Petition: Can we get a rework for functioning missile weapons?

[CastelloNova]

Let's try something along the lines of ''Don't put all your eggs in one basket'' after all thats what the problem is. A single PD can completely invalidate 2-3 slots of missiles every volley and thats alot of damage to miss out on.

So what if missiles fired in bursts? Each missile slot would be a bank, smalls 5, mediums 10 and larges 20. Every time they fire each slot would launch that many missiles before a lengthy cool down. Sure PD will shoot down a percentage of the incoming damage but that many missiles will overload their capacity pretty quick and completely negating the volley will take SERIOUS effort.

The fact that each missile would be doing less damage goes without saying.

 

[Trithemius]

Possibly voiced elsewhere but: shouldn't missiles have much less power cost than other weapons?

(They may have but I never use em sorry!)

 

[Sucellus]

Nukes/explosions in space are useless! There is no blast wave. Nukes are mostly blast wave and heat, that don't work outside an atmosphere, the rest is radiation and ships are already shielded against space radiation anyway. That's why missiles don't work so well, the game reflects this.

(please rewrite the lore about missiles, they need to work like bunker busters/drills/panzerfausts or something)

(OR use nukes to bombard planets, which would make sense)

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

Nukes/explosions in space are useless! There is no blast wave. Nukes are mostly blast wave and heat, that don't work outside an atmosphere, the rest is radiation and ships are already shielded against space radiation anyway. That's why missiles don't work so well, the game reflects this.

(please rewrite the lore about missiles, they need to work like bunker busters/drills/panzerfausts or something)

(OR use nukes to bombard planets, which would make sense)

Nukes are hardly "useless"- a nuclear missile is still more than capable of wrecking a spacecraft's day. That fission energy isn't just "shielded against"- it causes heat shock that can vaporize materials and cause stress fractures/spalling. Additionally, a nuke designed for anti-ship usage would almost certainly be a shaped charge to begin with.

 

[Sucellus]

Nukes are hardly "useless"- a nuclear missile is still more than capable of wrecking a spacecraft's day. That fission energy isn't just "shielded against"- it causes heat shock that can vaporize materials and cause stress fractures/spalling. Additionally, a nuke designed for anti-ship usage would almost certainly be a shaped charge to begin with.

What I'm trying to convey is that right now (nuclear) missiles work in a cliché way. Like you say and I also point out they need to be designed to work. Sure everyone can just imagine it for themselves and we don't need to think about it. But I like it when the science fiction stuff makes a bit sense.

Nukes in space aren't the big explosion we see on earth, it's basically "just" a nuclear radiation flash, no big fireball and shockwave, which I assumed a spaceship that can travel from star to star is shielded against (or not? maybe they don't care that the crew gets bombarded by the natural radiation in space). It's going to do damage but it just seems really inefficient compared to the other alternatives... It just seemed to be one of those "sound in space" cases.
Also: today nukes aren't just fire and forget. They make tactical and strategical nukes and from the later we have MIRV's, the game could reflect this. Missile with multiple warheads that target various ships at the same time, counter PD and the problem of focusing on only one ship.
Or the radiation flash: it could have various effects like jamming sensors/propulsion/shields, damaging crew and hull etc

I think missiles in game are maybe not working perfectly and so we could find a way for them to actually do, getting inspiration from how stuff works in the real world.

 

[Praetori]

The game misses the point of missiles compared to other weapons (except small-craft) and that's part of the reason why they're underperforming.

Missiles (in "realistic" aspects) doesn't need to be line-of-sight and the launching platform doesn't necessarily need to expose itself to the enemy or use active sensors. Missiles can carry its own sensors and adjust the flightpath to target once those are activated (which a ray of photons or most other "dumb" projectiles can't).
A good use of "missiles" would be to simply launch them at a suspected but not readily identified enemy fleet (just a passive radio bearing and estimated/triangulated range or a scout ship relaying information) from afar and have them multipath to target for maximum chance of defensive system overload when they arrive at the same time and from different directions. The launching fleet can stay pretty undetected for the duration and thus NOT be lanced or plasma destructed to death while the missiles pick out their own targets (albeit they won't be as effective as systems guided from a multi-billion credit sensor in a battleship).

In-game however they're just slow variants of lasers/projectiles so all the possible advantages goes straight out the window.

 

[Joe-Z]

Problems:

1. Missiles fly slowly compared to other weapons. With every battles you use a couple of ships of your own before you start to inflict damage yourself. This cripples missiles in the early game when every ship counts.
2. Missiles can be hardcountered by PD. No other weapon type has a hardcounter. A single flak cannon can counter 2 missiles weapon slots and still do good damage in the absence of missiles or small craft.
3. S, M and L sized missiles have the same hit points. A single P slot can shut down L sized weapon.
4. Overkill damage. No other weapon loses damage on overkills!
5. Missiles in flight destroyed on host death. No other weapon loses damage in this manner!
6. Plain damage without special bonuses. M and L sized wepaons of other types get armor penetration, but not missiles! The only other weapon with plain damage is Autocannon, it has the same tracking as missiles, but nearly twice the damage.

It would be nice if missiles had the ability to obtain a new target after the original target gets destroyed. It would make the missiles vastly more attractive and usable. This could be a researchable tech that improves all missile weapons.

Also, it has been suggested before that explosive damage should be area damage, which I agree with. That way, missiles would be more powerful, and the heat/particle blast would cause some damage if the missile just gets close enough to the target(s) before being shot down by PD.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

What I'm trying to convey is that right now (nuclear) missiles work in a cliché way. Like you say and I also point out they need to be designed to work. Sure everyone can just imagine it for themselves and we don't need to think about it. But I like it when the science fiction stuff makes a bit sense.

Most of the game's visuals are unrealistic- doesn't mean they can't be fluffed sensibly. I assume the nukes are "properly designed" as weapons the same way I assume the lasers or the railguns are.

Nukes in space aren't the big explosion we see on earth, it's basically "just" a nuclear radiation flash, no big fireball and shockwave, which I assumed a spaceship that can travel from star to star is shielded against (or not? maybe they don't care that the crew gets bombarded by the natural radiation in space). It's going to do damage but it just seems really inefficient compared to the other alternatives...

That's a failing on your end. Like, not to be rude, but there's many orders of magnitude difference between cosmic radiation and a close-range nuclear flash- that you have trouble comprehending the difference of scale involved is not a strike against nukes viability in space as an anti-ship weapon. (Realistically the solution to "shielding against" stellar radiation is actually a thinner hull and water shielding, anyhow- which is extremely limited use against the sort of damage a close-range nuclear flash would deal.)

 

[Cordane]

I think the question might have been looking at nuclear and similar missiles as an AoE option for that line of technology, as a way to balance out some of the drawbacks. An explosion in space has the "lack of a transmission medium" to deal with, sure, but also the immense distances involved. Any fleet is likely going to utilize combat spacing to eliminate the effectiveness of any AoE attack (or any potential explosive death of one of their own ships), and any shaping of discharge to concentrate the effect to be more useful at distance in one direction will make it useless in all others. MIRVs work on Earth because the atmosphere allows directional control and gravity provides the acceleration, two things that wouldn't be available in open space, along with evasive capability, unless there is a significant rocket package on each warhead, making for a MUCH larger weapon.

The hard counter of PD is huge, especially in multiplayer, and would need to be greatly reduced to make them more competitive with kinetic and energy weapons. As I stated earlier in this thread, most of PD should shift over to being utility module-based with an individual ship-only effect, leaving a more limited fleet defense capability (more along the lines of anti-strike craft) for flak cannons and similar weapons, which should be limited in their placement like PD or Torpedoes are currently. Those systems would have to be balanced such that they aren't capable of reducing the incoming damage from an comparable opposing fleet using missiles/strike craft by really any more than the potential damage they give up by not carrying conventional weapons in those slots.