Are Missiles and Torpedos completly useless !?

[TargetLost]

... because they are shot down bevore getting to the target.

Do I do something wrong here?
I mean can it be that the whole missile research tree is for nothing?

Gave up on missiles early because of that but once I finished all the research I gave it one mor try with Antimatter-Tropedoes.

I had 4 dread with 2 Antimatter Tropedo weapons each and tripple ammo storage unit and 2 rail guns as distraction in front and 6 normal dread's with phaser and plasmas.

Result: Not a single Antimatter Torpedo made it through!

Byway that works both way the aliens thorw a bunch of slow missiles and tropedos all on one single target but if you intercept them all their ships are empty cannon food.

On the contrary phaser and plasma can't be shot down...
So does it makes sense then to have anything else !?

[corisai]

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

I don't believe you, unless you've gone around and disarmed most of them of their nukes.

You're right about it :) I think you will agree that our councilors have not much work to do since midgame & once they killed every skilled enemy agent it's very easy to take control of country in two turns.

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

Not sure what your thing is on heat. IME waste heat generation is stupidly low, probably due to reactors being incredibly efficient. And realistically a ship without dedicated heat sinks can still absorb some heat into its structure before real problems arise. So I'd need a more articulated complaint to see the problem.

With destroyed (100% destroyed) radiators ships currently capable to fight and even strategic move without any issue. It's a bug and until it fixed - you could ignore Heatsink as a random chance to radiators being destroyed by any hit isn't affecting you much.

[mrolli]

@corsai:
1. i make sure (as i think most people do) that my pd can handle missiles, mags of the aliens. anything else is suicide.
2. that leaves lasers and plasmas as danger. laser are to busy to score much hits if you use coilers (and/or missiles).
3. 100 plasma hits (1% hit chance with tin droplet) will gut your ships long before the actually hit the radiator. 70 front armor + component armor and almost all ships i scuttled was due to hits to both the repair bay and either drive or reactor (trough the almost intact front armor). think by comparison it was about 12 cases, while only have 2 radiators hit and destroyed. (campaign, where my dreads shreded 90k fleet + 9 stations of the aliens)
think it is probably diffrent, if you go for plasma/laser builts and very heavy armor yourself. the lack of firepower will lead to longer engagements, where you take loads of hits (especially from laser, as they don't have coils,missilies to shot at). then radiator damage would become a issue and a heatsinks make sense.
with extra heavy drives, you also don't need hydron.
i did remove both component armor + repair bay in later models, since the unlucky ship the aliens decided to focus their fire on, generally had it's repair bay destroyed (front armor generally still well over 90%).
so even if they fix it, that radiator loss means a dead ship, it still wouldn't matter much.
even when i send a light coiler dread against 2 corvettes, 2 destroyers, 2 frigates and 2 battleships (skirmish mode ones) it killed them all, by dragging the formation apart. eat about 30 hits (lasers, no damage), but the radiator was missed and in the end, i was only scratches in the paint.
(no plasmas on this enemies).

[ulzgoroth]

Originally posted by corisai:

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

I don't believe you, unless you've gone around and disarmed most of them of their nukes.

You're right about it :) I think you will agree that our councilors have not much work to do since midgame & once they killed every skilled enemy agent it's very easy to take control of country in two turns.

I would not agree with that, I've usually got plenty of work for them between holding down all my stuff and running punitive operations against other factions whenever they get troublesome. And trying to exterminate the last Hydras on Earth.

Originally posted by corisai:

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

Not sure what your thing is on heat. IME waste heat generation is stupidly low, probably due to reactors being incredibly efficient. And realistically a ship without dedicated heat sinks can still absorb some heat into its structure before real problems arise. So I'd need a more articulated complaint to see the problem.

With destroyed (100% destroyed) radiators ships currently capable to fight and even strategic move without any issue. It's a bug and until it fixed - you could ignore Heatsink as a random chance to radiators being destroyed by any hit isn't affecting you much.

Strategic move, I'd agree is a problem and also agree is a true description of the situation.

Fight without issue, I do not believe is accurate pending actual supporting evidence. Fight without issue so long as they don't generate a much heat while doing it or have sufficient heat sinks is expected behavior, not a problem.

[corisai]

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

Fight without issue, I do not believe is accurate pending actual supporting evidence. Fight without issue so long as they don't generate a much heat while doing it or have sufficient heat sinks is expected behavior, not a problem.

Being able to move a ship to shipyards with destroyed radiators killing all value of Heat Sinks... That's why I think it's a bug.

[Mistfox]

Originally posted by corisai:

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

Fight without issue, I do not believe is accurate pending actual supporting evidence. Fight without issue so long as they don't generate a much heat while doing it or have sufficient heat sinks is expected behavior, not a problem.

Being able to move a ship to shipyards with destroyed radiators killing all value of Heat Sinks... That's why I think it's a bug.

Well, radiators are there to remove *EXCESS* heat, so I'm ok with it if your baseline heat generation is not above your base heat removal rate. Not sure if engines really generate that much to cause a cookoff when not in combat conditions.

[ulzgoroth]

Originally posted by corisai:

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

Fight without issue, I do not believe is accurate pending actual supporting evidence. Fight without issue so long as they don't generate a much heat while doing it or have sufficient heat sinks is expected behavior, not a problem.

Being able to move a ship to shipyards with destroyed radiators killing all value of Heat Sinks... That's why I think it's a bug.

What do heat sinks have to do with that? Heat sinks are for combat, not for travel.

If you fight with ships that have no radiators and experience no problems, that is maybe a problem with the game's heat economy. That ships with no radiators can travel is a problem (though IMO it's really a problem fixing another problem - ships having components totally zeroed out and just sitting in space forever is dumb.) That ships with no radiators can travel isn't a problem with heat sinks, though.

[corisai]

Originally posted by Mistfox:

Well, radiators are there to remove *EXCESS* heat, so I'm ok with it if your baseline heat generation is not above your base heat removal rate. Not sure if engines really generate that much to cause a cookoff when not in combat conditions.

It's very easy to notice that radiator mass going up exactly once you're add engines :)

[corisai]

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

What do heat sinks have to do with that? Heat sinks are for combat, not for travel.

Heatsink idea to protect radiators in combat - because loosing radiator is deadly, no?

Currently - both loosing radiator in combat lead to very low internal damage (take in mind that I'm not using space maneuvers - probably they would hurt a lot) AND compltely not affecting ship strategic mobility after battle.

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

If you fight with ships that have no radiators and experience no problems, that is maybe a problem with the game's heat economy.

Yes.

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

(though IMO it's really a problem fixing another problem - ships having components totally zeroed out and just sitting in space forever is dumb.)

I would prefer a dedicated tug ships or special "tug" mission (trading boost for pulling ship on Earth orbit/station) instead.

[ulzgoroth]

Originally posted by corisai:

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

What do heat sinks have to do with that? Heat sinks are for combat, not for travel.

Heatsink idea to protect radiators in combat - because loosing radiator is deadly, no?

Currently - both loosing radiator in combat lead to very low internal damage (take in mind that I'm not using space maneuvers - probably they would hurt a lot)

Right, so you're basically generating almost no heat, and then complaining that generating almost no heat has almost no effect.

Weapons use up pretty moderate amount of energy, and (because waste heat is stupidly only reactor waste heat) when combined with extremely high reactor efficiencies and no overhead on reactor start/stop that results in likely only having perhaps a couple GJ of waste heat to deal with if your ships are just shooting, not maneuvering. (Especially if they win the fight fast.) A couple GJ spread over a ship weighing a few thousand tons isn't actually that much.

[Mistfox]

Originally posted by corisai:

Originally posted by Mistfox:

Well, radiators are there to remove *EXCESS* heat, so I'm ok with it if your baseline heat generation is not above your base heat removal rate. Not sure if engines really generate that much to cause a cookoff when not in combat conditions.

It's very easy to notice that radiator mass going up exactly once you're add engines :)

I suspect there is a rather large buffer factor involved in that because the heat load involved in hard burns and firing energy weapons in combat is a lot less than a ship going at "cruising speed". Add extremely efficient drives to that and the heat generated would be a lot less than the maximum heat load a ship can really tolerate. I wonder if using the earlier less efficient drives would give you the result you want since they generate stupid amounts of heat? Might not be a game mechanics problem but rather a "you got pass the point where your drives will melt your ships" problem. Want to run a few tests on that with the older less efficient drives?

[ulzgoroth]

Originally posted by Mistfox:

I suspect there is a rather large buffer factor involved in that because the heat load involved in hard burns and firing energy weapons in combat is a lot less than a ship going at "cruising speed".

What are you talking about? Combat burns generate more heat than cruising burns, in exact proportion to the difference in thrust level. Firing energy weapons only adds to that, though (in game) not much.

[corisai]

Originally posted by Mistfox:

I wonder if using the earlier less efficient drives would give you the result you want since they generate stupid amounts of heat? Might not be a game mechanics problem but rather a "you got pass the point where your drives will melt your ships" problem. Want to run a few tests on that with the older less efficient drives?

I'm almost 100% sure that don't touching ship nav controls since battle start isn't add anything to heat except when weapons are firing. So here you're correct.

That's why I want to destroyed radiator being equal to immobile ship (like with destroyed reactor / drive). As currently from min-max point there is no reason to use Heat Sinks at all.

[mrolli]

opposition:
skirmish mothership
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2883999335

1 vs 1 defeated by 7 ares torp, 1 phaser pd, 3 nose phaser heavy dreadnaught.
(adv. plasma core drive, 12/12/120 admantine armor, about 100 mgees cruise, 1.5k kps, 3 mag, antimatterspiker, hydron, adv. laser driver.)

battleresult:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2883999400

plasma chipped front armor, and laser found some holes.

tactic: assult bomberrun, speed up a bit and change to a parrallel approch course (to avoid collision), unleash the trops from about 5-700km away.
result when to fast: own point defense can't keep up
to slow: plasma and lasers get trough the 120 nose armor

other skirmish tests:
easily kills the dreadnaught.
quite easily kills 2 of the skirmish battleships.
failed at tacking on 2 dreadnaught at once.
test of multiple dreads against each other, showed, that 120 nose armor are not enough.

ares torps are more badass than nukes, as they are much faster and have better manouverability. nukes are nice for leveling bases (insta against ground base, 1 nuke can take out the hit and all nearby defenses on a station.

[DigitalVulpine]

Maybe it can be expanded on later, but it is kind of unfortunate that missile tech wraps up after just two tiers of missiles even though we keep researching techs that could make our missiles better. Especially drives, better drives could make better missiles!

Faster missiles would be harder to intercept, so drive tech improving missiles could help them scale into the late game.

Missiles are pretty great in the early game because of their high base lethality though, it actually takes a while for lasers and kinetics to catch up.

[ulzgoroth]

Originally posted by mrolli:

ares torps are more badass than nukes, as they are much faster and have better manouverability.

I didn't even bother going to Ares rather than Athena, though the Athena warhead is small enough that its damage could plausibly become a problem.

Originally posted by DigitalVulpine:

Maybe it can be expanded on later, but it is kind of unfortunate that missile tech wraps up after just two tiers of missiles even though we keep researching techs that could make our missiles better. Especially drives, better drives could make better missiles!

Faster missiles would be harder to intercept, so drive tech improving missiles could help them scale into the late game.

Missiles are pretty great in the early game because of their high base lethality though, it actually takes a while for lasers and kinetics to catch up.

Our later drives for the most part don't miniaturize so much.