Arbitrary Fleet Restrictions

@Aeson:
Very interesting results. Thanks for posting.

BTW, I think your PD “failures to kill” were really “failures to hit”. The game draws beam misses as beams that stop right on the target but do no damage. When shooting at big ships, the missing beams appear to go straight through the shield and hit the target. When shooting at fighters, the beams appear dead on but no little green “Hull -4” or whatever floats up. So I think that when PD beams stop at a missile but the missile keeps coming, that’s a miss.

@ Archduke:
Please expound upon this significant tactical opportunity. On the face of it, it would seem that you could increase your survivability against missile-heavy fleets by going without shields, but surely you’ve got something more subtle in mind :slight_smile:

Traking speed of PD
3.0 for MKI
3.2 for Hi-speed and Automated
=> If they follow the same rules than standard weapons, they only have 45% chance of hit.

I’ve tested some alternative version of some weapons while modding, and I’ve see that a quick beam PD is much better than a long beam effect by allow other PD to try there chance against the same missile.

Hmmm, what formula are you using for the to-hit chance? I can’t make mine work with the above numbers. I’m using this formula from the thread linked above:

To Hit = (1-(S/T))*(0.5+((L/256)*0.5)) where
S = target speed, T = tracking speed, and L = length of target

Plugging in the above tracking speeds and the speeds of the FM and MWM to solve for L with a 0.45 chance to hit, I get nonsense.
For the FM (speed 0.32), L = 0, which is obviously wrong
For the MWM (speed 0.19), L = -11.264, which is also obviously wrong

So, what’s the real length of the missile? Also, what’s the tracking speed of the scrambler?

Here’s an interesting tidbit. With cruisers, GS and PD are more effective at protecting the hull and armor than they are the shield. This is because their range barely gets outside the shield bubble. But frigates have significantly smaller shield bubbles while the improved PD has the same range as a cruiser’s. Thus, frigate PDs do a better job protecting the shield than cruiser defenses.

So, when considering improving cruiser missile defense, it seems to me that the 1st priority would be a greatly increased range, say out to 500-600. Then the defenses would have a much higher chance of stopping missiles short of the shield, thereby greatly enhancing the ship’s survivability against all other weapons in addition to missiles. Also, a longer range would allow the defenses in 1 ship to cover adjacent ships. Then you could have a small number of dedicated anti-missile support ships protecting a larger number of all-offense ships.

However, to take advantage of the longer range, the defense needs a fast weapon, either an instantaneous beam or an uber-fast missile or projectile. A high rate of fire would also be nice, to continue to protect the hull once the shields go down. This latter means there’s still a need for essentially what we already have now.

So how about this? Take the frigate’s Anti-Fighter Missile, turn it into a cruiser module, and tweak it so it will shoot at missiles. Then tweak its stats to fit the above mission. As a start (pending testing and refining), increase the speed to about 0.7, increase the rate of fire to say 600, and increase the minimum range out to about 200-250 so it has a substantial gap close to the ship. Now you have a long-range missile defense to protect the shield, which you can back up with existing close-in PD and GS. It might even be able to stop incoming missiles before they split off the decoys/MIRVs, and perhaps stop them soon enough that the enemy ship will still be recharging so can’t fire again immediately.

When I see beams miss, I see the end of the beam sort of searching around near the target (the beam tracks around on the screen a little, as if ‘seeking’ the target it missed). The PD beam animation did not do this, so I assumed a hit and a failure to kill the missile. Whether or not that is correct, I don’t know.

I think he means exactly what you’ve just said - without shields, your point defenses (of any type) have a better chance of intercepting missiles before they impact on the target, which means that an ‘overwhelming’ volume of incoming fire is greater without shields than with them. Moreover, since it isn’t that hard to bring cruiser armor into the mid fifties or low sixties (highest armor penetration on a missile is on the Megaton Missile, and that has a penetration of 51), armor is a relatively easy way to make your cruisers ignore missile fire, even if you don’t bother with point defenses. Your ships will be slow, and won’t be as heavily armed as they would be without the armor, but it works (I can make a three plasma Federation Panther with about 53 average armor, nanobot repair system, and a guidance scrambler, and there are other cruisers which are much superior for this purpose).

To improve existing point defense weapons, I think what is needed is that the firing animation needs to be shorter and the rate of fire higher so that the weapons have a greater chance of firing multiple times before the missiles impact the hull or shields. Additional range would certainly help, but I don’t know that it would be a particularly good idea to significantly improve the range, unless we added a special ‘long-range point defense’ that costs more to carry, and might have a minimum range to encourage you to take normal point defenses in addition to it.

As for your question about the sizes of missiles, the module file defines the length and width of the missile (look in “\Positech Games\Gratuitous Space Battles\data\modules” if using Windows, not sure for Macintosh or Linux systems, then find the file named (ship class)_(module name).txt, then look for the lines started by “missilelength” and “missilewidth” - I assume that length is the one that the game uses for targeting calculation purposes, and I think most or all of the missiles have “missilelenght = 4”, but I’m not sure of that; example file name is “cruiser_dummy_missile.txt”).

Plugging a size of 4 and a speed of 0.32 into the targeting equation, I get a 45.7% chance to hit, so the assumption that the length is what was used for the calculation seems reasonable. Another interesting thing to note is that the speed of the missile isn’t actually going to make much of a difference in the hit chance - maximum hit chance is around 0.51 for a length 4 object, and the fastest missiles (even rockets) are only going to cut that down to about 38% (Firefly Rocket, 0.79 speed, fastest missile in the unmodded game) for a 3.2 tracking speed point defense weapon or about 37% for a 3.0 tracking speed point defense. Fast Missiles will be hit about 45% of the time, other missiles roughly 48% of the time (assuming the average speed of ‘regular missiles’ is 0.15 - some are slower, some are faster, but they are all around that fast), while standard rockets (0.48 speed) will be hit about 42% of the time. The difference is more in how many times the point defense weapon gets to fire than in how often it hits the inbound missile.

The reason why your MWM lose is because you put way too much armor on it. Too much armor == low missile density == rigged in favor of plasma. Use Tribe Utopia, no armor, drop your shield down to just 1 reflective, and all of a sudden you have double the MWM density, easily overloading your scramblers. Other than Tribe, MWM spammer also comes with armor tanks in front, which your plasma would take forever to kill without beams. MWM spammer can do this because the have the longest range.

For a better example, try kill challenge Tribe Pure MWM #4634858. Find it by hitting the A button to sort by attempt. If beating MWM spam is so easy it won’t be sitting on 702 attempts and 29 wins.
Or, if Tribe and lure are too cheap for you, try #4615745, a nomad fleet that sits at 1425 attempts and 73 wins. Yes if you play them you would probably notice that missiles are better in large fights.

Theory-crafting means absolutely nothing unless you can prove your point in combat against fleets that other people build. If the solution is that simple it wouldn’t take an average of 50 attempts to 1 win. The trick is in all the optimizations that your test did not consider.

Or if you prefer, you can also put up a plasma fleet and I would kill it. Posting fleets are the only way you can learn all the complexity in designing fleets. You can’t “just spam 7 plasma and 1 scrambler” anymore without getting slaughtered by anything that attempts to move in, or missile spammers with tanks.

Why is speed important? Because Cruiser Lasers and Ion Cannon. If those 2 weapons don’t exist then you probably never want to have fast ships.

I saw this thread at the time of my Diary thread, but refrained from commenting at the time. I’ve been revisiting my self-challenges and putting some more thought into trying to make the fleets more unique and more ‘gratuitous’. While I agree with some of these, let me finally add a few more. Note that in no way is this meant for competitive play. It’s just for fun, not to win tournaments.

Use all the hulls
The designers have been kind enough to invent them, it’s up to you to use them.Yes, even the sub standard ones. Rarely will an Admiral be able to pick and choose the ships under his command.
Use all the race specific equipment
By doing this, it automatically gives each race/fleet a slightly different flavour. Some of the race specific stuff is a bit…lacking, but force yourself to use it, even in just a token gesture way. If they aren’t going to use them, why would the various races scientists bother to invent them?
If one hull carries a certain weapon, no other hull OR ship type in the fleet can
For example, if a Federation Buffalo hull carries all cruiser plasma, no other hull in the Federation fleet can use it. Note that this also means no designing a second Buffalo which uses mostly plasma with the odd beam. A fleet, while having a ‘majority’ vessel, will always have to deploy specialist vessels for certain roles, and it’s inevitable that they’ll find their way into an Admirals force aand have to be deployed in battle.

These things combined make for varied fleets with no falling back on spamming one hull/weapon.

No tanks
Tanks, whilst effective, are boring. Keeping armour to a maximum of 50, means more weapons can play a part without having to rely on tedious lucky hit grind. Honestly, who’s going to build a ship whose sole role is to get hit??
No empty slots
“Thank you for the tour of the ship. What’s this massive, cavernous space for?”
“This sir? This is…erm…a contemplative space sir. For the good of the crew sir. Meditation and stuff sir. Yes. That’s it.”
“You’ve forgotten to put something in haven’t you?”
“No, no, no…yes”
Fill every slot, they’re there for a reason so make use of them.
Minimum speed of 0.1
Higher than your idea of 0.04 and it’s there for a reason. Faster ships make for more entertaining battles. Rather than watching two incredibly slow fleets drag their sorry arses into range before slugging away, have them charge into battle like they mean business. Contemplate giving every ship ‘Keep Moving’ orders as well, though that can add an extra level of variability to the battles, seeing the fleets circling each other is a lot more interesting than watching them line up and throw punches. Also, these ships are supposed to patrol an interstellar empire, which can’t be done at a snails pace.

That’s all I can think of for now.

I am aware that these arbitrary rules won’t make for the most effective fleets in the online challenge arena, but then that’s not the point.