Missiles and point-defense

[ExplorerBob]

Read this post only if you're comfortable with the possibility that it might ruin your Weird Worlds experience, reveal a major, ongoing problem in virtually every mod's balance, and make the game way too easy for you.

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Anyone who's played Odd Adventures knows of how I've tried to make missiles more powerful and useful. I removed point-defense guns, like the neptunium railgun, with the goal of bringing them up to par with other weapons.

However, I've discovered that this is in vain, and 003 will require an even more comprehensive rebalancing, aimed towards increasing the durability of long-ranged attacks.

Even though your weapons do not automatically target the missiles, they're still vulnerable to your attacks. By specially firing weapons in the missiles' vicinity, it's possible to use any weapon as a counter-missile gun, from chaingun to laser beam to tachyon beam.

This defense renders most, if not all missile attacks futile. If you want proof, do the following test in the simulator (I did this in Odd Adventures, but the trick should work just as well in stock and other mods):

Put four (4) Tan Ru Demolishers or Decimators in your personal fleet. Make an enemy Tchorak fleet of one Vent Mother, two Crust Busters, and two Lava Pods. Once in the battle, order your Tan Ru square to stay still and fire their weapons at the Tchorak fleet. Fire weapons at incoming missiles if they're outside your normal firing angles. The Tan Ru square formation should stay intact and shoot down all Tchorak missiles, allowing you to gain the edge in close-range combat.

This tactic can even be successfully employed by smaller craft. A Zorg fighter with its stock plasma blaster can hold off two Lava Pods' missiles, long enough for a ship the speed of a Terran Corvette to leave the battle.

In short, even when beefed up, existing missiles are still useless against a skilled player. Thus it is necessary to increase the effectiveness of missiles even further, to render them more proof against this type of defense, and make them a viable option for humans and AI alike.

The question now is how missiles can be improved to negate this as a problem.

The simplest, and most direct change is to try to improve their basic durability. Unfortunately, as I haven't experimented much with point-defense yet, I don't know how this could be achieved. Even if it could be done, though, it isn't necessarily a desirable effect; it could result in missiles being as tough, or tougher than fighters, capable of soaking up unrealistic amounts of damage. It might become possible to use missiles as shields to stop incoming fire, and that would be just as bad as how it is now, unless it was specifically intended to work that way.

A more reasonable idea would be to increase the missile reload rate, so that they swarm over a ship, and it would become more difficult to prevent missile strikes. This is probably a good idea and would be advisable in any case, but with fast-firing beam weapons I'm not sure how effective it would be.

Likewise, you could improve missile speed, so that you have less time to ward off strikes before they hit. That's also probably a good idea, but it won't solve the problem in itself, and it could create other problems with evading missiles.

Missiles could simply be made unshootable, but that eliminates the reason neptunium railguns and the Tchorak defense weapons have to exist. While I will make that change if it turns out that there's no other choice, I think that eliminating diversity in the game should probably be a last resort option, and should be considered only after we've eliminated every other option.

In short, we face a difficult problem here, and it will take some thought to consider how it can be adequately solved. I appreciate your input into this process and hope we can quickly resolve this situation for an improved Odd Adventures 003, and an improved Weird Worlds game.