Balancing Pulses and Missiles

[MrFURB]

The new weapons system is undoubtedly miles ahead of the old one, even if some of it's aspects were awkward to get used to at first. Since it's release we've seen a lot of balance changes and even whole weapon revisions (new beams <3) and I think we're right on the heels of a vanilla balance we could keep for many updates to come.

There are two important issues that I can see though; the uselessness of pulse primaries and the combination of versatility and natural strengths making missiles popular enough to warrant a second look at them.

Let's talk about damage pulses first. For each block in a damage pulse array, you'll get to deal 5 damage to everything within ten meters (up to 20 meters with a 100% beam slave) every ten seconds at the cost of 250 energy per block.
All other weapons have a base 5 DPS per block with a 1/10 damage/energy ratio.
Pulse weapons have a base 0.5 DPS per block with a 1/50 damage/energy ratio.
It's range is abysmal, up to a 20 meter radius compared to the next shortest range of 500 for beam weapons.
Due to it's naturally explosive behavior many of the tertiary effects aren't impacting the behavior of pulses. This leaves less of an advantage to gain from the addition of tertiaries compared to other weapon primaries.
Statistically there is nothing to warrant it's use. It has no strengths, only weaknesses.

To fix this, let's re-evaluate the role we want damage pulse primaries to have and then boost the stats to match the strengths and weaknesses of that role. If you've got a unique idea that would make pulses fun to use while giving them a nice niche to get cozy with, please post that here.

My own vision of pulses are to be a mixture between high risk high payout block bombing for use against larger vessels and an area-denial weapon against smaller vessels. This would require the weapon to have enough of a range to potentially cover an entire close combat area, I'm thinking a base 250 meter radius expandable to 500 meters with a beam secondary. The weapon would deal it's full damage split up between all the blocks hit within it's radius. If you fire a 5,000 damage pulse weapon and a 100 block enemy is fully in it's radius, each block on the enemy's vessel will take 50 damage.
It would need to ignore friendlies, else turret/drone/whatever bearing vessels will be locked out of this entire quarter of the weapon system due to their weapons destroying their own defenses and allies.
To bring it's stats back to a respectable place, I'll match the efficiencies of the other weapons. Each pulse block will deal 50 damage every ten seconds at the cost of 500 energy and with a range of 250.



The second issue I've been seeing since people have finished all their testing and are developing solid habits of using certain weapon systems is a prevalence towards missiles. I can't blame that, missiles have a lot going for them. They're tied for longest range, they're naturally AOE (a HUUUUUGE bonus), they have longer cooldowns allowing the use of secondary weapons while waiting for reloading, and their one natural weakness of slower projectile speed and reduced accuracy is counteracted by the locking capabilities of 3 out of 5 missile combinations.

What I'd like to do is to keep the missile's positive characteristics (power, impact) while making them harder to apply by giving people more of a chance to react to them. This would basically be a nerf to guided missiles overall, as the reliability of always landing your hits is mixing waaaay too well with the natural strengths of high damage explosives.
Giving missiles a maximum turn rate in degrees/second would be my primary choice but that will negatively impact a lot of people who use vertical launch systems for their missiles, and unless the missile isn't fired directly at the target it would still be nearly impossible to dodge.
Another solution and one that has been talked about in the past is a form of countermeasure for use against missiles, such as flares or point defenses. While I agree that this would be interesting, it would also have to be only partially effective, or somehow related to a pilot's skill/effort. There's very little one can do to balance the effective ratios of point defense vs. missiles. Someone might fire a 10,000,000 damage nuke only to have it go poof from a 10 block point defense array. Lots of numbers would have to be tweaked and at that point missiles vs. their counters would have absolutely nothing to do with the relative skill or tactical efficiency of the pilots involved.

My preferred solution is simple; revert the missile/pulse combination to a dumbfire weapon. We all know that the heatseekers aren't much of a problem as their... Unique tracking system isn't the most reliable in the first place, making them a quirky if accidentally well balanced fire and forget weapon. Missile/beam should also retain tracking, but due to the natural damage shortcoming of beam secondaries they should also have a reduction in their damage radius more fitting to their reliable low damage standard. This change should push it's role and characteristics away from the other more high-impact and slower dumbfire missiles and give it a reasonable tradeoff for it's strengths.

Let me know what you think, and if you have any ideas concerning these you want to discuss, go ahead!

 

[Winterhome]

Personally, I feel that Missile/Pulse systems shouldn't be totally dumbfire - but their turning radius should be sufficiently abysmal that you have to lead your shots, or fire from either in front of or behind your victim's movement vector if you want any hope of successfully hitting them.

Perhaps reduce turning radius with possible damage output. But a dumbfire torpedo with a 90 second reload really would be too nerfed, regardless of the possible damage output on a successful hit.

Missile/Beam might do well to take a slightly decreased damage counter, rather than radius - reason being that we want to encourage more large blocks of weapons rather than more smaller weapons (shotgun arrays), for performance purposes. If you have a missile with a radius of 10 meters, and you have a missile with a radius of 5 meters, you'll get people firing four of the 5 meter missile when they'd do the same amount of damage (roughly) as one 10 meter missile.

 

[Crimson-Artist]

the damage values of the Missile/pulse combo is pretty ridiculous. even a tiny array of about of like 5 pr 10 missiles and 1 pulse can cause f'in phenomenal damage! its tracking abilities also make it the best low investment high payoff weapon.

I agree with Azereiah. they're turn radius should be nerfed. However I have another solution. Buff the locking speed of the Missile/Beam combo. at the moment there really isn't a good reason to have a 100% beam slave cuz all it does is adds another 1000m to the range. wooooooooo. The way i like to go about things is just slave like a minuscule amount of beam to a missile system just for the tracking. If we were to increase the lock on speed the closer you get to 100% then it would make the combo more useful and more meaningful to devote more mass to beam blocks. while going with the missile/pulse combo the more pulse is slaved you get a stronger missile but low-tracking and slower lock-on speed.

The pulse system is definitely becoming one of my favorite weapons. Both of them actually. while i agree that the pulse at the moment is practically useless i've actually be doing some testing with it being a melee weapon.

This is a stand alone bayonet I developed. Its logic enabled so all you have to do is dock it to the front of your ship and ram it into something and it'll fire a powerful pulse that will just eat a massive chunk of hull. it uses a monostable circuit for the trigger so its self reseting. I've made this one of my signature systems and have begun adding it to my ships.

While i've found a (admittedly novel) use for it, overall its a mess. The damage is poor compared to its range (was hopping for a Missile/Pulse combo level of damage), Even with the beam slave it barely gets any bigger, and all of its slaves are novel at best and redundant at worse.

• The Pulse/Cannon combo is useless cuz it already does stupidly low damage. why on earth would you want to half that just to fire it faster
• The Pulse/Missile is broken. No comment
• The Pulse/Beam is probably the most useful of them as it increases the range but in the end its nothing to write home about
• Finally the Pulse/Pulse combo has the potential to be great but is hampered by the extremely short range. Do you want to wait a 1 and a half just to see if you even have a chance to hit anything with it again?

The solution is simple

More Power

More Range

Less Suckage

Now on to the Push pulse.
I think this is probably the most under appreciated weapon in the game. After the weapon update it got a interesting quirk. Ships caught in its effect get hit with a Power outage like effect. Basically you go limp and can't respond for 3 seconds. The effect even works with your shields up making it extremely useful for "second to win it" fights. I've actually started pairing this with the Damage pulse on my bayonets so it gives a 1-2 punch of damage and EMP.

I would very much like to see this weapon gain full weapon status (it can slave other weapons and have an effect attached to it). but first some changes.

1. The range of the pulse needs to be nerfed. not to the level of the damage pulse but definitely smaller as its range is ridiculous
2. More blocks means longer outage time. as of now 1 block is basically the same as 100 blocks so thats gotta change
3. #2 but with the Push force. It can't even push things effectively and it has push in its name. lame -_-

for the pulse system in general the idea is:

Longer range= less power.
Shorter Range=REKTed

 

[Megacrafter127]

This would require the weapon to have enough of a range to potentially cover an entire close combat area, I'm thinking a base 250 meter radius expandable to 500 meters with a beam secondary.

YES

The weapon would deal it's full damage split up between all the blocks hit within it's radius. If you fire a 5,000 damage pulse weapon and a 100 block enemy is fully in it's radius, each block on the enemy's vessel will take 50 damage.

How about this:

As the pulse expands, it deals damage to a block it hits, when it hits the block.
The maximum amount of damage the pulse can deal to a block should be: (damage-potential of the pulse) / [ (radius of the pulse)² +1 ]
{radius of the pulse does not refer to the maximum radius defined by the array}
After damage was dealt by the pulse, it is subtracted from the damage-potential.​

If the block has less HP remaining, than the pulse would deal to it(assuming shields and/or HP-system doesn't absorb the damage), only the damage, that is required to break the block, is dealt, instead of the damage calculated by the above formula.​

Another solution and one that has been talked about in the past is a form of countermeasure for use against missiles, such as flares or point defenses. While I agree that this would be interesting, it would also have to be only partially effective, or somehow related to a pilot's skill/effort. There's very little one can do to balance the effective ratios of point defense vs. missiles. Someone might fire a 10,000,000 damage nuke only to have it go poof from a 10 block point defense array. Lots of numbers would have to be tweaked and at that point missiles vs. their counters would have absolutely nothing to do with the relative skill or tactical efficiency of the pilots involved.

I simply suggest, that a missile defense doesn't destroy a missile immedeatly(or after a time), but instead reduces the damage the missile will deal by - let's say - 10 d/s for every second the missile is affected by the defense. The missile only "poofs" away, when it's damage has been reduced to 0.
Also, how about pulses can use their own damage to annihilate some of the damage a missile deals?

My preferred solution is simple; revert the missile/pulse combination to a dumbfire weapon.

Soo much YES!

 

[NeonSturm]

I would like pulse to be a ship/mass-based-weapon rather than a block-based-weapon

That would reduce lag and make it easier to balance.

 

[Megacrafter127]

I would like pulse to be a ship/mass-based-weapon rather than a block-based-weapon

That would reduce lag and make it easier to balance.

And what block(s) of the ship, do you suppose should be damaged once the damage is calculated?
All evenly? All radial from the origin of the pulse?
Only the one nearest to the origin of the pulse?
None?

 

[Winterhome]

Dumbfire + long reload = bad.

Low turning rate + longer lock time (5x longer, in pace with the other effects, along with losing the ability to maintain target lock when switching weapons) = good.

 

[NeonSturm]

And what block(s) of the ship, do you suppose should be damaged once the damage is calculated?
All evenly? All radial from the origin of the pulse?
Only the one nearest to the origin of the pulse?
None?

For EMP, Ion, etc you don't need to know where.

Maybe you could buff damage of other weapons
Or just make it like a large explosion with origin on the pulse, but pre-calculated damage per block based on hit ships, their mass, their % size in the area...

 

[Megacrafter127]

For EMP, Ion, etc you don't need to know where.

If the effect isn't at 100%, you do need to know wher the remaining damage ends up.

 

[MrFURB]

I agree with Azereiah. they're turn radius should be nerfed. However I have another solution. Buff the locking speed of the Missile/Beam combo. at the moment there really isn't a good reason to have a 100% beam slave cuz all it does is adds another 1000m to the range. wooooooooo. The way i like to go about things is just slave like a minuscule amount of beam to a missile system just for the tracking. If we were to increase the lock on speed the closer you get to 100% then it would make the combo more useful and more meaningful to devote more mass to beam blocks. while going with the missile/pulse combo the more pulse is slaved you get a stronger missile but low-tracking and slower lock-on speed.

...I like it! I like it a lot, and for some reason locking speed slipped my mind as a number that can be tuned.

How about this:
As the pulse expands, it deals damage to a block it hits, when it hits the block.
The maximum amount of damage the pulse can deal to a block should be: (damage-potential of the pulse) / [ (radius of the pulse)² +1 ]
{radius of the pulse does not refer to the maximum radius defined by the array}
After damage was dealt by the pulse, it is subtracted from the damage-potential.
If the block has less HP remaining, than the pulse would deal to it(assuming shields and/or HP-system doesn't absorb the damage), only the damage, that is required to break the block, is dealt, instead of the damage calculated by the above formula.

Besides the damage/radius calculation, that sounds just like how a missile deals it's damage. I think there might be issues with an 'expanding pulse' pinging several thousand blocks as it goes, taking up lots of calculations. I wonder if a dev could clarify if that's an issue or not.

 

[Megacrafter127]

Besides the damage/radius calculation, that sounds just like how a missile deals it's damage. I think there might be issues with an 'expanding pulse' pinging several thousand blocks as it goes, taking up lots of calculations. I wonder if a dev could clarify if that's an issue or not.

The problem is: the pulse is an 'expanding pulse'. maybe make it a config option if the pulse deals it's damage instantly(less calculation heavy), or if it expands with it's animation for cinematic effects.
Or how do you suppose one can retain the current pulse-animation AND apply all damage instantly, without it seeming out of sync/odd?

 

[Planr]

Hulk missiles are already very slow in the first place, they need that homing capability if they want to even hit anything.

Beam slave for missiles should not be giving any negative effects to the missile's damage or AoE. Its long range capabilities don't give much benefit already when the missile is just as slow as regular missiles. You can't hit much of anything that far out with a missile anyway, it's easy to dodge, even with lockon.
Missile-beam setups were never very worth using, because it's a poor tradeoff: You give up valuable space in your ship, you give up some damage, and now you want it to also give up some area of effect too? The only ships that really benefit from the lockon feature of missile+beam are fighters and small frigates. Anything bigger than that can't turn enough to aim, and if they use free look to aim instead, they become vulnerable. If AI was changed to automatically use lockon features of weapons, then maybe they would be worth using.

Honestly, all the other weapons suck too bad to justify using. Beams in their current state use way too much power and already still have crappy 500-m range, so they are useless compared to other weapon choices. Cannons do very little hull damage naturally so their only real use is to function as an anti-shield weapon with an ion tertiary.

On top of that, I still see no sign that weapons are anywhere near to balanced. Titans are still the only way to go, since power consumption VS damage still appears to scale linearly (my 2-million damage missile cannon requires 20 million power to fire, same as how a 20,000 damage missile requires only 200,000 power to fire). And, since titans scale exponentially in size from smaller ships, their weapons thus also scale exponentially stronger in power.

If anything, missiles do not need a nerf. The other weapon types need a buff.