Splitting PD

[El_Phil]

Well there goes another otherwise damn fine plan...

Still I might as well give it a try, what's the worst that can happend hey?

[Alneyan]

If I understand you correctly, you would like missiles to have a defence penalty. If that's so, this line in settings.txt is your friend:

Seeker Combat Defense Modifier := 40

A negative number should work fine, but I have never tested it. I am not sure I understand what you would like to do though (besides toying with the AI, but that's something I know nothing about).

[El_Phil]

Alneyan said:
If I understand you correctly, you would like missiles to have a defence penalty. If that's so, this line in settings.txt is your friend:

A negative number should work fine, but I have never tested it. I am not sure I understand what you would like to do though (besides toying with the AI, but that's something I know nothing about).

Nothing to do with the AI, infact avoiding AI poking is the aim of the plan.

The idea is: Give seekers a defence penalty, but the PD cannon less good at hitting things. These two should balance out if I put the same number in both right?

If thats right then the PD cannon would also be less good at hitting fighters, but still effective against missiles. So making fighters more usefull without having to split PD into two seperate groups and mucking around with the AI.

[Alneyan]

You should then remove that defence bonus seekers get, and reduce PDC accuracy bonus by the same amount, and voilà! Seekers are still as easy to hit, and fighters will be harder to hit.

I am not sure if a negative value would work here, but I think it would be fine (planets have a negative defence penalty).

[Atrocities]

Phil said:
Well there goes another otherwise damn fine plan...

Still I might as well give it a try, what's the worst that can happend hey?

You succeed and we are all envious and steal your work for our mods.

[El_Phil]

Atrocities said:

You succeed and we are all envious and steal your work for our mods.

Possible, but then imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

Anyway thanks Alneyan , that was exactly the line I wanted. Seekers still get knocked out of the sky but fighters have a good chance. Perfect

Unfortunately I've now lost another excuse not to start the game story I've been promising myself I will write "just as soon as the mods finished". Bugger I may actually have to start it this weekend

[Suicide Junkie]

PD missiles can be very useful and entertaining too.

With no autofire built in, your ships will have to use their multiplexing to pick and fire at incoming missiles / fighters / etc.
Although each missile individually has 100% chance to hit, there are still the problems of lead-time and overkill.
The former involves the fact that your missile must reach the enemy missile before the enemy missile reaches your hull
The latter involves organization between ships and among the weapons of each ship. You want to spread out your targets, so that you don't waste missiles against targets that have plenty of missiles inbound.

Overall, you get a healthy mix of offense and defense chance. When the defense outnumbers the offence by a large margin, there is still a chance to score some hits. Missiles fired from short range are liable to hit their targets before the PD can land their shots. The defenders will also be firing a lot of overkill, wasting supplies.

As the number of attackers increases, the missile targets spread out more, and you get less overkill. Defense efficiency improves, although they still will suffer more hits due to the larger volume of fire incoming.