X4 - whispers....please please.

[Graaf]

That is a basis from the pilot flight manual: If 1 ship can do the job, bring 10.

Don’t get me wrong I get that but clearly you have never spend any length of time in the war sectors because if you had you would know exactly why it’s a problem but for the uninitiated the issue is that the response first and foremost is completely disproportionate to the level of threat if I show up in a corvette I don’t expect to get an entire fleet on my ass the other reason this is a problem is because RFF ships are unlimited so even if you blast them more come its an unwinnable fight, even if you brought an entire fleet with you its still impossible to win and I should know because I've actually tried not to mention the fact that the computer is a retard and cant handle player ships properly, unfortunately while the whole RFF thing might sound good in theory in practice the implementation leaves a lot to be desired and it needs a complete overhaul, plus having the computer interfere when I'm trying to do assassination missions is just frustrating

As a Transport pilot I also gat spammed by missiles on occasion. Never really had a problem with them. So why can't your Hyperion survive?

Again you evidently have never been to the war sectors and had 4 RFF M7Ms jump in and then unleash the payload on you even in a Xenon I which is arguably one of the most powerful ships in the game can't stand up to that and that has about 10 times the shielding of the Hyperion as for the M8s it only takes maybe 3 hits for tomahawks to kill you and the Hyperion isn't the most agile ship making it tough to shot them down and that's when there is only 1 m8 shooting at you if you have like 3 of 4 of them shooting at you then you are toast because you wont be able to take out the missiles fast enough and even the moz missile defense doesn't help because it usually misses and you can try and dodge them but more often than not even when strafing like crazy you are still going to get hit particularly if the missiles are all coming from different vectors, and as if that's not annoying enough when you take out m8s if they have missiles on board they explode in your face and one shot you because the blast range is like about 2.5km which is about the max range of most none capital weapons and no that's not an exaggeration

True, I don't spend much time in the War Sectors. Mainly because there is no data collection possible there. And I don't feel like exploring with my TS/TP with a hostile fleet in sector. You on the other hand are willing going into the war sectors with an M6 and are complaining about missile ships using their only weaponry against you.

As chief Brody said: you need a bigger boat.

[Doktor Teufel]

His point is valid. You can throw credits and complexes at the issue, get your own small fleet of bombers and missile frigates crammed full of munitions, jump in, obliterate the enemy from across the sector (with the help of a spotter, if need be), and jump out. It might end up being more complicated than that, but that's the essence of it.

No amount of defensive turrets and Mosquitos can defend ships against a heavy enough barrage of specialized missiles.

Why is this a problem? Well, there's a large variety of ships in the game. When just one or two of them become "I Win" buttons, that's a bit of an issue, especially for people who particularly enjoy fleet combat.

Here's an example: While I was mapping out Argon space as a Terran Commander flying a Springblossom, I ran into numerous Minotaurs in their core sectors. I tried two methods of escaping Flails. The first was to rely on the combination SSCs and EEMPCs in my turrets, run by Smart Turrets (a script which is much better in general than vanilla turret AI), and with Missile Defense Mosquito activated, while moving away from the Minotaur at max speed.

Its Flail barrage obliterated all of my shields and nicked off 2% of the hull, too.

Only with a Turbo Booster (or jumping away entirely) am I able to reliably escape M7Ms unscathed, and that's only when fleeing with all of my might.

No other ship has such powerful deterrent capability.

[Triaxx2]

What? Powerful ships, are powerful? I had no idea...

I'll be honest, war sectors, fine idea. RRF, fine idea. Combining the two? Kind of hilariously imbalanced. In addition to giving the AI the ability to fire barrages, it meant that it was now always going to use them since it was the thing that did the most damage, instead of using just single fired missiles, which they relied on in TC.

On the other hand, they spawn with a fixed amount of missiles. Or should, which means you only need to survive the initial attack and then they're helpless. Also, stations are your friends because you can tuck up inside their super structures and the missiles will hit them. Same with asteroids, put them between you and the target. As long as it's only flails, they'll never breach a map size asteroid.

MDM on the other hand, was never intended for barrage protection. It's designed for countering single strong missiles, and the fact that up to two can be required for a single missile...

[Doktor Teufel]

What? Powerful ships, are powerful? I had no idea...

Powerful is all well and good, but generally a rock-paper-scissors arrangement works best and is most enjoyable. AP sort of has that, at least situationally, but not holistically.

Missile frigates and bombers are like scissors, and pretty much everything else is "paper rocks." M7Ms and M8s can certainly be killed by a fairly wide variety of ships, but they have no hard counter, unless you count other M7Ms and M8s.

An interesting counter might be fast heavy fighters or corvettes that mount hitscan beam emitters in the turrets for Kha'ak-like, top-tier missile defense, as well as main guns that bypass (and don't damage) shields or hull, but directly damage a ship's missile reserves. When the missiles start to blow, the ship most likely blows also. Their weakness would be that they're fairly fragile, useless versus any ship not carrying missiles, and of limited use against ships carrying light or minimal missile armaments.

That, or a "fleet protector" ship covered with turrets mounting long-range, high-powered beam weapons that damage missiles only. This would be functionally identical to my earlier ECM frigate suggestion.

Kha'ak ships could kind of-sort of serve this role as-is (not really, but sort of), yet they've perhaps not entirely coincidentally been pretty much removed from AP. That's what mods are for!

[jorganos]

That, or a "fleet protector" ship covered with turrets mounting long-range, high-powered beam weapons that damage missiles only. This would be functionally identical to my earlier ECM frigate suggestion.

The easy way would be to either introduce a cheap anti-missile swarm missile (or to adapt both wasp and poltergeist to such duty, with poltergeist's FF ability).

Other rather simple solutions would be to (re-?) introduce decoy buoys (not sure whether I mix Freelancer and X2/X3 memories here), to introduce ECM drones (possibly with a rear turret-mounted IRE laser for missile defense) mimicking the target emission signature to draw missiles away from the primary target, or to have some shotgun effect variation of a projectile weapon - enough impact to trigger a missile detonation, too little to do serious harm to an M4 fighter (even of Split build). A shotgun variation of the ID would be cute, too, frying their targeting systems, or at least overloading them so they need to re-acquire the target. The two latter effects would be nice as specialized warheads for countermissiles, too.

Speaking of the Honorverse missile doctrine below, a short lived big diameter shielded drone interspersing itself between the missile and its target might cause premature detonation, too.

Basically missile spam countered by anti-missile spam. And possibly some sort of shortcut solution system avoiding to have the game engine simulate every single submunition as a 3D object whenever offensive and defensive missiles get into proximity of one another.

This shouldn't lead X series space battles down the Honor Harrington-universe style missile slugfeasts, though. ECM drones or warheads getting countered by recon drones and anti-anti-missile warheads counter-spam-counter-spam mixed in the missile broadsides...

[Doktor Teufel]

I imagine X4's metagame will be quite different than AP's regardless. This discussion has treated AP's game mechanics as though they'll be more-or-less carried over and iterated upon, but I have a feeling that won't really be the case.

From what I recall, missiles in X were once considered marginal and fairly useless; the pendulum essentially swung the other way in AP.

[gbjbaanb]

That, or a "fleet protector" ship covered with turrets mounting long-range, high-powered beam weapons that damage missiles only. This would be functionally identical to my earlier ECM frigate suggestion.

The easy way would be to either introduce a cheap anti-missile swarm missile (or to adapt both wasp and poltergeist to such duty, with poltergeist's FF ability).

Other rather simple solutions would be to (re-?) introduce decoy buoys (not sure whether I mix Freelancer and X2/X3 memories here), to introduce ECM drones (possibly with a rear turret-mounted IRE laser for missile defense) mimicking the target emission signature to draw missiles away from the primary target, or to have some shotgun effect variation of a projectile weapon - enough impact to trigger a missile detonation, too little to do serious harm to an M4 fighter (even of Split build). A shotgun variation of the ID would be cute, too, frying their targeting systems, or at least overloading them so they need to re-acquire the target. The two latter effects would be nice as specialized warheads for countermissiles, too.

Speaking of the Honorverse missile doctrine below, a short lived big diameter shielded drone interspersing itself between the missile and its target might cause premature detonation, too.

Basically missile spam countered by anti-missile spam. And possibly some sort of shortcut solution system avoiding to have the game engine simulate every single submunition as a 3D object whenever offensive and defensive missiles get into proximity of one another.

This shouldn't lead X series space battles down the Honor Harrington-universe style missile slugfeasts, though. ECM drones or warheads getting countered by recon drones and anti-anti-missile warheads counter-spam-counter-spam mixed in the missile broadsides...

I don't like the idea of missile spam being countered by more missile spam.

We could have better point-defence but then that makes single missiles a bit pointless, leaving overwhelming the PD with missiles as the only option, so make PD better... and then all missiles become pointless.

That also means things like boarding pods become pointless, so there has to be a way to have missiles as well as PD and not let things get out of hand like current. And thinking about it, the only way I think that would work is to have shields work against missiles much better.

So.. fire off missiles against a target, you do not get blown to bits even by a large flail missile barrage, you have to get up close and laser the shields down before missiles become effective. Or make missiles with heavy damage slow and easy to shoot down, while fast missiles do little damage. That way, a barrage of fast missiles could hurt your shields without blowing you up, the slow ones will get shot down.

That means heavy missiles are pointless - so why not make all missiles simply lose their blast if they hit shields, the shielding absorbs far more missile blast. fore a nuke against you, most of the blast damage is radiating away from you anyway, the little that comes your way will get absorbed by the shields - so missiles do a tenth of the damage to shields. That should fix the problem as even a barrage will not kill anything, unless its absolutely excessive to the point where you simply can't carry enough to kill a shielded corvette. Hence you have to send the fighters in first.

[Triaxx2]

At that point, there's no reason to even leave missiles in the game. Just dump them out completely because they're completely useless. By the time you have enough fighters to breach shields, missiles are pointless. They'll either do nothing against shields, or you'll hit the target and the excess explosion vaporizes your fighters afterwards. Because even if a direct hit absorbs it, after detonation, the shockwave no longer cares about shields.

[Snafu_X3]

I wrote something speculative some time ago, maybe in an X:R topic, about 3-stage defence/offence

• Point defence should be short-range, relatively low-powered & near-hitscan (due to energy constraints: inverse square cube rule applies (subs check this - ed). This implies laser defence, which uses lots of power (# of weps firing) but dmg falls off rapidly over range (so useless for eg attacking hostile capships, but still useful vs swarms of gnats)
• Medium def/attk is where <playership>'s manoeuvrability & player brain/skill kicks in. Incoming high-threat missiles/bolts can be dodged with practice from this range, & outgoing fire can be applied to achieve <player's> objective as necessary. Common AoE weps should be AoE-nerfed (nukes effectively don't have AoE in vacuum; their devastating effect comes from operating in some sort of atmosphere), although point energy transfer would be high, so mabe useful for limited hull-busting.. (marines, anyone ?)
• Long range fire should only be available using matter weapon variants , which means bombers/hvy fighters using torpedoes or similar high-dmg missiles, while capships either stand off or slug it out using appropriate weps as necessary

How this would translate/balance (even if it could be applied) to X3 I dunno. Remember that AP (hvy) missiles now have more than token HP for instance, while TC & previous iterations don't..