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.

[Arkcon]

geoschmo said:
"Simple mathematics really:"


*SNIP*

Nice summary. Always kinda knew that, but never really put the words together like that. That may be the real reason that missles rule the early game, and a so weak in the late game. Its not so much the missle damage and PDC cannon research ('tho that is there). Its the ability to overwhem an opponent is gone once people gear up and start building fleets. If you stay 2 hull sizes above your opponent, you could field more missiles than his PDC, but that really doesn't stay the case for long.

[Suicide Junkie]

Early on, there is no PD, shields, armor or big fleets.
The range advantage of the missiles trumps regular guns, letting you shoot without taking return fire.

Defenses of any sort quickly degrade the usefulness of missiles towards zero, since as mentioned before, they're just too big to overwhelm PD, but also their damage/kt/turn sucks, and they do not divide among the enemy targets well.

[Makinus]

To increase the missiles use i modded (on top of TDM) the missiles cost to half the normal cost...

Since TDM AIs use a decent number of PDCs i´m still not sure if it will worth it, but i´m still playtesting...

The advantage would be that missile ships would be cheaper, allowing you to construct more of them to overwhelm the PDCs of your enemy...

I also modded fighter bays so they have twice the normal cargo space, allowing more figthers per carrier...

I´m playing a race with exclusive use of missiles and fighters to see if my changes make them more useful in the late game...

[Caduceus]

Thanks for the input guys.