Shields work like the shields in the ‘Dune’ series of books, meaning that very slow moving objects can pass through them. Thus, some clever aliens develop a new super-clever rocket that hurtles towards the enemy ship, the slows to one quarter speed as it crosses the shield boundary. This means it goes right through enemy shiels, BUT, it is thus massively vulnerable to point defence, because its slow as hell at the last section.
If thats too good a weapon, it could maybe be ammo limited too.
Thoughts? It might be quite fun to watch in action
Since everything else* needs to get through shields to do damage, I see it being used in one of two ways:
A) As “bonus damage” to the hull/armor alongside normal armaments. Too many of these in favor of other weapons means shields aren’t getting damaged enough.
B) As a primary means of destroying ships, attempting to ignore shields entirely.
If it’s brain-dead easy to be shot down by point defense, philosophy A falls out in favor of B: outright spam, which at least potentially overwhelms PD.
Missiles in general suffer a bit from this already as scramblers are a hard counter (better bring a lot of missiles or very little) but I think the problem is compounded with the “incompatible” hull-only damage type. I think you would have to walk an odd line with the ammo limits.
Point defense could negate it entirely, particularly if PD is fixed so that it fires more than once in a blue moon. As it moves so slowly GS’s will almost certainly take care of all of them unless you just spam the missiles. But if you’re spamming missiles than regular fast or multi missiles work just fine.
If these special warheads were immune to PD/GS then the limited ammo thing makes sense. However if they’re immune to PD then they have no counter. Just spam a whole bunch of them and watch as the missile swarms plow right through the shields with no resistance.
I do approve of the idea of making the explosions more gratuitous though!
Think of it like Battlestar Galactica (new one, not the old one). Normal regular hits against the hull are relatively minor, most of the bullets just bounce off, or missiles hit but do little impacts. Then you had the nuke that hit the ship during the series premier. Much, much larger explosion, such that most of the ship was obscured by the sheer size of the explosion.
Put in some sort of slow moving, very long reload, but utterly devastating weapon and that could be fun. Even more fun, give it an awesome graphic.
And it does AoE damage.
Even if it impacts against shields and the shields hold, it should damage everything, friend or foe, within a certain radius.
Immunity would be a bad thing, methinks. But some sort of resistance - upping the chance the missiles can be hit by PD/GS and laugh it off - might work.
The other thing that pops into my head: I recall at some point reading that if PD/GS zaps a multi-warhead missile before the warheads split, the whole thing goes poof. So how about giving this shield-piercer multiple warheads that split apart very soon after being fired? Could be balanced out by rate of fire, ammo limits, and/or damage.
yes you most certainly are. Scrambler is much better for protecting the ship it is on. Plus having PD Frigates/Carriers seems like a waste. besides, they get destroyed far too quickly
The main use I have seen (and by “seen” I mean “read about here in the forums” - haven’t had a chance to test it myself) for PD frigates is the notion that frigates armed with PD only are largely (completely?) ignored by enemy ships as being “unarmed”. If that is the case (and if the frigate PD is actually worth anything as a defense) I could see relatively cheap PD frigates being a fairly effective counter to missile fleets.
The same thing occurs for scramblers. Tractors and the PD modules (and I mean PD in the generic sense) apparently aren’t considered weapons, making them fairly easy to screen against armed craft.
The hilarious thing is that if you had some sort of nuclear bomb AoE weapon that would damage everything within a radius of the blast, you could even use it for a semi-suicidal anti-fighter weapon.
Have tough, heavily armored and shielded cruisers. Wait until you get swarmed by fighters. Drop a few nukes right on top of your own cruisers.
Fighters gone. Cruisers maybe hurt a little, but should still mostly be there.
It would also be a great counter to the stack 50 cruisers on top of each other in the corner of the map tactic. If you have that many ships all stacked together AoE weapons would be devastating. If the ships are spread out the AoE weapons would be much less useful.
oh god, i hate the spam 50 frigates in a corner strategy, especially missile spam with no fighters. nigh impossible. i might use the occasional spam cruisers, but that is low.
Anyway, as for coding in, it’s easy enough to code in damage and ROF, but i have no idea how to do AOE. it is possible, since the (relatively minor) shockwaves from destroyed ships do AOE damage. but i have no idea of how to incorporate this into a weapon module
Heh I have been putting those missle spam maps down very easly, But I will not say how i do it as they people that put up this STUPID maps with just supply limit the items i use out and just be silly. I wish we had a way to report maps for spam type ships IE missle, and or other single ship one weapon config ships. So that they can be removed for spam, there are SOO many challanges there and well not really any that can be played.
Also Can we see in the map what expansions are used in the challage? I have no expansions right now and Its hard for me to find a NON-SPAM map to play. But I have begun to find these spam maps enjoyable as i almost always try to find a way to beat them. And a few maps I have been the only one to beat it. Kinda make me feel good, anyways sorry to hijake this thread with my rantings but i feel it was with another post within it.
