Almost everything you've read about missiles is wrong. They are terrible, but possibly not for the reasons you are thinking. I have just spent five hours running variations of combat with a wide range of missile settings to determine exactly how they work. I used a personal mod to adjust game stats between tests and loaded my save and replayed the same battle over and over. I did this without using reload stats (because that crashes Stellaris as soon as combat starts) so I had to exit and restart Stellaris for every single test. Here are my results:
The Setup
I used two beginning game fleets of 20 Corvettes each equipped with 3 Small weapons, 2 fusion reactors, and the initial tier 1 required components. I also modded their armor to 0. On one set I put 3 Nuclear Missiles, and on the other 3 Red Lasers. Both sets of weapons were modded as follows: Range 50, Cooldown: 5, Damage: 10, Accuracy: 100%, Tracking: 70%. Missiles were set to speed 5 (what they are by default). As a result of these settings, every attack will hit and do full damage, and there is no range advantage for the missiles.
Note that in Stellaris, with no random wind-up or damage, combat is actually deterministic. That is, it plays out exactly the same every time when you have identical battles.
>> Original reddit thead and discussion.
The Outcome
The missiles you see launched from your ships are not real missiles. They are just a visual effect that hold only a passing resemblance to what your missiles are actually doing. In particular:
- In general, only a single volley of missiles will be drawn at a time. You can hear the sound effect of each volley, but no new missiles appear (this is on max graphics settings). This can easily result in 4-5 invisible missiles flights waiting to strike. (EDIT: This appears to be controlled by MAX_GFX_MISSILES which is set to 50. Since my salvos were 60 missiles, I basically saw only one salvo at a time. Thanks FullMetalFox)
- The invisible missiles strike much earlier than the visible effects, apparently travelling about twice as fast. Basically, when the visible missiles are half-way to their target, the invisible missiles they represent hit. There is still a noticeable delay before hitting even when ships enter into a furball.
Missiles suck because they overkill INSANELY compared to direct fire weapons, with missiles allocated to overkill their targets by between 3 and 4.5 times:
- Visible missiles disappear only when their target dies for any reason. Often this is a result of invisible missile damage. The visible missile disappearing does NOT affect your damage output. However, invisible missiles disappear when the attacking ship dies but the VISIBLE missile remains!
- In a single volley of 60 missiles that deal 30 damage each, 45 were targeting a single 300 hull corvette, dealing it 1350 damage! Out of the 60 missiles, the spread was: 45 @ ship A, 6 @ ship B, 3 @ ship C, and 3 @ ship D.
- In a single volley of 60 missiles that deal 5 damage each, 48 were targeting on a single 300 hull corvette, dealing it 240 damage. Out of the 60 missiles, the spread was: 48 @ ship A, 6 @ ship B, and 6 @ ship C. Roughly the same spread of missiles, despite the reduced damage.
- Compare to a single volley of 60 red lasers dealing 30 damage each. The spread was: 10 each @ ship A-E (killing all 5), 6 @ ship F, 3 @ ship G, 1 @ ship H. Note that there is ZERO overkill here, even though it takes 10 shots per kill and each ship mounted 3 lasers. This means some ships fired at two targets to avoid over-killing. Side note: Ships RARELY target multiple targets with identical weapons, in fact, over-killing is the only time I've observed that behavior.
There are several important features mods should consider:
- Changing damage values of the missiles doesn't change the outcome much. It is apparent that the 13-15 missiles directed at other targets were more flukes than an intelligent attempt by the game to estimate necessary damage to kill the initial target.
- The wedge formation is very important to consider. Because the ships don't all reach engagement range at the same time, ships further back make targeting decisions based on the results of the attacks of the front ships. This is NOT true of missiles.
- The variable wind-up for weapons is also important because it causes ships to pick different targets. When wind-up is fixed, all ships that fire at the same time tend to pick the same target. Especially for high-damage direct fire weapons, the min and max wind-up time should be larger to increase the time delay between shots of ships with the same weapon.
Point Defense, Now Coded with Spaghetti
- Slow missiles, especially with a long range, means a lot of invisible missile waves and greater amounts of overkill.
Maybe, just maybe, something could be done about missiles via mods with everything that has been found so far. That is, until you account for point defense. NOTHING in point defense makes sense. The system is full of black-magic and basically impossible to sanely mod.
I used 10 Destroyers with no armor, 3 tier 1 PD, and 2 Red Lasers (still modded as above). I modded the PD to 100% accuracy, a 2.5 CD, and to deal only 1 damage. This gives me 30 PD guns facing 60 incoming missiles. I modded the missiles to high CD so I could observe only a single salvo for testing.
First, Point Defense stats are for attacking other ships only. They aren't for shooting down incoming missiles. Instead, there is some black box conversion that apparently determines how many missiles should be shot down. This formula has holes in it that can result in very crazy results from PD, that cause wildly different numbers of missiles to get stopped. Here are some examples:
- Remeber, the visual missiles mean nothing. PD shooting those down is just eye candy.
- Changing the cooldown on the red lasers affects the number of missiles shot down, even though the red lasers do not participate in shooting down missiles. How these even happens I cannot fathom.
(Why you no have tables on your forum PI? Is it because all your games are so simple no one's every needed them before
- Here are the number of missiles shot down based on the speed of the incoming missiles, see if you spot anything odd:
. Go here for the table version)
* Missiles had a range of 50 unless otherwise indicated.
Spd=5, 46 of 60 missiles stopped (with only 30 PD, 16 got two shots @ 2.5 CD)
Spd=10, 36 of 60 stopped
Spd=20, 32 of 60 stopped (at this point, 2 of the PD guns got a second shot)
Spd=30, 26 of 60 stopped (not every PD gun even got a single shot off, possibly due to the formation and guns on one edge not having range against missiles targeting a ship on the other)
Spd=60, 18 of 60 stopped (hard to attribute this to formation and range issues)
Spd=90, 42 of 60 stopped (WTF? Almost as bad as speed 5 missiles!)
Spd=120, 54 of 60 stopped (WORSE than speed 5?!)
Spd=55, 36 of 60 stopped (just 5 more speed and 18 less missiles get stopped)
Spd=65, 40 of 60 stopped (just 5 less speed and 22 less missiles get stopped)
Spd=50, 36 of 60 stopped (wait for it...)
Spd=40, 3 of 60 stopped (Thank you reddit users for the graph)
Spd=50, Rng=|40, 42 of 60 stopped (So, if I reduce the range of the missiles to 40, 6 more missiles get stopped. Why? This should have no impact on the Spd=50 and Rng=50 test)
So, there you go. PD use black magic to shoot down invisible missiles. Systems and values not even related to PD or missiles may drastically impact there performance.
Paradox Action Items
Not trying to be passive aggressive PI, just want to TL;DR this whole post in case this is an area you have any interest in make changes.
- Please fix reload stats so it stops crashing Stellaris. This made this testing EXTREMELY painful.
- Find a way to draw more missile salvos. If you cut to showing only a single missile per ship (instead of one per launcher per ship) you could get more salvos on screen. Consider making grouped missiles particles so you can get multiple missiles on screen for each ship but only use one particle. Reduce missile trail particles, they are kinda long. Maybe have the trail length decrease quickly so that by the time the next salvo launches the salvos in the air have minimal tails.
- Increase the base missile speed, just for visual purposes, speed 5 is comically slow. Heck, the invisible missiles are hitting earlier anyway, so maybe at least increase the visual speed? Bonus points for matching visuals and actual impact.
- Missiles need to intelligently account for damage from other missiles in the air, like direct fire weapons. You'll need to account for expected PD kills and over-allocate when the target fleet has PD, but this is a solvable math issue so there isn't any excuse for getting very satisfactory results.
- Speaking of PD, fix that terrible implementation. If you are going to black box it, at least do the math right. How the missile speed can cause results like that, not to mention the insanity of changing the Red Lasers' CD causing different PD results.
- Lastly, I can recreate any of these situations on demand. If you need a save and mod files to reproduce, let me know.
I have done some more clinical tests and I don't actually see any strange behaviour from missiles. The magic is simply missiles that are invisible due to the engine not drawing them in space. Missiles are fired and hit ships just fine and PD shoot at them exactly as they should.
If you give missiles very high speed they will act crazy by more or less stopping in their tracks if they need to turn and then it takes time to accelerate again and that is what give PD time to shoot at them.
My test was more simple, 2 ships... one with a PD that shoot once every second does 1 damage and 100% accuracy and 10 range, the other with a missile that does 1 damage, zero evasion and shoot every three second with varying speed and hitpoints.
If the hitpoint are 3 the PD needed 3 hits to shoot it down, every time, the graphic showed this very clearly.
If I gave the missile speed 2 it was shot down all the time, no questions asked.
If I gave the missile a speed of 3 the PD usually managed to shoot down the missile unless the ship travelled directly at the missile then it did not have time. It was an edge case.
At speed 4 it rarely managed to shoot down the missile since three hits was needed and the missile traveled 12 range in three hits. But if the ship traveled directly away from the missile it usually could hit.
At speed five it was extremely rare for the PD to shoot down the missile.
PD always manage to shoot once no matter what speed a missile have. So if the PD do one damage and the missile have two hit points there is a much greater chance for missiles to get through.
If I gave the missile a speed of 30 it often started to try and take sharp turns and halted in the middle of space and often multiple times before impact, this made it EASY for the PD to shoot down the missiles. But when it went straight in the missile was lightning fast. The graphic showed this behaviour perfectly.
As far as I can tell missiles and PD work exactly as it should. The test you did was not really about the mechanic but how they act in large salvoes.
I agree that missiles should have a "chance" to retarget (could be a technology) if the original target dies. Missiles need to have that ability to become a bit more competitive in large quantities. In smaller numbers they work OK, when not fired in huge clustered droves but enough to overwhelm PD.
One rather annoying fact is that PD always shoot at a new missile coming into range. So even if it already shot two times at a 3 hit point missile and could fire a third time it always target a new missile coming into range first. I do think it would be good if PD shot at the same missile until it dies, but this is not a major issue
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