head I can't recall if I took the potential "point-defense like" qualities of a continual-beam energy weapon into account when I set the pricing on them, either. I'd have to go dig through my notes.

Hmm... this may provoke another round of playtesting, equation tweaking, and COST rebalancing. I'll think about it for a day or two, but this topic of conversation may (may) inspire a version 4.1.