[Atraikius]

I happened to notice that through the various Posts that it seems that the missile/point defense issue bounces back and forth on which is too tough. To me this seems as it is causing more problems that what may have been in the game to begin with. First we saw mods to increase the amount of PD on AI ships, now the updates of what is on the beta test Versions indicate that the speed of missles is going to be increased. Is there going to be another demand for increaseing the effectiveness of PD after the next Version?

Part of what makes this such a great game is the ability to customize it to make it how you want it to be, but after making some massive mods for SE3 right after the capibility to modify the components and facilities was included, I realized the many of the changes I had tried actually took away some of the uniqueness of the game, and made it more generic feeling since items that were once useful to some extent now were realitively useless. I found that you really needed to sit back and look at how each change would effect other items in the game, otherwise any mod was pointless. In a way I see this starting to happen to SE4, point defenses were improved, now missles are improving; APB's had their damage and range increased, the damage is understandable, but to me the range increase seems to make meson bLasters worthless, and coupled with the fact that phased shields are easily available eventually this tends to take away a lot from the phased polaron beams. Those two used to be the long range beam weapons with the highest levels of the phased polaron beam having a slight edge in range over the APB at the cost of decreased damage with its abiltiy to ignore shields being offset by its increased research cost, and the meson bLaster having a longer range at the expense of damage. Now with APB having a range of 6, to give the meson bLaster some worth it would either need to do heavier damage than the APB (at the expense of ripper beams), or bump its range to 7, but then it would start effecting the usefullness of the long-range heavy weapons.

I apologize for the rambling, but I don't want to see all the urging for fixing one type of weapon cause an arms race that makes this game loose its enjoyment value.

To return to the topic, I agree that there is an issure between PD and Missiles, but instead of just increasing thier abilities (speed, damage, etc...), couldn't a change be proposed to MM to change missiles to be worked similar to fighters? A basic structure to support that is already in place from the fighters, then missles could be costomized and tailored to each race, sacrificing armor or damage for extra speed or ECM abilities. Also, instead of being a weapon itself that fires every three turns, now the missle component would be a cargo component, and you would have to construct the missles like fighters. This way, missles could be as dangerous as anyone would want, yet would not take away anything from the PD effectiveness because the effectiveness of the missiles is also compensated by a limited supply and a cost to build them.