Beams v Missiles

[Caduceus]

What is everyone's break point when choosing beam versus missile tech? Once PDC become more commonplace, do missiles become superfluous for your race?

[Fyron]

Once PDC is available, missiles are generally useless. They can be good as a surprise attack against an enemy that neglects sufficient PDC, thinking that they don't need it. But after that, you had better have beam ships to handle their next fleet.

You can of course try to overwhelm enemy PDC with fighters, missiles, and drones. This takes a huge amount of micromanagement and a lot of resources anyways, so you are probably better off just sticking with beam ships...

[Ragnarok-X]

The problem with missiles is that they are wasted once the target is destroyed. Your ship always launches whatever it can, so under most circumstances many missiles are wasted, since they dont head for a new target once their former is destroyed. If you have played MoO2 you may have noticed there is certain technology, which, once aquired, allows your missiles to automaticly aim for a new target. This would be good in SE 5

[Slick]

You have some (minimal) control over this. When setting up ship strategies, you can set the damage percent per ship (and planets, etc). The AI will make an attempt to direct weapons fire to accomplish this. The default is 80% damage to ships. With beam weapons, this is a little flakey, with missiles, you more often than not will exceed the percent damage and often destroy the target. This is partly because the AI doesn't take into account missiles that are in flight.

As an aside, this is why missile fleets are bad for capturing planets. They tend to glass them.

Of course, as stated, PDC is easier to use and cheaper to get to nerf missiles.

[brianeyci]

I am thinking organic is the only way you'd want to go missiles late game.

2 reload speed, and maximum range strategy, how can you resist? Top that off with organic seekers using... organics... and you get ships constructed twice as quickly.

Brian

[geoschmo]

Simple mathematics really:

Name := Capital Ship Missile V
Tonnage Space Taken := 50
Weapon Seeker Dmg Res := 50

Name := Point - Defense Cannons V
Tonnage Space Taken := 20
Weapon Damage At Rng := 65 65 65 65 65

One PDC takes less then half the space, and kills one missle per shot. Forget the fact that the PDC is way cheaper then the missle too. It should be plainly obvious that you simply can't overwhelm PDC with missles without having your opponent way outnumbered in ships. All you are doing by using missles is giving your opponent a sporting chance. Rate of fire is not even relevant. Organic missles are no better. You could have CSM's that fire every turn and travel a speed of 20 and you'd still lose unless you had more ships then the other guy simply because of the difference in tonnage space taken. Because he can put one PDC on his ships for every missle you have and he'll be unhitable by your missles. And he'll have enough room left over for direct fire weapons to shoot back at you.

[Caduceus]

Thanks for the input guys.