Combine Flak and Point defenses into one

[Thirlan]

Having the two of them, one for missiles and one for strike crafts is just unnecessary complication and adds no real depth. Please, just combine the two of them into one module for ships.

 

[Acheron]

Huh? Are Battleships no longer the best option?

 

[frozenparagon]

some of us ship/component modders have completely disabled those weapons in our mods or made the small lasers/kinetics into point_defense type rather than instant so they can attack fighters.
I've personally made the disruptor and autocannon both point defense type and the upgraded versions of the pd laser and flak respectively, but yeah having two types is mostly just for visual appeal for users. the best point defense period is using a modified autocannon. it looks cool as shit and shreds everything like a boss

 

[Thirlan]

some of us ship/component modders have completely disabled those weapons in our mods or made the small lasers/kinetics into point_defense type rather than instant so they can attack fighters.
I've personally made the disruptor and autocannon both point defense type and the upgraded versions of the pd laser and flak respectively, but yeah having two types is mostly just for visual appeal for users. the best point defense period is using a modified autocannon. it looks cool as shit and shreds everything like a boss

That actually sounds like a good idea to just have the smaller weapons handle it : P

 

[GOLANX]

That actually sounds like a good idea to just have the smaller weapons handle it : P

I think small weapons should be able to targets Strike Craft but not missiles. PD can hit both. Small weapons would target Strike Craft last, PD target them first.

 

[HFY]

some of us ship/component modders have completely disabled those weapons in our mods or made the small lasers/kinetics into point_defense type rather than instant so they can attack fighters.
I've personally made the disruptor and autocannon both point defense type and the upgraded versions of the pd laser and flak respectively, but yeah having two types is mostly just for visual appeal for users. the best point defense period is using a modified autocannon. it looks cool as shit and shreds everything like a boss

Swarmer Missiles might be another option, but they'd need to be re-coded to actually be multiple missiles and not just a "swarm" graphic on top of a single object.

 

[Cordane]

some of us ship/component modders have completely disabled those weapons in our mods or made the small lasers/kinetics into point_defense type rather than instant so they can attack fighters.
I've personally made the disruptor and autocannon both point defense type and the upgraded versions of the pd laser and flak respectively, but yeah having two types is mostly just for visual appeal for users. the best point defense period is using a modified autocannon. it looks cool as shit and shreds everything like a boss

I've brought this up in many places and times here on the forums, but firing on Guided Weapons and Strike Craft is not even in the same league as firing on Corvettes and Battleships. I've determined this by focusing on the sizes of GW and SC compared to the warship targets for Corvettes thru Battleships. I typically start off by looking at the ratios in the ship design and construction mechanics to postulate that a Battleship is basically 8x the size (volume/mass) of a Corvette - if a proportional increase, then each dimension would be twice as long on the Battleship. I would typically refer to this difference in size as an order of magnitude.

Just based on relative sizing, a single SC vessel could maybe be viewed as 1 order of magnitude smaller than a Corvette, but a full 8-vessel wing in a Hangar would take up the same mass/volume as a Corvette (and with no actual space to maneuver within the Hangar and no room for relief wings), and three wings' worth of m/v would be the equivalent of 37.5% of a Battleship's m/v. This is probably too large by an order of magnitude.

An SC vessel that is 2 orders of magnitude smaller would be equivalent to 1/64th of a Corvette and an 8-vessel wing would be 1/8th of a Corvette. Each of the three Hangars on a maxed-out Battleship could have 2-3 wings and plenty of room to have their SC move around and be worked on. This seems to be around the right size.

The base Evasion in vanilla Stellaris for a Corvette is 60 while a Battleship is 5 - my own opinion is that the Square-Cube Law would more likely put the Battleship at Evasion 7.5 (or 1/8th of the Corvette), and since that dovetails nicely with the other 8x and 1/8th ratios, I'll use it for this discussion. That ratio applied to a single order-of-magnitude smaller ship would see an Evasion of 480 - crazy, I know, but we haven't gotten to the 2 OoM SC we looked at earlier. That would be Evasion 3,840.

I'm not necessarily looking for a single Evasion and Tracking continuum that runs all the way out to greater than 4,000. One, it becomes a bit ludicrous to be dealing with values that large when the base usage is on a 100-point scale. And two, it probably wouldn't be quite that high realistically for SC, mostly because the ranges at which they would be fired on would be much shorter. I typically look at Corvettes as being 400 meters long, with constant accelerations of 1 gravity (Earth surface, 9.81m/s^2) plus tech increases, and firing/being fired on at ranges of multiples of 100,000 to 1,000,000 kilometers (e.g., light-seconds), and smaller ships having higher accelerations (e.g., a 2 OoM drop in size would proportionally be 4x the acceleration) and closer ranges (e.g., same drop would be 1/64th the range, which would then be multiples of 1,000 or 10,000 km). In order to have much closer ranges for all ships, you have to have a combination of smaller ships overall and higher accelerations. (The 1 G acceleration above comes from the apparent acceleration and cruising speed of a starting fleet crossing a planetary system, accelerating for a couple of days, cruising, and then decelerating at the hyperlane limit, taking about a month in total, and comparing that to the size of our own RW solar system.)

We haven't even touched Guided Weapons, which would be one or more OoM below even the SC above. If an (unimproved!) Evasion score of nearly 4,000 is ludicrous, one north of 30,000 or 240,000 boggles the mind. Again I don't expect to see GW or SC, or the weapons designed to fire at them, with scores in that range, but it informs just how completely disconnected the systems are. No weapon that operates within the basic warship Evasion/Tracking continuum can ever hope to compete against SC, never mind GW. It also points out just how low-power SC, PD, and Flak attacks would be, unless their MUCH closer ranges would make them very accurate versus what may actually be very inaccurate long-range direct-fire weapons (kinetics and energy). GW would still punch quite well (and I do mean "punch", i.e., they wouldn't even need a warhead) due to F=mv^2 with a good-sized missile hitting at high speed over even a few hundred thousand kilometers run-up.

If you're not at all worried about having anything approaching realism in your combat systems, feel free to ignore anything I've said here and do what you like, especially with any mods you put together. Otherwise, try to keep the above in mind when making decisions about GW, SC, PD, and Flak.

 

[Thirlan]

I've brought this up in many places and times here on the forums, but firing on Guided Weapons and Strike Craft is not even in the same league as firing on Corvettes and Battleships. I've determined this by focusing on the sizes of GW and SC compared to the warship targets for Corvettes thru Battleships. I typically start off by looking at the ratios in the ship design and construction mechanics to postulate that a Battleship is basically 8x the size (volume/mass) of a Corvette - if a proportional increase, then each dimension would be twice as long on the Battleship. I would typically refer to this difference in size as an order of magnitude.

Just based on relative sizing, a single SC vessel could maybe be viewed as 1 order of magnitude smaller than a Corvette, but a full 8-vessel wing in a Hangar would take up the same mass/volume as a Corvette (and with no actual space to maneuver within the Hangar and no room for relief wings), and three wings' worth of m/v would be the equivalent of 37.5% of a Battleship's m/v. This is probably too large by an order of magnitude.

An SC vessel that is 2 orders of magnitude smaller would be equivalent to 1/64th of a Corvette and an 8-vessel wing would be 1/8th of a Corvette. Each of the three Hangars on a maxed-out Battleship could have 2-3 wings and plenty of room to have their SC move around and be worked on. This seems to be around the right size.

The base Evasion in vanilla Stellaris for a Corvette is 60 while a Battleship is 5 - my own opinion is that the Square-Cube Law would more likely put the Battleship at Evasion 7.5 (or 1/8th of the Corvette), and since that dovetails nicely with the other 8x and 1/8th ratios, I'll use it for this discussion. That ratio applied to a single order-of-magnitude smaller ship would see an Evasion of 480 - crazy, I know, but we haven't gotten to the 2 OoM SC we looked at earlier. That would be Evasion 3,840.

I'm not necessarily looking for a single Evasion and Tracking continuum that runs all the way out to greater than 4,000. One, it becomes a bit ludicrous to be dealing with values that large when the base usage is on a 100-point scale. And two, it probably wouldn't be quite that high realistically for SC, mostly because the ranges at which they would be fired on would be much shorter. I typically look at Corvettes as being 400 meters long, with constant accelerations of 1 gravity (Earth surface, 9.81m/s^2) plus tech increases, and firing/being fired on at ranges of multiples of 100,000 to 1,000,000 kilometers (e.g., light-seconds), and smaller ships having higher accelerations (e.g., a 2 OoM drop in size would proportionally be 4x the acceleration) and closer ranges (e.g., same drop would be 1/64th the range, which would then be multiples of 1,000 or 10,000 km). In order to have much closer ranges for all ships, you have to have a combination of smaller ships overall and higher accelerations. (The 1 G acceleration above comes from the apparent acceleration and cruising speed of a starting fleet crossing a planetary system, accelerating for a couple of days, cruising, and then decelerating at the hyperlane limit, taking about a month in total, and comparing that to the size of our own RW solar system.)

We haven't even touched Guided Weapons, which would be one or more OoM below even the SC above. If an (unimproved!) Evasion score of nearly 4,000 is ludicrous, one north of 30,000 or 240,000 boggles the mind. Again I don't expect to see GW or SC, or the weapons designed to fire at them, with scores in that range, but it informs just how completely disconnected the systems are. No weapon that operates within the basic warship Evasion/Tracking continuum can ever hope to compete against SC, never mind GW. It also points out just how low-power SC, PD, and Flak attacks would be, unless their MUCH closer ranges would make them very accurate versus what may actually be very inaccurate long-range direct-fire weapons (kinetics and energy). GW would still punch quite well (and I do mean "punch", i.e., they wouldn't even need a warhead) due to F=mv^2 with a good-sized missile hitting at high speed over even a few hundred thousand kilometers run-up.

If you're not at all worried about having anything approaching realism in your combat systems, feel free to ignore anything I've said here and do what you like, especially with any mods you put together. Otherwise, try to keep the above in mind when making decisions about GW, SC, PD, and Flak.

Yes, not really trying to look at realism here and more looking at game mechanics for a fun game. Chess is not real but we still have fun thinking about the moving pieces and how they are all very different. In this case it is trying to figure out what is best for the point defense and my opinion goes with Kalashnikov's quote "Things that are complex are not useful, Things that are useful are simple." Eliminating Flak and only have Point Defense do the role of both is the fastest and simplest way to give it more meaning in the game.