With a mod you could increase the number of rounds in a phase to the double amount, impose a reload-time for kinetics and beams and double traveltime and reload time for missiles. This would give you double the amount of flak-chances at half the chance for each shot. If you have technological superiority, simply overwhelming the flak-defenses would be considerably harder.

fractal wrote:
Making missiles intercepted by flak do a small amount of unpreventable damage - let's say something like 5% of the usual total with no possibility of a critical. That way, you know you're going to get at least something out of your missiles guaranteed but there's also a chance that you get something much much more impressive out of them if the enemy didn't outfit their ships correctly.

This is a good idea! I still dont like the image of a gigantic, mountain large dreadnougth getting blastet by two not intercepted missles but getting the mechanics away from from the current 1<->0 picture is a good start.

I agree with both of you, making missiles do less damage and lowering flak efficiency makes them functionally equivalent to the other weapons systems in the game. I don't think missiles are too powerful but they are unbalanced in that they are totally effectively or totally ineffective.



I'm thus leaning increasingly toward the idea of raising flak overall efficiency a little from where it stands, rebalancing it to allow more shots so that a few good flak can overcome clouds of weak missiles but making missiles intercepted by flak do a small amount of unpreventable damage - let's say something like 5% of the usual total with no possibility of a critical. That way, you know you're going to get at least something out of your missiles guaranteed but there's also a chance that you get something much much more impressive out of them if the enemy didn't outfit their ships correctly.

Apheirox wrote:
The suggestion makes no sense... Lowering missile lethality while decreasing flak efficiency puts missiles at the same strength as now. All you're accomplishing with it is making missiles less unique and different from the other weapon types.



If you put any armor on a ship at all it won't get killed by a single missile. If the problem is missiles are too powerful (I doubt it) then instead increase flak efficiency so the chances of that single missile slipping through approaches zero. I very much disagree with making missiles work the exact same way as the other weapons.

The problem with missles is not that they are too powerful. The problem is that there is no borderline between "All enemy missles intercepted" and "My Complete Fleet gets blasted". One single missle (not taking into account any critical chance) can do up to 1000 damage. A dreadnought has around 1500hp. So two unintercepted Missles have a good chance to blast it up. This vast damage can not be countered with armor. Instead you stuff your ship up with masses of flak and...voila instad of loosing all ships in the first round now you dont even take a scratch...this is extremely boring!



Battle should be less binary. I have seen hundreds of battles always going the same way: Long Range phase -> Suicide Missle ships launch their load and get blasted by beam weapons in the same round -> two rounds of waiting while watching the last Suicide Missle ships exploding for hours -> Missles Hit?-> Fleet dead/Missles intercepted?-> no scratch.



There is nothing in between. No thrill watching the battle proceeding while Ships at both sides get damaged and destroyed. No everything is reduced to a binary yes/no event in the first round.



If you would reduce missle damage AND Flak efficiency there would be a better chance that ships rather get damaged then beeing either instantly destroyed or dont't take a scratch.

ørret wrote:
Considering the vast amount of damage a not intercepted Missle inflicts tweaking the Evasion/Intercept concept alone won't make the missle mechanics more interesting. It is still kind of binary..Missle gets through => Ship dead. I would prefer decreasing the Missle damage and at the same time further decrease the flak efficiency. The outcome should be that missles are even harder to intercept but ships can sustain much more missle hits than currently. This would also reduce the appeal to create cheap missle-only ships that explode when they are barely touched but before that spitting out masses of missles each of which able to kill a fully loaded battleship with one hit.

The suggestion makes no sense... Lowering missile lethality while decreasing flak efficiency puts missiles at the same strength as now. All you're accomplishing with it is making missiles less unique and different from the other weapon types.



If you put any armor on a ship at all it won't get killed by a single missile. If the problem is missiles are too powerful (I doubt it) then instead increase flak efficiency so the chances of that single missile slipping through approaches zero. I very much disagree with making missiles work the exact same way as the other weapons.

Considering the vast amount of damage a not intercepted Missle inflicts tweaking the Evasion/Intercept concept alone won't make the missle mechanics more interesting. It is still kind of binary..Missle gets through => Ship dead. I would prefer decreasing the Missle damage and at the same time further decrease the flak efficiency. The outcome should be that missles are even harder to intercept but ships can sustain much more missle hits than currently. This would also reduce the appeal to create cheap missle-only ships that explode when they are barely touched but before that spitting out masses of missles each of which able to kill a fully loaded battleship with one hit.

fractal wrote:
I don't think you could have made my point any better, Draco. As you note with your underlining, he was talking about increasing the travel time of missiles and halving the chance of succeeding on each shot. That is not keeping everything else equal and increasing missile travel time.

Increasing missile travel time automatically incurs a "half accuracy" on flak. Unless you're saying half accuracy in addition to that. Which isn't clear.

It sounds like a good idea, but I'm not very good with the weapon physics in this game, so I can't be sure.

I don't think you could have made my point any better, Draco. As you note with your underlining, he was talking about increasing the travel time of missiles and halving the chance of succeeding on each shot. That is not keeping everything else equal and increasing missile travel time.



I do agree, however, that that solution is not a great one. It might work fine as a sort of homebrew modding solution but I'm personally more interested in trying to put out ideas that might help the dev team to come up with new and interesting solutions.

fractal wrote:
I fail to see the relevance. No one was talking about increasing the travel time of missiles and keeping everything else the same...

No?

Grubsnik wrote:
With a mod you could increase the number of rounds in a phase to the double amount, impose a reload-time for kinetics and beams and double traveltime and reload time for missiles. This would give you double the amount of flak-chances at half the chance for each shot. If you have technological superiority, simply overwhelming the flak-defenses would be considerably harder.

Kinetics and beams aren't relevant to the equation, and there's no mention of reducing flak accuracy. The "half chance" is entirely due to increasing the rounds by double and is baked in.

Draco18s wrote:
Except that everything else being equal, increasing the travel time of missiles, flak gets stronger.

I fail to see the relevance. No one was talking about increasing the travel time of missiles and keeping everything else the same...

Except that everything else being equal, increasing the travel time of missiles, flak gets stronger.

It's not really about making flak better - it's about redistributing the effectiveness of flak. I'd like to see in fairly equal missile exchanges, ships getting damaged but not destroyed outright by misiles. At the moment, it's very very rare that I see a missile volley doing moderate damage - they either all get intercepted and do no damage or they destroy their target. I also think it's cheeky to say the least that glass cannon destroyer fleets can take on a tanked up dreadnought fleet simply by loading up on cheap missiles - once you get to rank 4 or 5 missiles even level 9 flak on the dreadnoughts won't be enough.



Even if the player building the destroyers has access to much higher rank missiles, there is a huge industry saving to be made by using lower tech ones. Effectively allowing a little industry to take out a lot of industry on the part of the defending player. Basically, if you want to make an all offense missile fleet, you should at least pay the cost of outfitting it with decent missiles.



A further plausible idea would be to make missiles do a small amount of splash damage (some small fraction of their total damage perhaps?) even if they are shot down. If your flak detonates something like an antimatter warhead a mile or so away from your spaceship, the damage will be greatly reduced but it's still likely to cause a little damage. You might raise the interception odds slightly to counter this. In this way, overwhelming numbers becomes less of a hard counter both in terms of missiles vs flak and flak vs missiles.

Grubsnik wrote:
With a mod you could increase the number of rounds in a phase to the double amount, impose a reload-time for kinetics and beams and double traveltime and reload time for missiles. This would give you double the amount of flak-chances at half the chance for each shot. If you have technological superiority, simply overwhelming the flak-defenses would be considerably harder.

In other words: make the best flak even better.

At present, the missile mechanics seem a little too binary to me. It seems incredibly rare that a missile attack results in a moderate level of damage to a ship, it either destroys it utterly or does absolutely nothing based on no more than how many missiles are thrown at you. It seems particularly odd that pathetically low tech missiles can overwhelm high level missile defenses with sheer numbers and still inflict massive damage.



I therefore suggest the following change: Make missile-defense have many more shots than the missiles and lower the probability of interception. For the purpose of the example mechanics I have designed, I have assumed that a missile defense should be capable of shooting down a maximum of three missiles.



I note that the game includes 9 levels of both missiles and flak, so I use the level difference - let's call that D, between the two to derive an interception probability. Such that



p = (D+10)/2)*(1 + (D+10)/2))/100



This formula is a little oblique, so let's give some examples. That means with equal techs, the flak has a 30% chance of intercepting one missile - but remember the flak gets three shots per module. If the missile attacker has a 2 level tech advantage, that falls to 20% or 8.75% with a 5 level tech advantage. If the defender has a tech advantage of 2 levels, the interception probability is 42% or 63.75% with a 5 level tech advantage.



So, what would this mean in a battle situation?



Let's assume the attacker has 5 missile launchers on his ship and the defender has 5 flak. The attacker has 5 shots, the defender has 15. So, what do the statistics look like?



Probability of defender shooting down all 5 missiles: 48.5%

Probability of defender shooting down at least 4: 70.3%

Probability of defender shooting down at least 3: 87.3%

Probability of defender shooting down at least 2: 96.5%

Probability of defender shooting down at least 1: 99.5%



Attacker has a 2 level tech advantage:



Probability of defender shooting down all 5 missiles: 16.4%

Probability of defender shooting down at least 4: 35.2%

Probability of defender shooting down at least 3: 60.2%

Probability of defender shooting down at least 2: 83.3%

Probability of defender shooting down at least 1: 96.5%



Defender has a 2 level tech advantage:



Probability of defender shooting down all 5 missiles: 82.6%

Probability of defender shooting down at least 4: 93.2%

Probability of defender shooting down at least 3: 98.1%

Probability of defender shooting down at least 2: 99.6%

Probability of defender shooting down at least 1: 99.9%



So far I've only shown the effect of equal number of missiles and flak though. What happens if the sneaky attacker has put twice the amount of missiles on his ships as we have defense? So now, he's firing 10 missiles and we have 15 shots in defense.



At equal techs we have no chance!:



Probability of defender shooting down all 10 missiles: 0.4%

Probability of defender shooting down at least 9: 1.5%

Probability of defender shooting down at least 8: 5%



You get the idea, this is going to end badly for the defender.



In order to spare you lots more painful probabilities, it appears using this system for an amount of flak to become remotely viable as a defense, you need to have a 3 level tech advantage:



Probability of defender shooting down all 10 missiles: 12.9%

Probability of defender shooting down at least 9: 27%

Probability of defender shooting down at least 8: 46.1%



If you're lucky enough to be attacked by someone with 7 levels lower missile tech than defense you'll have an almost 95% chance of taking no damage, even with only half as much flak. Equally if the attacker has a 7 level tech advantage, the defender would not even manage to shoot down a single missile over 55% of the time - even with 5 flak guns.



Based on the amount of damage each missile does, this should hopefully lead to them being a little less binary and inflicting moderate damage on vessels rather than the current everything or nothing weapons system that they appear to be. Hopefully this would also allow further tactical flexibility - you could decide to go all out for missile defense and conserve tonnage by using a smaller number of high tech missile defenses or you could say "to hell with tonnage" and try and cram your ship full of the inexpensive missile defenses and hope that sheer numbers do the trick.



Finally a little extra:



I think it would be neat from a game perspective to have some mechanism for having a fleet-wide missile defense system. That way, you could build neat combined fleets by packing small ships with missile defenses to aleviate the need for them on your big ships, which could in turn pack more firepower or other defenses. I don't know exactly how this would be implented but I suspect that just making missile defense fleet-wide would horrendously unbalance both the existing mechanics and my own presented above. One possible option would be to design a second kind of "fleet missile defense" module - this might give less shots than the "per ship" versions, allowing you the versatility of outscouring your missile defense to a single platform and the expense of some efficiency.



My suspicion is that this setup would make such a fleet extremely effective against enemies that pack a mix of weapons but inferior to a "per ship" missile defense loadout against an opponent that concentrates solely on overwhelming missile assaults.



I hope that some of this is in some way helpful!

One thing that I'm still not clear on from what you've said is, in the current system, does a single flak module just get 3 chances to shoot down a single missile or if it successfully shoots down a missile in an earlier round, can it actually switch targets to deal with another missile?



From my experience in game though, I think any problems with missiles are a little smaller when you are engaged in a relatively equal battle. The problem comes in the outlying situations, for example where one player has a huge tech advantage or in unequal battles - a particular problem I can see is using a huge number of glass cannon destroyers with cheap missiles against a fleet of dreadnoughts with state of the art flak. As it currently stands, the huge tech advantage of the dreadnought fleet doesn't really come into play it's purely a matter of numbers.



Now, if it's the case that flak can shoot down 3 missiles already, then perhaps the number of flak shots should be even higher. Missile defense on a spaceship would probably be some kind of slug for kinetic kill, probably much like a very small kinetic weapon or a small laser weapon so I don't seen a flavour problem with high rates of fire. In mathemetical terms, there doesn't really have to be a limit on the number of flak shots you allow, so long as the interception odds are revised down accordingly. Having lots of shots at a comapatively low probability of success ought to just lead to a lot of statistically average results.

You also forget: IF flak lacks intercept its combined with other flak to shoot down missile. Its reason why first flak was best flak, it had best intecept/weight in game and also 1 flak can shoot down max 1 missile per round.

You need to read the thread Draco linked to understand the formula. It seems, though, that missiles were never binary to begin with - just that the interception rate is so high it might as well be. As you can see from Draco's math there is a 96.3% chance to intercept a same-level missile. That also means I can't agree with you there's a problem with missiles - in fact I simply think your suggestion is silly; I mean, we're dealing with missiles, not tiny little metal fragments like from kinetic weapons, right? Of course a missile is going to deal high damage same as how in a first person shooter an RPG is going to deal more damage than a single bullet from an assault rifle but with a much slower rate of fire. A missile that *does* evade interception and hits may deal a lot of damage but it should happen very rarely and as such be a non-issue - do you yourself actually have Dreadnoughts blowing up, have you in fact seen it?

I did not completely understand the formula you have given but the idea of making the missle/interception system a bit less binary is good.



Generally Missles should be much harder to intercept but they should cause much less damage. Consider that a lv 8 missle causes up to 1000 damage at a normal hit. Even a Dreadnougth has only around 1500 HP meaning that two not intercepted missles have a good change blowing it up. This is completely stupid!

Thanks for clearing that up. So effectively the flak efficiency is nearly, but not quite, the 100% I supposed.