samsonazs wrote:

The main problem we face here is that any projectile weapon is currently weak.

And the problem before was that kinetic weapons just were to good not to use.

samsonazs wrote:

Shileds provide very little defence agains energy weapons. Details are discussed in this thread.

agreed. I'm not a big fan of shields since forever. They feel unsubstantial to say at least.

samsonazs wrote:

Adjusting shields to provide better defence agains energy weapons solves just part of the problem.

Another one is that missiles are affected a lot by shields and they shouldn't be. Projectile weapons should be countered just a little by energy defence and countered more by hull plating.

Well, I'm ok with that Shields are not just there for energy weapons and hull plating just to counter kinetics. (If that's how it's working)

samsonazs wrote:

The last issue is the flak efficiency.

Keep in mind that currently there is a bug in the game (reported here) that doesn't scale flak defence on larger hulls.

Flak defence should be 2 times better on Hunter / Coordinator class hulls and 4 times better or Arks / Carriers.

This means that we are in even bigger inballance then what is written here.

perhaps it's intended. I noticed that, too and put flak on smaller ships. It also keeps me building these smaller ships throughout the game. So, could be intentional.

samsonazs wrote:

I have a few simple solutions to the flak system that should work:

1) Flak defence could have a cooldown just like any other weapon. This way it isn't as effictive all the time.

     But it doesn't mean that if you have 4 guns then all of them fire at a single missile and everything goes into cooldown.

     It is enough that one fires and goes into cooldown and the others remains active waiting for targets.

I'm absolutely against a flak cooldown. Cooldowns should be used sparsely. This game is already hard to balance. Tweak around more with the cooldowns and this problem won't get smaller. On the contrary.

samsonazs wrote:

2) A rebalance is needed in flak defence as it is too powerfull right now. But on the other hand a reduction on the missile damage is also significant.

That's the problem. Now it's too good against missiles. But, I guess it's intended as the game forces me to stop using flak as cheap all around solution.

samsonazs wrote:

And as a general rule all weapon damages should be lowered (or defences increased) as battles end to quickly and are too binary but that is a separate topic ;)

I disagree. I'd probably skip the battles if they'd last longer.

My biggest gripe with swarm missiles is that only one target is attacked by a launcher. Defeats the purpose of a MIRV.

Idea1: 

The problem is in the combat calculation. Either we shoot synced missiles to make it reliable, so all missiles always face all flaks, and thus it is reliable. Or instead of treating missiles as entities with HP that are being damaged by a weapon, the solution would be to treat FLAK the same way shields are treated.

That means flak "absorbs" a percentage of kinetic missile damage, just like shields absorb damage. In that way, flak is a damage reduction percentage and cannot do overkill.

Adding more FLAK needs to have a logarithmic progression, that can never reach 100%. So the more FLAK you add, the less efficient that FLAK addition got.

Though the visual 3D representation of such an approach would probably have side effects, as missiles just pop in mid air, possibly without being fired at, since visualization and mechanic are not aligned. Or missiles being shot at for a long time, but not popping.

Idea2:

Consideration of missile speed, distance to target and angle. If there is actually a physics engine running in the background....  I don't know.

The closer a missile gets, the less hit chance the flak has. This would also resemble real world physics :)   If the angle of attack increased, the transversal velocity increases the angular velocity, making it harder to hit the target.

So missiles that change speed and accelerate non linearly are harder to hit, and missiles that get closer are even harder to hit.

In order to resemble this in the game, FLAK could have a damage fall-off, starting with peak damage at maximum short range, and rapidly falling off, while addionally getting penalized for shooting at missiles with a high angle of attack. If that info is even in the system. No clue how much of what we see is actually calculated.

And this would probably make missile effectiveness less predictable and more random.

Idea3:

Just rebalance it, cause what I just thought about is probably all to crazy for a release game at this stage anyway...  :D

Slashman wrote:

Maybe I misunderstood how flak works, but I thought it could only fire so much every round. So synced or not, swarm missiles would soak up flak that would otherwise be turned against normal missiles. Well it should work that way anyway.

Flak has a maximum and minimum range and fires non stop at anything between those ranges. Flak dps is extremely high (like 300 dps vs 90 hp missiles) but the range band is very narrow and it takes missiles less than 1s to pass though the flak zone so if your missiles are not synced perfectly and are staggered by more than 0.5s they will effectively count as 2 separate salvos and flak will have 2 opportunities to fire at them. Stacked flak forms a wall that is almost impossible to get though since your missiles will spread out naturally just from the minor differences from ship positions and angles they fire at (not to mention different cooldowns and speed between normal and swarm missiles.). That's why just one ship could defend against whole fleet with missiles after the flak changes. Even after the nerfs it's still extremely effective. The long range lower dps flak from before was actually much better for consistant effectiveness and easier balancing.

Sublustris wrote:

I find them quite effective. Plus this is the way to go against flak heavy fleets with shields. As a setback they have lover DPS then normal missiles.

You'll be glad to know that missiles only have 60% shield penetration and shield absorption is so high that they are 100% effective against both energy and kinetic weapons. So missiles are stopped both by shields and armor. Their dps is less than half of normal missiles. Normal missile dps is not that great anyhow so when you cut it in half it's worse than any other weapon. And they're still not actually immune to flak. Just about 3x more resistant than normal missiles. So you won't get full effectiveness anyway vs flak. They're inferior to energy weapons in every way.

What's the point of swarm missiles?

A missile weapon that's resistant to flak?

You know what else is resistant to flak? Energy weapons which do comparable damage at long range and much higher damage on shorter ranges

A weapon to soak up flak to cover your normal missiles?

Then why does it have different cooldown? The weapons fire completely out of sync and it's very unlikely that both normal and swarm missiles will arrive at the same time to go though flak. Especially with the narrow band flak we have now.

If the enemy does have flak you're better of using non missile weapon because swarm missiles have terrible dps.

If the enemy doesn't have flak you're better off using normal missiles.

There is no situation where this weapon is useful.

Also when you have a lot of them and they get into flak range the game freezes and drops to like 3fps because the cpu can't calculate so many flak hits.

plutar wrote:

For the performance issues I can't help you there, they run smooth as silk at 4k for me.  

Normally they're not a problem but I had a fleet with lots of swarm missiles and facing a lot of flak and the moment the swarms entered flak range fps dropped massively and it was stuttering until missiles passed flak range.

plutar wrote:

Simple fix is to have swarm missles fire on the same cooldown as missles.   Or syncronize them in some way.  They still serve a use if your using a fighter+bomber and boarding pod fleet to mitigate the flak damage they are recieving.  

I'm pretty sure anti squadron flak and anti missile flak are separate and they fire independently because of vastly different ranges they have.

So again, why do swarm missiles exist at all? They don't provide the cover for normal missiles because they have different RoF and if you want to use a weapon resistant to flak just use beams or lasers. Swarm missiles have such pathetic dps that they're straight up worse than them.

On second tier you will always pick autonomus construction first for tanks and +CP because of how important they are. If you decide to pick up basic swarm missiles after that you'll also unlock next weapon tier at the same which gives you basic phased beam.

Let's compare them. Basic swarm 17 dps on 100/50/25 accuracy vs 19 dps on 100/100/100. The basic missiles are instantly 100% obsolete the moment you research them.

For advanced missiles you can just compare them to normal missiles you get on the same tier for free. 27 vs 61 dps. Enemy would need to have enough flak to shoot something like 2/3 of your missiles for the swarm missiles to be worth it. If you're facing somebody with this much flak the missiles are gonna be a bad choice anyway even if they're swarm so you're better off using just lasers and beams which do comparable damage on long range with much better closer range accuracy.

Currently there is absolutely no situation where those missiles would be better than normal missiles or some other weapon. Their damage is just too low.

They look really cool though so I really wish they were viable.

This is another issue I addressed in my combat mod by syncing the swarm missile's rate of fire with regular missiles, so that they can actually fulfil their role of distracting flak. You are right also that with the base game's weapon balance, there is no reason to use missiles at all anyway.