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If I fight space battles missiles are the cause for over 90% of the ships being destroyed. I think one should reduce the number of missiles carried by each ship to racks of 2, 5, 15 and 25, with adequate displacement. Thus one ship can fire only these missiles and has to rely on other weapons otherwise.

Well, Missilies are not that overpowered as you think ;-)

 

Missiles have two major weaknesses, they can be shot down by point defence beam weapons like Laser, Massdriver, Phasors etc., and they could be avoided by using e.g. ECM system in your ships! It is your choice if you like to build a ship which has good protection vs. specific kinds of attacks. In difference to MoO2 you can't fit in EVERY useful equipment. 

Missiles are overpowered quite significantly, especially in late game combat. Fast Missile Racks reload before the enemies PD meaning that even if they are defensive enough to stop/minimise your first volley, which limits their damage output by the way, they will still be eating the entire of the second one. None of my ships ever have PD, maybe some Anti-Missile Rockets if they are lucky. That said, when miniaturization comes in that may change, right now the protection isn't worth the space and you are better off relying on raw DPS so that at least if the other guy has the same tactic (and most do) then his ships will all die too.

 

They'll need to fix that it some point but I'm not concerned yet.

personally i think missiles are fine right now, i do think the lasers need a buff for pd use though, the phasors are really OP compared to them or mass-drivers in terms of PD.

 

a good pd setup can nullify over 20 missiles in my experience, for instance one of my titans would have 60+ missiles, 20+ torpedoes, x number of phasors if available, and 2 banks of 30+ PD weapons. it was completely immune to the missiles of a star-base and missile base. i would also have a frigate support fleet each with 4 or so PD weapons..... pretty much every ship i design has a good amount of PD.

 

i have only lost 2 major fleet engagements so far, one was a surprise ambush by a neutral faction after i just crushed a near equal force of hostile ships in the same system (hence my fleet was badly beat up) the other was a foolish attack where i was outnumbered 3 to 1 against an enemy military outpost, i still beat the enemy fleet but the retreat button is broken so it was 3 of my frigates left vs a military outpost....

Missile Titans and Battleships are the mainstay of my fleet in a Klackon hard playthrough. Naturally they are fitted with the Dauntless Guidance Unit and Fast Missile racks and all four upgrades for the missiles (e.g. Heavy or ECCM). In large battles against the AI Frigate/Destroyer spam fleets I sometimes have my FPS dip down into the single digits. Anyway, missiles might not be as powerful if the AI would build ships to counter your builds, forcing you to adapt. As it is right now the AI does not adapt and therefore does not use enough ECM or PD weapons mounts to counter your missiles. A fully missile equipped Doom Star is, therefore, also quite a sight to behold, that is if your GPU is up to the task.

 

 

Do any of you guys even encountered a properly equipped ship against these missile heavy builds of yours?

 

Like Did any ship had proper PD defenses, Lightning Fields and ECM jammers?

It's also quite a significant shortcoming that currently ships do not cover each other with their PD fire.

Once that is fixed(If fixed) I see little merit in actually building missile ships, there are just way to many counters to them.

 

I have had people try to counter me in the ways you suggest Blackhog but this simply brings us into a meta-environment I fear they cannot win. For each of my missiles they want to shoot down they lose space for offensive systems to fire back and once I have Fast Missile Racks equipped they won't even have PD for every second volley. On top of that none of the other weapons has range to counter you effectively, so after initial engagement all you have to do is shoot and kite. Trying to run down an enemy fleet flying in 8 different directions with ships with beam weapons doesn't really work, especially since there's no need for your Missile Boats to even face the enemy.

 

In short it's not just the missiles. It's also the short ranges of beam weapons, the very limited combat model, the fact FMR > PD etc etc. They could fix everything else and maybe missiles are balanced then? Hard to say. Definitely broken right now though.

I have found that a ship with missiles is vastly better than a ship with beams, I found fighters, bombers to be totally ineffective too. In MOO2 the downside with missiles was you would eventually run out. I have not tried counter measures against AI missiles yet.

 

One tactic I have tried is torpedos + displacement device. The Torpedos seem to have the longest range, so you wait till you fire them, then pause, then displace to the other side of the battlefield. It is quite a good tactic with automated repair device and shield capacitors. However, the missiles do follow you around the map when you displace, so you cannot dodge them this way. I tend to use a combination of torpedos and missiles + point defence beams on my ships. 

 

Whilst we are chatting, I was thinking it would be good for Starbases, Outposts, Titans and Doom Stars to have Super Heavy Mounted Beams with huge range to make these units more appealing.

 

actually plasma torps with semi guidance will wrek your missile boats( better damage, range, and immune to PD and ECM), it is just the ai never uses them. tbh though plasma torps are the only torps worth having, as mercuites can match the other 2 types easy.

 

i have been loading up my titans with 30 semi guided plasma torps+ 60 or so missiles as secondary weapons. the plasma torps will take out a starbase/outpost from outside missile range with one volley. missiles are better in a close range fight though as semi guidance is only about a 90 degree arc after the volley is fired. but if you have to close in then beam weapons can come into play too....

 

personally, i rarely use beam weapons on my destroyers/frigates or my larger ships. but late game i make them my main cruiser armament as they become a sort of meat shield for my big ships and they can actually take a hit unlike frigates/destroyers. and keep some plasma torps for long range bombardment of stationary defenses.

 

Torpedoes are only immune to PD, not jammers, And They have no way countering jammers, unlike missiles. I believe the only equipment which (maybe) reduces jamming is the Dauntless. I may be wrong however, never used it.

 

That may be a bug. The lower reload rates of PD weapons. The cooldown on missiles is around 10 second I believe, while the PD weapons have 6. Even with missiles racks The PD weapons would fire faster than the missiles reload. On the Anti-missiles It's like 3 second.

 

This whole thing seems waay unfinished for me. 

First off ships do not cover each other with PD which is really weird. You could load dozens of PD weapons on destroyers and basically hard-counter missile ships that way and still retain good weapons on your main ships, would make frigates and destroyers useful in big scale fights.

 

The PD rating of weapons is also interesting, lasers have horrible ratings, around 0.33 per weapon I believe, Mass drivers may have around 0.5 and Phasors have 1 If I remember correctly.

I guess that means how many missiles or fighter/bombers can They shot down every 6 seconds (cooldown).

Which indicates that missiles are really strong in the early game and would became phased out in the late game with jammers and lighting fields and all that.

Because I think a Zeon M costs around 10 points while a PD Phasor around 6 or 8(maybe 10) depending on arcs. Still leaves room for other weapons to slowly grind down the enemy fleet while countering their main damage output.

 

Also Missiles have a range of 60 units, while Direct Energy weapons have 50, not that huge of a difference. Beam weapons have 40.

 

I don't know, I like prolonged gun fights way more than missile tornadoes. Like 50% of points on just various defenses and rest on shield penetrating weapons. 

I also used Bombers instead of Torpedoes, since They are equipped with the best torpedoes and drop them at point blank range I thought that they are better.

Although They can be shot down with PD.

 

Maybe because I started watching Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

 

Maybe Heavy mounts could increase damage slightly(+25-50%) and range(+10-20 units)

That way Outpost and etc could out-range your fleet, unless You have those on your fleet as well.

 

 Misssles is too strong, and planetary defence stations is too weak, except Missile Base (well, cause it shooting the missiles). AI don't stand a chance against big missile ships with dauntless guidance systems and MIRV missile trait no matter of game difficulty level. 
Edited by PatPatrik, 06 April 2016 - 02:21 PM.

 

Is that the fault of missile countermeasure being bad or the AI not using them, though?

 

Edited by Bl4ckh0g, 06 April 2016 - 02:21 PM.

 

Just checked my savegame, where i used my 6 missle battleships against 20 AI cruisers. First wave of my missiles was almost completely obliterated by PD, but since i has "fast missile racks" my ships shot faster than PD managed to reload, so i won (3 battleships survived).

So probabbly missiles isn't total OP, but at the current situation with AI and balance they are just universal and easy answer.

Edited by PatPatrik, 07 April 2016 - 10:12 AM.

In MOO2, missiles were great in the beginning, but once you got better targeting computers, PD + the limited amount of ammo missiles had, made them a lot less powerful mid game. I am not sure if this is the same with the current build, as I have not tried PD + the higher end computers (Optronic / Cybernetic) against the AI using lots of missiles. I also need to try the ECM jammers, but the AI seems to build balanced ships rather than specialized ships that a human player would do.

 

Another drawbacks missiles use to have is if a ship in the nearby vicinity exploded the shockwave would eat all the missiles. That happened on more than one occasion with MOO2 and was frustrating, but another reason missiles were a risk.

 

It would be cool if there were different chassis for the classes of ships, like a missile boat cruiser chassis you could unlock, just as an example. What do you think? 

 

I believe the same trend is also present in this game, since You've got more defensive tools later in the tech tree, advanced jammers and lightning fields.

I kinda have the impression that PD weapons are not functioning optimally, like ships do not cover each other and It seems weird that missiles reload faster with racks than PD weapons.

I also put up for discussion in another thread the idea of Battleship and above being considered capital ships and having a number of picket slots, say Battleship 2, Titan 5. You drag and drop your smaller ships into the picket slot at the start of the battle and they act as sentries, following the capital ship around the map until your individually order them to move.

 

Do you think something like an order you can give to a ship to defend another ship would be useful? So you click on A, order defend B and it attempts to screen B and fire PD weapons at anything approaching Bs position.

 

I think If They would make it so, that different class of ships could be grouped together and used in a formation, It would be good enough.

Currently even If you assign them a custom group They would still be divided by class, like You cannot make a formation with a battleship and four cruisers.

 

Ah, that is what I was hoping they would let you do though. I was playing a cool battle earlier, and one of my cruisers in the vanguard was getting well and truly beaten up. What I wanted to do was ask that cruiser to retreat, but I cannot without all the other cruisers (there were 3 others, working fine in good shape) retreating too. So that is where I was thinking of battle groups, similar to how fleets work in Sins of a Solar Empire. You select all the ships you want in a fleet, then control + f to turn them into a fleet. Then you can give the fleet a formation and hotkey it. You then click on the fleet icon to order the fleet to do X,Y or Z or individually click on a ship to overide and give individual instructions, such as retreat.

 

Problem with that is, you probably want your PD destroyers screening your larger ships, depending on how the units appear on the map, your Titan say, may be the one at the front of your formation (if you are choosing V formation) That is where I thought of pickets as the solution rather than fleets, so you would have set formations based around your larger ships. 

 

Since you can use the mouse to drag a box over groups of ships and order them all to attack X etc, it would be better for me for the UI to enable you to give individual orders to ships. 

 

 

 

I played quite a lot of SoaSER back in the day but I never knew that You could make fleets like that and use formations.

I always just clicked my entire fleet at the enemy's planet.

That seemed to work against the best AI.

:-) to be fair I have been playing the Star Trek Armada 3 Mod for Sins of a Solar Empire Rebellion and it has commands to have fleets fly in close formation, normal grouping and loose formation, also to group speed. It works quite well, but suffers from the units drifting out of position very quickly. In that game I want to put a small group of repair frigates behind every capital ships and have them stay in tight rigid formation, the game does not let you. It is the same on the current MOO CTS tactical combat. 

 

That is why I am really pushing Pickets as a concept, I would like to put ships in set formation at the beginning of the battle and have them stay this way :-)