[Weapons Update] Missile Turning Rate inverse to damage

[EricBlank]

I agree with the OP that larger missiles should be both slower in terms of max velocity and turning rate than smaller missiles, even assuming the same weapon to secondary ratio. The game in general has some issue with everything scaling up evenly. In places like a weapon's fitness for dealing with substantially larger or smaller craft, an imbalance or imperfect scaling that sets apart the largest and smallest ships would allow for more diversity in ship and turret roles and more diverse and interesting gameplay overall.

I want bigger turrets and missiles to have a harder time tracking and hitting significantly smaller targets, just as smaller craft shouldnt have much hope of stopping a battleship from blowing up whatever it was going to blow up (including the fighters, if the player commanding them doesnt disengage) Bombers have a role in damaging capitol ships, and defensive turrets, gunship escorts and fighters should have a role in intercepting bombers. With large capitol turrets and missiles being fully able to track and kill even the smallest craft equally efficiently as the largest, theres no point in fielding small or midsize craft in the first place. Just another, preferably bigger, battleship.

 

[Nosajimiki]

This is a good thing. It's still beside my point of a ship being able to carry multiple missile systems designed for different target profiles, and you're still asserting something that isn't true: the designers did not intend to force everyone to min-max their missiles, and this is pre-supposing an assertion that I am suggesting should not be the case for gameplay's sake.

No weapon should be equally useful good against all targets. This is a staple of Space Combat Sim genres, and StarMade is worse off for not implementing it.

We agree with the fact that "No weapon should be equally useful good against all targets", but you seem to miss the fact the m-b are NOT equally useful against all targets. More-over, they are not equally useful on all ships. In weapons 2.0 you could make a salvo of 100 2-million damage explosive homing missiles and never have to worry about overflowing your damage radius on any one of them. The system basically scaled up cleanly until you got to about 150 missile outputs which is when phasing began to be a problem. This meant that you could go up to about 500k mass cruisers before there was any meaningful difference in scale which was the max size for many servers anyway.

In weapons 3.0, you have soft caps that become very punishing past about 20 or so missiles AND there are no explosive tertiary effects to expand blast radii which means that the maximum effective size of individual missiles got drastically reduced. The end result is that missiles now start to plateau as an effective weapons system at about 1/20th the scale. You are arguing about nerfing 100k module missiles, but there is no point in arguing about them when they are so worthless to begin with.

As for what Shine intended to do, Lancake confirmed that homogenizing missiles is intentional a few weeks ago:





Also note, that I said that this would have been a much better idea under power 1.0. If you could propose a system that prevents missile spam, encourages missile diversity, and fixes the scaling issues, then I would totally agree with this idea. Basically what you are suggesting is not inherently a bad idea. It is a bad idea because you are taking something that is already disadvantaged and further disadvantaging it. It's like recoil, sure it logically makes since, but effically, it is taking cannons that already cant hit squat and making them even better at not hitting squat. This suggestion is taking a weapon that already doesn't scale up in proportion to other weapon classes and making it scale up even worse.

This is akin to replacing the planet-buster with another anti-fighter missile. Both the Sidewinder and RIM-161 are built for the mission of interception. A Minuteman is not. And yes, I do think that M-B weapons can still be planet busters because I've seen them used as such to horrific effect on my servers.

In power 1.0 I agree. You could do massive damage with missiles, but they just don't scale like that anymore, and technically, I would say that the minute man is more of a weapons 2.0 missile-pulse, but that class of weapon has effectively been removed from the game.

 

[Esarai]

As for what Shine intended to do, Lancake confirmed that homogenizing missiles is intentional a few weeks ago:

*snip*

Also note, that I said that this would have been a much better idea under power 1.0. If you could propose a system that prevents missile spam, encourages missile diversity, and fixes the scaling issues, then I would totally agree with this idea. Basically what you are suggesting is not inherently a bad idea. It is a bad idea because you are taking something that is already disadvantaged and further disadvantaging it. It's like recoil, sure it logically makes since, but effically, it is taking cannons that already cant hit squat and making them even better at not hitting squat. This suggestion is taking a weapon that already doesn't scale up in proportion to other weapon classes and making it scale up even worse.

In power 1.0 I agree. You could do massive damage with missiles, but they just don't scale like that anymore, and technically, I would say that the minute man is more of a weapons 2.0 missile-pulse, but that class of weapon has effectively been removed from the game.

Thanks for sourcing that, I wasn't on the Discord when it was said, had no idea.

After having derped around in Dev build for a while with missiles, I'm starting to realize the extent to which missiles have been nerfed. It's really hard to get a missile anywhere close to previous damage levels, and even then, the lockon times are so long that they interfere with firing other weapons.

Hell, that might be what needs to scale--instead of turning rate, increase lockon time proportional to damage, but probably with an asymptotic cap.

 

[EricBlank]

Yeah theres definitely something to be said about the lock on timer right now. I counted it at about 25 seconds. Id understand if there was a way to adjust that based on like weapons scale vs target size vs own sensor strength vs target stealth strength vs weapons secondary ratio, so you can get it down to just under 1 second under perfect conditions, but it doesnt look like anything contributes to that.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Missile lock times would be a great reason to invest in basic stealth/sensor strength without all the addons for more specialized e-war builds

 

[MacThule]

Thanks for posting that info from Discord, Nosajimiki

Personally, I think they may have pivoted from missiles initially being very OP, to them being too restrictive. They'll need to make some degree of correction to pump a little bit more utility and power back into missiles.

 

[Ixalite]

Missile lock times would be a great reason to invest in basic stealth/sensor strength without all the addons for more specialized e-war builds

100% agree! being able to know where the target's reactor is, or what they had for breakfast is one thing, but sensors should help you lock on to targets faster and more reliably.
Stealth should let you be harder to lock on to.

This should apply to beams that stay on target as well: if you are stealthy, the beam might not "stick"

 

[Ixalite]

As long as I am suggesting things, let's throw in increasing view range with sensor upgrades!