Point Def. too tough against missiles-change it.

[Suicide Junkie]

What I think we should do is take the seekers, take the PD, and compare them to beams & shields+regenerators.

Perhaps, One PDC should be very roughly equal to enough regenerators to recharge the shields in 3 turns from the missile damage.
The missiles' damage should be set to get a damage factor of about 1.0 (average), since they have long range & 100% accuracy, but can be stopped by PDC/shields)

given a missle damage of about 120, we need a regeneration of about 40 pts/turn. With regenerators, you need 2 SRIVs so the PDCs would be 2x the size they are now.
given a missile damage of about 120, and a shield with 360 (rounded) hitpoints, you need 1/3rd of a shield to block 1 missile, making the PDC a one-shot deal @ 13kt

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Ok, clearly doubling the size of PDCs to match them up to regenerators & shielding is not ideal. Since they only protect against missiles, and not beams, they should be reduced in size compared to regeneration.
Thus, we end up with PDC like they are now.

Answer: use strategic genious to outwit the enemy.
Ie. If the enemy has no PD, use missiles. If the enemy loads up on PD, then he skimped on weapons and/or defences, so rip 'em a new one with beams.
With a mixed fleet, tell beam ships to attack PD ships, and missile ships to attack beam ships.
With mixed ships, going extreme either way can get you the win.

[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.

[Nitram Draw]

Atraikius,
You have a great point about how changes affect the game. I am one of those who would like to see more added to the game but I realize you just can't add without changing the balance of the game. That is the hardest part of creating a component, not what it will add but what will it take away too.
MM has done a great job in creating the large number of components and having most of them be useful. The large number also lets you play your favorite style, everything has a counter. This is why I like the game so much.
I think that every patch will see some component tweaked, like the PD and missles seem to be in the upcoming patch. They must have a good group of testers because so far they have kept the balance with each patch.
I'm not sure how to balance the PD question. I have found that missles are ineffective against massed PD, 1-2 destroyer with only PD on it seems to protect my fleets from all missle/fighter attacks and that seems wrong. On the other hand missles always hit so maybe the problem lies with the accuracy of the two weapons. Make each less likely to hit each other and it may balance itself out.

[This message has been edited by Nitram Draw (edited 30 March 2001).]

[KiloOhm]

Ok, that's just plain nasty putting point defense on fighters... you sick little monkey.

quote:

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Originally posted by Nitram Draw:
Can you put PD on fighters?

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Regards,
KiloOhm

[Nitram Draw]

Hey whats wrong with a little air superiority

[Arralen]

Another thought:

- make PDC have range 1 .. this way they'll only protect the ship they're mounted on, any maybe a neighbouring ship. With enough missiles you could still flood the defences and do some serious damage .. but you'll only be able to do this every 3 turns ..

- make PDM which have range 5..8, and reload time of 2; tell the AI to build "Aegis Cruisers"

Have tested this setup with the Olesen Techset in SE3, and it worked quite well !!

A.