Give AOE/splash to missiles and swarm missiles

[Exarian]

As everyone (everyone?) agree missile weapons are barely useful on mid-to-top level of play. Their marginally superior and 100% hit chance are overshadowed by huge disadvantages of these weapons:
- unlike energy and ballistics, missile need a lot of time to travel to their target. relatively low-range plasma may hit several times before missiles hit anything. It mean missiles are useless as alpha-strike weapons.
- inability to change their target mid-flight combined with slow speed makes them victims of huge overkills
- unlike other weapons, (non-swarm) missiles can be shoot down - depending on enemy fleet composition, this fact may turn them from something weak into something useless.

Here is the solution:
SPLASH DAMAGE!

Stellaris lack this kind of stuff, one of consequences is existance of doomstacks of fleets. Giving missiles Area of Effect damage will make them high-risk high-reward weapon this game desperately need. This concept need combination of two ideas:

1. All (swarm and regular) missiles doing damage to all targets in specific radius, allowing them to easily damage multiple starships at once
2. Missiles "in fly" no longer vanish after their target is destroyed, they travel to their target's last location and explode here

+ one "hardcore" idea

3. Missiles do friendly fire
(it will make abusing pure-missile fleets little tricky to use)

Of course missiles shoot down by point defense/fighters do not explode



What do You think?

 

[terrycloth]

Splash damage in space doesn't make a lot of sense in general, since space is too big and is bad at propagating shockwaves.

Swarm missiles it kind of makes sense since there are a bunch of separate projectiles that might retarget on things near their original impact point.

But we're already supposed to have this with the arc lightning weapons and we don't because it doesn't work. So, current engine limitation that they haven't been able to fix I guess.

 

[Exarian]

Splash damage in space doesn't make a lot of sense in general, since space is too big and is bad at propagating shockwaves.

Swarm missiles it kind of makes sense since there are a bunch of separate projectiles that might retarget on things near their original impact point.

But we're already supposed to have this with the arc lightning weapons and we don't because it doesn't work. So, current engine limitation that they haven't been able to fix I guess.

1. Nuclear weapons are not propagating shockwaves in space, but are emitting huge amounts of destructive radiation (nearly 100% of energy go to radiation) -and this effect could be "emulated" in-game by AoE damage.
2. every missile "could" retarget, but under existing game coding, swarm missiles are regular missiles with "swarm" animation - and simple "retargeting" trait is fixing only one thing of many. On top of that making every single missile from "swarm" smart may be too CPU-consuming.
3. I have no idea on current engine limitations, there are already AoE effects in game (space stations), so it should be possible.

 

[StJimmyRocks92]

Pretty sure the devs have said before the engine can't process splash damage, in addition to it being very unrealistic.

 

[Repeats]

Not being engine feasible wasn't a good excuse in 2016, yet alone now in 2017. Most things are implementable if you want to spend time on it. Saying it isn't usually means it would take some effort, but we don't want to spend the man power to make it happen.

 

[terrycloth]

1. Nuclear weapons are not propagating shockwaves in space, but are emitting huge amounts of destructive radiation (nearly 100% of energy go to radiation) -and this effect could be "emulated" in-game by AoE damage.
2. every missile "could" retarget, but under existing game coding, swarm missiles are regular missiles with "swarm" animation - and simple "retargeting" trait is fixing only one thing of many. On top of that making every single missile from "swarm" smart may be too CPU-consuming.
3. I have no idea on current engine limitations, there are already AoE effects in game (space stations), so it should be possible.

Without the shockwave the radiation falloff is so ridiculously severe that it might as well not even exist.

And what I meant was that swarm missiles made sense to model as AOE damage with the explanation being that some of them were retargetting.

An AoE field like the stations should be possible, sure -- in fact there's a mod that has one -- but it's centered on the ship, not targetted.

 

[Dëzaël]

Interresting way of making them useful. For the realism we could just say they have a shrapnel effect. Why not?

Engine wise, it should be possible to create a station AoE on impact, then instantly deleting it, but a missile battle would become really taxing on perf I guess.

 

[Exarian]

Without the shockwave the radiation falloff is so ridiculously severe that it might as well not even exist.

And what I meant was that swarm missiles made sense to model as AOE damage with the explanation being that some of them were retargetting.

An AoE field like the stations should be possible, sure -- in fact there's a mod that has one -- but it's centered on the ship, not targetted.

1. Heard of Starfish test in 1962? Radiation will not burn starship alive, but will severely hurt electronics and crew. And it can be considered as AOE damage
2. It makes sense, sure, but it also require total rework. And these missiles, although being called "swarm", are probably using nuclear warheads too (since even most basic light missile in this game is "nuclear"...). Splash damage require rework anyway, so maybe..
3. So maybe creating temporary invisible untargetable "ship" with specific "aura" on point of impact is workaround to this coding problem?

 

[Krajzen]

Justifying AoE effect wouldn't be too big deal - you could explain that with radiation, EMP bursts, or shrapnel. In space without air resistance even small particles can make huge damage when travelling with fast enough speed. I can imagine rocket which explodes sending thousands of shrapnels everywhere, with some of them hitting targets and causing serious damage.

Not to even mention some kind of ridiculous space technology, such as missile which explodes and spreads micro missiles flying towards closest targets.

Anyway, those are insignificant details, in this game there are biological missiles and space dragons

 

[Diezy]

Rocket -should- have added shrapnel and side-effects for extra utility, given all the extra trouble for manufacturing one. Dumping mines, throwing sharpnel, unloading many EMP's until PD kills it, acting more like a suicide utility unit rather than an ordinary rocket that just tries crash into something.

Otherwise, simply flinging a high-speed tungsten love-dart directly at their ship is just way more devastating and efficient of a way to fight.

 

[General Retreat]

Personally I'd remove missiles as a tracking projectile mechanically, and make them hitscan like all the other weapons. At the end of the day, you can chuck a missile out of a mass driver - it's a kinetic round with an explosive warhead. There's no reason missiles should travel so much slower than kinetics.

Rename them rockets, give them very high accuracy and tracking, higher module cost and maintenance as well. As currently, no shield or hull bonus. No more wasted damage on overkill, no more retargetting issues. Rockets become good at everything for a price, but not as good as specialist weapons at their particular niche.

PD could operate by simply reducing both the accuracy and tracking of all munitions in range.

 

[henzington]

I agree that weapons could be better balanced but I am not sure it is possible to have splash damage with the game engine.

 

[Airowird]

Pretty sure the devs have said before the engine can't process splash damage, in addition to it being very unrealistic.

May I point your attention to the mine field component for military stations?

One thing I miss in Explosives is the 3rd weapon.
Energy has Laser/Plasma/Disruptor
Kinetic has Gauss/Autocannon/flak
Explosive has Missiles/Swarmers/???

One of the ideas I've had was Cluster Bombs, that work similar to missiles, but when they hit a target they leave behind a small minefield for a couple of days.

 

[StJimmyRocks92]

May I point your attention to the mine field component for military stations?

That's not exactly splash damage.

 

[Robotkiller]

If your game engine can't handle it, maybe improve your game engine?

 

[D Inqu]

I agree that weapons could be better balanced but I am not sure it is possible to have splash damage with the game engine.

We have station AOE effect like minefield. Missiles could be reworked as effectively creating a "minefield" over an enemy fleet, with damage per day dependent on weapons. That way it avoid all the current issues with animations, overkills etc. For example:
1. Each missile "fired" (no longer actually fired) does X damage per day with Y% chance (like a minefield) to all ships in an enemy fleet, adjusted by tech level
2. Torpedoes are unlikely to cause damage to smaller ships, and more likely to hit capitals.
3. Swarmer missiles are the opposite.
4. Each PD gun greatly reduces chance of the first N missiles to hit. Escorts can contribute a portion of their PD to protect the capitals.

 

[Dëzaël]

Personally I'd remove missiles as a tracking projectile mechanically, and make them hitscan like all the other weapons. At the end of the day, you can chuck a missile out of a mass driver - it's a kinetic round with an explosive warhead. There's no reason missiles should travel so much slower than kinetics.

Rename them rockets, give them very high accuracy and tracking, higher module cost and maintenance as well. As currently, no shield or hull bonus. No more wasted damage on overkill, no more retargetting issues. Rockets become good at everything for a price, but not as good as specialist weapons at their particular niche.

PD could operate by simply reducing both the accuracy and tracking of all munitions in range.

Agreed. Also less physical objects, and less targeting from PD. So less impact on perf than what we have, and much less than AoE spawn/despawn thingee.
Could be nice with a half second delay between firing and hitting, and according hit/miss animations.

Fact is the thing to have in PD range now is firing ships, since there's no rockets to target. PD range has to be infinite, otherwise opposing BBs would have 100% efficiency on the opening, even being the only ones equipped with rockets. And PD could not simply target ships as regular attack, applying reduction to only one untill it's destroyed. They should target the next opposing shot when ready, flagging the targetted ship to avoid retargetting and PD overkill. A bit taxing again.

My view is we could make PD a system wide AoE whitch strenght would somehow scale to PDnumber/RocketNumber ratio, with some limitations to efficiency (No 0% PD hit, or 100% rocket hits).
The PD animation would be contained in the missed rocket one, directed at the aimed ship. Or better get rid of the laser and just blow the rocket at a distance.

Good perf, flaws covered, no loss if scaling done right.

Kind of reverted the thread here...
Nice idea.
Devs?

 

[Exarian]

Missiles AOE will also improve fighters, since point defense capabilities will be far more critical. If enemy use these AoE missiles, You NEED point defense, or even small enemy fleet will hurt Your doomstack.

 

[Cordane]

I don't think this is the right direction to go with missiles. Right now, missiles don't perform well for a whole host of reasons, but of course all of it is moot due to the effectiveness in PD at complete hard countering them. Splash damage, which has limited effect in vacuum against a minimally dispersed fleet (I mean, if a ship blowing up on destruction does nothing to the fleet around it, why would a relatively tiny warhead?), still won't be effective if the missiles continue to be shot down or disappear after the launching or targeted ships die.

I do like the idea of finding another niche for missiles once they become effective in their own right.

 

[Exarian]

I don't think this is the right direction to go with missiles. Right now, missiles don't perform well for a whole host of reasons, but of course all of it is moot due to the effectiveness in PD at complete hard countering them. Splash damage, which has limited effect in vacuum against a minimally dispersed fleet (I mean, if a ship blowing up on destruction does nothing to the fleet around it, why would a relatively tiny warhead?), still won't be effective if the missiles continue to be shot down or disappear after the launching or targeted ships die.

I do like the idea of finding another niche for missiles once they become effective in their own right.

Nuclear explosions in vacuum don't cause shockwave, but cause extreme and destructive radiation wave (nearly 100% energy go to radiation [Starfish test in 1962]) - and it can work as AoE effect. Because of point defense effectiveness, slow movement speed and overkill issue, missiles are completely useless ATM. Adding AoE damage at significant radius and removing overkill issue (missiles explode at destination place, instead of vanishing after target dies) will effectively turn them into high-risk-high-reward weapon, additionally giving interesting way of interacting doom stacks.