Seeking Information: Anti-missile turrets

[Valiant70]

Anti-missiles turrets are great in theory, but I have yet to see them work well in practice. My other turrets are regularly blown off by missiles and have to be replaced, despite my ship mounting four anti-missile turrets with 360 degree (spherical) coverage on all sides.

Has anyone been able to get these confounded contraptions to do their job? If so, please tell the rest of us how.

On another note, I thought I read something about recent or upcoming improvements to anti-missile AI. Does anyone know anything about this?

 

[Snk]

I was thinking of trying a shotgun instead of a machine gun. Maybe that would work?

 

[Valiant70]

I was thinking of trying a shotgun instead of a machine gun. Maybe that would work?

I'm afraid they spread too wide to work. It might be worth a try though.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

They work but they need to be accurate to be effective. If you are playing on easy they will not work.

Spoiler: What Does AI Difficulty Do?

They do need some work however. Currently they are not very good at picking priorities. I've had my turrets busy firing on dumb rockets flying away from me when there are heat seekers on a direct war path for my ship. They are also not good at leading targets and sometimes turn to slowly to even engage a missile before it hits.

 

[Snk]

I'm afraid they spread too wide to work. It might be worth a try though.

You could stagger the cannons, get more shots off that way

 

[Panpiper]

I am planning on a set of point defense turrets for a new build. I have no idea how well it is going to work, but my plan is to waffle a set of autocannons in a 7x7 solid grid array, for each such turret. (Obviously, these turrets will be a bit larger than your typical point defense turret.) I figure it will give the fire some spread such that a shot that would technically be a near miss for the AI, might still catch a missile due to the thickness of the fire.

 

[SkaireKrough]

Keep in mind that power requirements increase 10% for every extra 'emitter' in the array. A set of 11 single block cannons will use double the power of 1 eleven block cannon. Your proposed 7x7 array will use 480% more power than if they were combined into one barrel.

The concept is sound and does somewhat work, I built a small ship with a relatively large frontal array of single rapid fire cannons (148 if I remember correctly) to enable it to take out missiles. Worked great on missiles, it could only sustain auto-fire for 2-3 seconds before totally draining power. Small cannons also meant that it really could not damage anything but a missile. It also could not take or keep a targets shields down due to the power problem. I tried to solve the power problem by lengthening the ship which also meant the reactors got longer. That helped with the power but then it became slow turning tub. Tried adding overdrive to the cannons to increase damage and found that it would not even fire afterwards. Did some research on-line and learned about the 10% power demand for every extra barrel. Tried going with shotgun but the pattern is not random or uniform, its a fixed biased pattern, same with salvage-missile and beam-missile. I deleted most of the blueprints but one, not sure which revision I kept.

 

[TrainDodger]

The best way to deal with missiles is to simply have as many Cannon/Cannon point-defense guns as you can pack onto your ship. You don't need very many cannon blocks at all. Anything more than about six to twelve cannon blocks per turret is a waste. Focus on power and shielding to keep them from getting nicked up by enemy fire. Keep the number of cannon groups down to one or two at maximum. Try to have at least twenty or thirty of these small turrets peppered across your hull in strategic locations. If the difficulty level is turned up enough, then you will, without fail, shoot down a significant percentage of incoming missiles that way.

 

[Panpiper]

Keep in mind that power requirements increase 10% for every extra 'emitter' in the array. A set of 11 single block cannons will use double the power of 1 eleven block cannon. Your proposed 7x7 array will use 480% more power than if they were combined into one barrel.

Thank you for the feedback.

Having built the array, it takes just over 12K of power for the 7x7 array, which while a lot for a point defense cannon, is fairly trivial to generate in a box turret. (I prefer a turret to generate as much of it's own power as possible.)

The turrets I am building are deliberately quite oversized (for point defense), as I want them to stand up to fire without needing constant repair and replacement (I do a lot of pirate hunting). I am installing 24 of the things with a mass of 400 each. Simply using the box edges I am able to have four separate power lines making pretty much full use of the box dimensions. I could get more power than that by adding extra 3D crosses inside the box, but it already generates far more than it needs for both the array and it's shield regen.

 

[CyberTao]

Keep in mind that power requirements increase 10% for every extra 'emitter' in the array. A set of 11 single block cannons will use double the power of 1 eleven block cannon. Your proposed 7x7 array will use 480% more power than if they were combined into one barrel.

Having built the array, it takes just over 12K of power for the 7x7 array, which while a lot for a point defense cannon, is fairly trivial to generate in a box turret. (I prefer a turret to generate as much of it's own power as possible.)

One advantage of AI is that it fires all computers at once, regardless of whether it is in range. Dividing the guns up among 2 computers on a turret would more than half the power cost of firing. With 11 outputs, +100% on each group, and you have 11 groups, so ~+1100% in all, but changing the groups to 6 and 6 on 2 computers gives +50% per group, so only +300% per computer (+600% total, and has an extra output). Takes up a bit of space on small turrets doing this though, since they would need that space for shields.

Tried adding overdrive to the cannons to increase damage and found that it would not even fire afterwards.

Overdrive increases the power costs by 6x, and the damage only by 3x (also counts towards the weapon group count iirc). You'd probably be better off combining a few groups and arranging the outputs to make a tighter shot.

 

[Panpiper]

One advantage of AI is that it fires all computers at once, regardless of whether it is in range.

Hmm... It occurs to me to wonder, if the AI will fire all groups at once, is it doing only a single targeting role for all groups, or would having nine point defense cannon/computer sets in a point defense turret give that turret nine chances to hit? I am right now rebuilding the turret to have nine, 3x3 cannon arrays. (The existing box coincidentally is the perfect dimensions for making that nicely symmetrical.)

Edit: It dawned on me that I really did not need to keep the turret core on it's hotbar and instead could put ten computer/array sets into the point defense turret.

 

[CyberTao]

Hmm... It occurs to me to wonder, if the AI will fire all groups at once, is it doing only a single targeting role for all groups, or would having nine point defense cannon/computer sets in a point defense turret give that turret nine chances to hit? I am right now rebuilding the turret to have nine, 3x3 cannon arrays. (The existing box coincidentally is the perfect dimensions for making that nicely symmetrical.)

AI is really simple, it fires everything it can at 1 target. Whether it is a 2block group of cannon+cannon, or a massive arrange of nukes, if it decides to target a drone, that drone is taking it all.

So 1 turret with 3 computers will fire all 3 at 1 target.

 

[Panpiper]

AI is really simple, it fires everything it can at 1 target. Whether it is a 2block group of cannon+cannon, or a massive arrange of nukes, if it decides to target a drone, that drone is taking it all.

So 1 turret with 3 computers will fire all 3 at 1 target.

Yes, but is it one roll to hit with all three hitting or missing depending upon the single dice roll, or it is three separate chances to hit? That makes a HUGE difference when we are talking about point defense.

 

[CyberTao]

Yes, but is it one roll to hit with all three hitting or missing depending upon the single dice roll, or it is three separate chances to hit. That makes a HUGE difference when we are talking about point defense.

I was under the impression that all outputs have a different hit chance. I could probably test this with Ra's tribarrel punch cannons, see what kinds of mark it makes.

Edit; Unfortunately, it seems as thought the inaccuracy is due to the AI choosing an inaccurate place to shoot at to start with. All 3 barrels are converging on the same spot, which was the same offset from the core. So it either hits with everything, or 'misses' with everything. Interesting, gonna have to explore this further, cause if that's the case, you only need 1 cannon/cannon group per turret for PD.

 

[Panpiper]

... it either hits with everything, or 'misses' with everything.

Well, that is somewhat disappointing. Oh well... At least I now have 'very' wide spread converging fire. So even if the AI misses, there will still be an awful lot of cannon fire being put in the general path of missiles. Maybe a missile will get hit by itself flying 'into' that thick shot, as opposed to being deliberately hit by the inept AI.

 

[Xavori]

Some testing I've done on this problem.

Turrets and drones don't necessarily fire all the weapons computers they have available. There is no consistency in this problem either. I've had drone/turrets that used all their guns, and other drone/turrets that would only use a single gun. I've therefore starting going to a single-weapon-per-turret rule. This not only avoids the problem, but it makes it very easy to decide how and where to place turrets.

The 4 seperate shotgun barrels hooked to a single computer seems to do the best job, especially if the shotguns are not aligned, ie. one shotgun might be right at the edge of your docking area, another a block back, a third two blocks back. It creates a huge fairly random spread of cannon shots, and it's still fired pretty quick so it tends to fill an area with enough shots to take down most incoming missiles. You can fit such a turret in the minimum docking area even so you can stick a bunch of these on a ship.

Even better than turrets is a chaff system. Simply cover the inside of your hull with evenly spaced 1 cannon - 1 missile tubes hooked to computers facing in all six directions, and use a basic logic clock to fire them non-stop. If you go totally crazy and waffle your inner hull, you're invincible vs missiles (and likely having huge power issues). If you space them a few blocks apart, you can get near invincible without needing quite so much power for all those guns.

 

[Smoke]

The AI does not lead the target at all.

The accuracy setting of vanilla is atrocious, on any setting.

With these in mind I suggest adjusting the AI accuracy in the server.cfg file. On the Arctic Gaming servers that I admin on are 250, and 2000 for the BALANCED server. The number is the range at which the AI is 99% accurate dropping off at some unbeknownst to me value after, but I assume it's something like one percent a meter. Now the sector size of the servers is currently, 5km and 10km, which greatly impacts weapons range. Missiles with Beam mod move at 5.94 server speed and have a range of 4.8 times sector size; Cannons Have a max range of 1 or 2 sectors, and move at 10 to 20 times server speed, the latter being Cannons modded with Beam.

With these in mind beam missiles are very powerful, so much so that they fight missile/missile systems as top dog. Missiles with lock-on, modded with either Pulse or Beam, have their tracking systems thwarted by Radar Jammer, but can still be dumb fired.

Because the Missiles(Beam) move so fast, and AI does NOT lead it's target, AI-AM systems really struggle in the current starmade environment.

I have already implemented balancing changes in the "Arctic Gaming BALANCED" server, and the "Arctic Gaming" server will have changes made if the balancing is well received.

The logical framework that I have constructed for the Missile balancing is the if you have a given number of modules to work with ie 100:
100 Missile Modules
50 Beam + 50 Missile
and so on.....
That the physical Missile projectile would be the same, so that if you have a beam mod for example,
you are trading explosive payload for powerful engines and sophisticated tracking systems. Therefore, pure missiles should do the most damage and have the biggest radius, as they are the hardest to use. All of the Missile systems other than dumb fire, should do less damage, as they have removed a portion of explosive payload for guidance and engines, and they are "easier".

Missile/Missile is lame.
lets be honest folks, this is a spammy, no skill, crutch of a weapon.
I have removed the "split" it now fires a single projectile,

Missile/Pulse is lame.
Slow, short range, LONG reload, and LESS damage than Beam
I have made the missile split into 10, but still is Lock-on
This is to give people a choice in how they want to overcome AI-AM systems
with speed BEAM, or mass Pulse.

Keep in mind that all missiles, except M/M, can be dumb fired which only adds to their usefulness.

These changes are also in line with bringing down damage across the board, as blocks have a max Hp of 255, and a max EHP of 25500.
There is my Benchmark, when I am trying to make armour useful, and to not punish people for having aesthetically pleasing ships and stations, but to reward them with a robust structure that will protect their blocks when they need it MOST.

VANILLA
Shield Capacitor 55 (diminishing returns)
Adv. Armour 400 EHP
Avg. Block health maybe 10-20 (not armour)

Missile Module 75 damage
Warhead 200 damage

These numbers do not make for a balanced game.

I LOVE STARMADE I ONLY WANT TO MAKE IT BETTER FOR EVeRYONE

 

[Valiant70]

I may field test some shotgun turret and chaff designs. The ship in question has a lot of power to spare so running chaff instead of a radar jammer is plausible. The engineering bay will provide a place to mount the chaff.

 

[Xavori]

I may field test some shotgun turret and chaff designs. The ship in question has a lot of power to spare so running chaff instead of a radar jammer is plausible. The engineering bay will provide a place to mount the chaff.

You should also test using the various colored lights to create a nude portrait of Rosie O'Donnell on your ship. Pretty sure nothing would hit that...

 

[SkaireKrough]

You should also test using the various colored lights to create a nude portrait of Rosie O'Donnell on your ship. Pretty sure nothing would hit that...

Uh,,, that's not gonna work, heat-seekers and Bobby controlled weapons act like drunken sailors just returned from long deployment, will go after just about anything with very limited success. Many players that spot that would open fire while backing away as fast as possible as primal survival instincts take over.