Missiles and PD 2.0, Less spam moar balance

[Nickizzy]

Great suggestions. I'm not completely sold on the nonlinear growth of missile health though. Surely, the more obscenely large a missile gets, the more HP it should have in perfectly linear proportion? What could be done is make so that the size of weapon you need to shoot down a beam-missile is only 1/3 or 1/4 the size of the missile group, maybe even less than that. In essence, you'd need some heavy combined firepower to bring down a capital class torpedo that would realistically be the size of a small frigate, but it would be much more cost efficient than the launcher itself. What happens otherwise is, making missiles above a certain size simply isn't worth it. It feels a little limiting, although i can understand the incentive (a large enough missile is often a one hit kill weapon).

And of course, another issue is often you'd need your main weapons to deal with a very large missile, but they might be set to target ships. To solve this something more could also be done with the AI options: what if you could select Ships, Missiles or Ships&Missiles? The Ships&Missiles option would let you set a missile size threshold above which the AI will switch to killing missiles, and once no missiles large enough are in range it switches back to targeting ships.

Because
A- It's farly rediculous to see a single pixel-light missile tank a main battery cannon fire
B- It's a lot easier to build a bigger missile than it is a bigger turret.

 

[AtraUnam]

On the other hand its also rediculous to see an ICBM instantly destroyed by a weapon that does less damage than the pistol carried around by astronauts.

 

[apelsinsaft]

A- It's farly rediculous to see a single pixel-light missile tank a main battery cannon fire
B- It's a lot easier to build a bigger missile than it is a bigger turret.

A. So let's make them have an actual model and grow in size as they do more damage, too!
B. But the anti-missile group shouldn't need to be the same size as the missile group it's intended to shoot down. It should be able to be much smaller, like 1/3 or 1/4 the size of the intended target missile group.

 

[Chckn Wildstyle]

I toyed with missile health on my own server when they added the ability to do so. I also changed how nukes worked to how they work in real life which is very fast and unguided. The combination of a very fast unguided nuke and an HP value of 1/1000 the Damage value made missiles in general a lot more fun to use, and the nukes in particular much less cancerous as they were more skill based and didn't follow you around like a lost puppy when you were just a little too fast for them.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

Over all, I like the idea but I wouldn't tie damage output with missile HP like that. That would cause players to kill the damage dealers with the upgraded AMS and tank the rest. You might even see people abandoning missiles entirely.

I doubt anyone would want that.

 

[kikaha]

I must have a terrible time with turrets then :/ They always seem to end up rotating in reverse, getting stuck on something invisble, refusing to fire or even just randomly de-docking and catapulting my ship around. Attaching turrets became vastly quicker when I discovered the T2Ship command. Still, I think the game hates me, I'll spend 2 hours designing an elaborate turret only for it to be facing backwards -_-
Even then constaly spawning and trying to attach point defens turrets feels like a real chore to me. You must be a god to get them all on in 10 mins without issues

Spawn all the top side PD turrets needed then fly your main ship right under them. You'll spend a lot less time moving them. Repeat for all sides of your ship. Don't hesitate to rotate the ship.

Turrets facing backward used to happen to me. Take great care in wich direction is facing the arrow on the turret axis AND the turret docker.