|
Post by millesmissiles on Sept 30, 2016 21:42:06 GMT
I want to like this game, but the missile mechanics are killing me. I'm a guy who likes missile spam, and I'm trying to beat Vesta Overkill like that. I have a ship with about 2000 missiles and 200 drones accompanied by a laser battleship, and my strategy IS sound...
Except for the missile mechanics. I've played Kerbal Space Program, I'm not terrible at orbital mechanics and maneuvering... but these missiles, man. These missiles are going to put me in the ground. I spent THREE HOURS earlier adjusting my courses because every ten minutes the enemy would adjust theirs to avoid my salvos. Doesn't help that the AI perfectly aims their salvos every time. Eventually got so frustrated I just threw myself at them, which almost worked except I couldn't do any kind of maneuvering with the lag from my 1200 remaining missiles in flight and got ganked.
This unending cycle of adjusting your trajectory by a few m/s and then "Enemy Fleet Has Changed Course" becomes wearing very quickly- and seriously gets in the way of what little fun this game has to offer. I understand that the enemy ships have more dV than my missiles and could wholly dodge at least 4-5 salvos, but I have 2000 missiles. If they dodge 4-5, I can launch more: they can't dodge all of them.
Essentially, the limiting factor on how much fun I can have in this game isn't my own skill, or the mechanics themselves, but how well I can deal with the tedious task of doing hundreds of small trajectory adjustments by hand. If the AI already have some means of automatically creating hyperbolic intercepts for their missile salvos, why can't us players? I'm fine with manually piloting the capital ships, I even enjoy that sort of thing, but manually piloting missile and drone salvos gets old REAL fast.
TL; DR
I'm angry and want to be able to automatically direct my drone/ missile salvos to intercept people because doing that manually is pulling teeth
|
|
|
Post by blothorn on Sept 30, 2016 22:15:14 GMT
Automatic re-engagement would be nice--usually once I fire missiles, I want them to keep going until they engage or run out of DV forcing the enemy to dodge; I am never going to say "oops, that interception is too expensive, going to let them carry on out of orbit and hope they find an interesting target in solar orbit."
That said, after an enemy adjustment you are usually not too far off interception; if your missiles have even a modest reserve of DV you can often just wait until you are close to change course (by which point dodging is going to be too expensive, or even require more acceleration than a capital ship has). Readjusting course every 10m is going to a lot of trouble to eke out a tiny advantage, which it sounds as if you do not need. You can also direct your fleet to a near-interception and then launch missiles from a few hundred km. Or you could exploit AI limitations and put your missiles on an almost-but-not-quite interception course at the start and then burn for the intercept at the last minute; I have never seen the AI dodge away from a non-interception course.
Also, I think this goes without saying but just in case, if you are playing DV exhaustion games with missiles you should never have more than one volley in flight at a time.
|
|
|
Post by boomertiro on Oct 1, 2016 7:26:08 GMT
Just how far out of the way are they dodging, seriously?
|
|
|
Post by quarkster on Oct 1, 2016 13:21:41 GMT
Just how far out of the way are they dodging, seriously? Let's suppose that your intercept is 1 hour away and your target makes a 10 m/s burn orthogonal to the intercept trajectory. We can expect this to introduce a 36 km error to the intercept.
|
|
|
Post by thorneel on Oct 1, 2016 13:23:53 GMT
This is also a problem when trying to intercept a close by missile fleet as they started their interception: each little burn makes it escape my own interception.
|
|
|
Post by quarkster on Oct 1, 2016 14:04:43 GMT
If you're doing an automatic intercept your intercept speed might be very low. I have been doing all of my intercepts manually and it has worked much better.
|
|
|
Post by etranger on Oct 1, 2016 14:49:25 GMT
The physics of that are fine though. If they make a burn then they'll evade. That the missile officer on the ship might do the adjustments without the captain in reality is a given, but how to handle that? How much dV should be spent to adjust intercept? The key to successful missile attacks is having a lot of dV left in the terminal phase (last 5-10 km), and the AI missile officer might burn off all the dV needed for an effective attack.
|
|
|
Post by millesmissiles on Oct 1, 2016 17:49:18 GMT
Trying again this time. The enemy will change their course every time you plot an intercept, meaning that every time you take a "turn" they will change course accordingly. This, of course, means that turns take a few seconds to a minute at most- so combat is protracted and ugly. Missile tracking mechanisms are still weird but I keep managing to cripple the enemies- of course, this is after two hours of maneuvering a single missile salvo.
|
|
|
Post by millesmissiles on Oct 1, 2016 18:12:00 GMT
Trying again this time. The enemy will change their course every time you plot an intercept, meaning that every time you take a "turn" they will change course accordingly. This, of course, means that turns take a few seconds to a minute at most- so combat is protracted and ugly. Missile tracking mechanisms are still weird but I keep managing to cripple the enemies- of course, this is after two hours of maneuvering a single missile salvo. Update: finished the mission. Total expenditures: 1000 flak missiles 495 striker nuclear missiles 50 lancer drones Thinking a lot about missile combat. I think qswitched takes some liberties to avoid a central issue in sci-fi space combat, specifically regarding missiles. Most space combat scenarios would quickly devolve into missile-spam environments, with whoever brings more and deadlier missiles always being the victor. I'm not so sure that the setting of CADE can legitimately avoid that: with a ship like mine, lightly armored with a great deal of missiles and dV, if I were patient enough I could just simply run the enemy out of dV and throw missiles into him without issue. Basically: if the enemy ship's dV isn't greater than my ship's dV plus my the dV of my missiles, then he cannot avoid them. And if I have more missiles than him, then he can't intercept all my missiles with his. The same goes for flares: all I would need to do is send small salvos of missiles at the enemy until he runs out of flares. The only thing getting in the way of this now is the mechanics by which missiles can be aimed and controlled.
|
|
|
Post by Crazy Tom on Oct 1, 2016 18:49:40 GMT
Trying again this time. The enemy will change their course every time you plot an intercept, meaning that every time you take a "turn" they will change course accordingly. This, of course, means that turns take a few seconds to a minute at most- so combat is protracted and ugly. Missile tracking mechanisms are still weird but I keep managing to cripple the enemies- of course, this is after two hours of maneuvering a single missile salvo. Update: finished the mission. Total expenditures: 1000 flak missiles 495 striker nuclear missiles 50 lancer drones Thinking a lot about missile combat. I think qswitched takes some liberties to avoid a central issue in sci-fi space combat, specifically regarding missiles. Most space combat scenarios would quickly devolve into missile-spam environments, with whoever brings more and deadlier missiles always being the victor. I'm not so sure that the setting of CADE can legitimately avoid that: with a ship like mine, lightly armored with a great deal of missiles and dV, if I were patient enough I could just simply run the enemy out of dV and throw missiles into him without issue. Basically: if the enemy ship's dV isn't greater than my ship's dV plus my the dV of my missiles, then he cannot avoid them. And if I have more missiles than him, then he can't intercept all my missiles with his. The same goes for flares: all I would need to do is send small salvos of missiles at the enemy until he runs out of flares. The only thing getting in the way of this now is the mechanics by which missiles can be aimed and controlled. I've reached much the same conclusion. Missiles simply have the best cost/benefit ratio: they allow you to engage from afar without risking your ship for a very reasonable price. And they're relatively light which means your warship can have good dV capacity. However, there is one thing that might tip the balance of power back to the gun: the Orion Drive. With a high thrust and high exhaust velocity, an Orion Drive equipped ship should be able to dodge almost any missile salvo. Orion drives are too large to be mounted on missiles, and the Orion drive is actually more efficient for larger spacecraft, which makes Orion driven missile buses iffy. All this might come together to favor large battleships equipped with guns, that can pursue one another and slug it out from close range.
|
|
acatalepsy
Junior Member
Not Currently In Space
Posts: 97
|
Post by acatalepsy on Oct 1, 2016 19:29:01 GMT
I've reached much the same conclusion. Missiles simply have the best cost/benefit ratio: they allow you to engage from afar without risking your ship for a very reasonable price. And they're relatively light which means your warship can have good dV capacity. I don't think the issue is missiles, really. I mean they're good, but there are countermeasures. Right now, missiles are actually too weak against the player, while being too good against the AI; the AI doesn't know how to fight missile spam effectively, and it doesn't know how to properly use missile spam to destroy its enemies. It's possible that the 'metagame' would devolve into different types of missile spam and possibly mutual kills, but I bet drone missile interceptors, at a minimum, have a lot of potential for cutting down the viability of missile spam. That's not even getting into the problems of decoys, which are, if anything, overpowered against missile swarms. The most powerful strategy is the one your opponent won't find an answer to. My long range railgun death drones, and nuclear coilgun battleships are similar. There are solutions, the AI just won't take them.
|
|
|
Post by josephw71 on Oct 1, 2016 22:00:27 GMT
If I remember right the genesis of the game was to see what space combat would be like without preconceived notions, and the experiment continues. It would seem like some sort missile behavior preferences might be in order.
|
|
|
Post by Harpoon on Oct 2, 2016 12:05:14 GMT
Why try to avoid missiles in the first place? Beam drones seem to be pretty good at picking them off. Haven't had much experience with the game yet but so far even a decent amount of beam drones can destroy large number of missiles.
|
|
|
Post by Durandal on Oct 2, 2016 18:49:48 GMT
Why try to avoid missiles in the first place? Beam drones seem to be pretty good at picking them off. Haven't had much experience with the game yet but so far even a decent amount of beam drones can destroy large number of missiles. This is what I'm seeing. Even using just a few of the stock YAG green lasers, I can pick off most missile salvos with ease. I would think that with the progress people have been making with reactors and lasers an effective "shield" could easily be made to counter missile waves. Also, has anyone built any sort if conventional cannon-based CWIS?
|
|
|
Post by blothorn on Oct 2, 2016 21:21:28 GMT
Note that most stock missiles have very poor armor vs. lasers---missiles armored with silica aerogel seem near-immune to lasers unless you can get behind them and shoot the engine (and that with an optimized 100MW laser).
I have made some semi-effective kinetic CIWS--look for very high velocities (since missiles rarely mount Whipple shields or have any redundancy, the usual objections to hypervelocity projectiles are inapplicable) and fast turret traverses (since they will make most of their kills within 2-3 seconds within 10km, fast retargeting is key). The problem is that they do not scale well; all guns on the same ship target the same missile until it dies, which means that regardless of effectiveness each ship can only kill them at a rate of distance/muzzle velocity.
I suspect that railgun drones would be somewhat effective; each targets the closest missile, so they should divide their fire better.
|
|