Shooting down missiles.

[Cody]

I kinda like the occasional missile that I can do nothing about (except run or cloak, if available).

[cim]

IMHO, the addition of hard-head missiles to the core game unbalanced it.

In Elite you had missiles and ECM. (and it was somewhat possible to shoot down missiles)
In Oolite, you have missiles and ECM and hard-head missiles which are (almost) immune to ECM. (and I don't think I've ever managed to shoot down a missile)

To re-balance, having some sort of chaff (passive/dumb) or anti-missile (active/smart) system (Shift-E?) part of the core game makes sense to me. It would have a number of 'shots' before it needs refilling.
Thoughts?

The problem I find with hardheads is that the following four are all true at once:
1) If you're unlucky, a hardhead can destroy a Cobra Mk III even through military shield enhancement and full energy banks. Much more likely if you hit it head-on, but not impossible even when running away.
2) Once you have injectors (a cheap early-game purchase), running away from them until they run out of fuel is pretty straightforward, but also really boring.
3) If you don't have injectors, or you've just made a long jump and don't have an OXP method of refuelling, you have to be ridiculously good to reliably shoot them down, and evasive manuevers at normal drive speed won't reliably keep you safe for the full 30km in something with the cross-section of a Cobra.
4) Enough enemies - on a normal spacelane - will have at least one hardhead that you can't just rely on ECM to get you through.

Passive chaff "mines" that explode into an expanding shell of fragments once they've cleared your ship I like - there's going to be some skill in getting the missile behind you and at the right distance that the chaff cloud gets it, and you can use them on normal missiles too if you need to. Probably the dispenser would need to be fairly cheap, and the chaff sufficiently expensive that investing in an ECM for normal missiles makes sense, in that case. Of course, NPC ships would need to be able to have and intelligently use this equipment too.

Alternatively, what about making hardheads (compared with a normal missile):
- faster (so even injectors won't quite outrun them in a Cobra, but might buy you time)
- less manoeuvrable (so evasive action is more likely to work)
- less damaging (so a Cobra III in good shape should survive with at least one energy bank intact)

That way the way to avoid them isn't to fly out on injectors for 20km, turn round, fire a couple of shots at the pirates while you wait, then fly back in on injectors knowing that the missile won't have the fuel left to catch up - but to twist and turn and weave in the dogfight and to try to lose it (the missile being less manoeuvrable might also give more of a chance to shoot it down, too). Injectors may help, but it's still possible without them, and if it doesn't work then you're probably still alive (unless you've been taking a lot of laser fire too)

(Given that these changes would make the missiles considerably more effective against the default "run away" anti-missile AI, that might also need to be changed to accommodate better evasive action.)

[Disembodied]

I kinda like the occasional missile that I can do nothing about (except run or cloak, if available).

Same here ... I think it's about right, really. It makes the game that little bit harder. Hardheads aren't totally overpowered, and they're neither so common that they're irritating nor so rare that you don't remember to watch out for them. The basic missiles are virtually irrelevant, once the player has an ECM. There is a hardhead countermeasure, anyway: duck and run! And slap the ECM, too, because there's always a chance.

Once you have injectors (a cheap early-game purchase), running away from them until they run out of fuel is pretty straightforward, but also really boring.

You don't need to run away until the missile runs out of fuel. Dodge past it. A reasonably nimble ship (i.e. a Cobra III) can outmanoeuvre a missile. Get some distance, slow down, turn, speed up, shoot your opponent up while the missile loops back around. Missiles can't slow down, and have a much larger turning circle than a ship with a throttle.

[Eric Walch]

In Elite you had missiles and ECM. (and it was somewhat possible to shoot down missiles)
In Oolite, you have missiles and ECM and hard-head missiles which are (almost) immune to ECM.

I think that the hardheads are good balanced and the plain missiles are to easy once you bought a ECM. I often kill the hardheads with ecm. There is a 10% chance of killing it with a pulse. You only must keep in mind that when they receive a pulse, they will ignore new pulses during 5 seconds, so there is no need to keep the ecm button pressed. I normally fly away, press ecm and only press ecm again when the energy has recharged enough. And when the missile is still coming to close, I hit the injectors for a brief moment to make a bit distance. I fly a boa MK2. That ship can withstand a single missile so that I can risk getting a full blow when my shields are up.

One other thing I also do sometimes, is shooting a cheap plain missile back to the hardhead. When you have the right missile selected, you can immediately fire when targeted with the missileAnaliser. When you have it selected with shift-T, I think you loose the target again when arming the missile. In that case you can retarget with the target memory (+/-).

I try to avoid using a cloak because that feels like cheating. I also don't want to use missile racks as that also feels like cheating by giving the player more missiles. My ship has just 5 missile slots and that should be enough for a balanced play.

Looking at the code, it is possible that on low fps situations the impact can be fiercer, because the missile can fly closer to the target before triggering the detonation. And detonating closer to the target does progressive more damage. I have no idea how noticeable this effect of fps will be. Could be an interesting study Some time ago I wrote a test missile oxp that logs the distance and impact of every blow. Could be interesting to see how that would behave on low fps values.

[Eric Walch]

I just did some tests. And as I can't lower my FPS easy, I increased my TAF. 4x TAF should be comparable with 4x lower FPS, so about FPS=25 on my system. Results:

Code: Select all

FPS: 99, TAF 1x
Distance to target: 22.514089584350586, Damage on target : 234.65643310546875
Distance to target: 22.39680290222168, Damage on target : 236.73709869384766
Distance to target: 21.54970359802246, Damage on target : 252.6215057373047
Distance to target: 24.177915573120117, Damage on target : 207.87069702148438

FPS: 99, TAF 2x
Distance to target: 24.33380699157715, Damage on target : 205.59893798828125
Distance to target: 18.316633224487305, Damage on target : 330.6830711364746
Distance to target: 20.956396102905273, Damage on target : 264.718505859375
Distance to target: 18.91718864440918, Damage on target : 313.66439056396484

FPS: 99, TAF 4x
Distance to target: 14.672880172729492, Damage on target : 471.3724670410156
Distance to target: 21.385114669799805, Damage on target : 255.89285278320312
Distance to target: 11.117902755737305, Damage on target : 717.0250854492188
Distance to target: 10.669134140014648, Damage on target : 761.2103576660156

With high TAF values (probably similar as low FPS values), there is a much higher spread in explosion distance to my hull and damage received. With 1x TAF only 75% of my front shield is blown away. With 4x TAF my shield was blown away in two tries together most of my energy banks.

[Smivs]

As per the above posts.
Hardheads do no more damage than a normal missile, and they are fairly easy to deal with in truth as has been explained above. I think they fit well into the balanced core game and would not want to see any changes.

[cim]

I just did some tests. And as I can't lower my FPS easy, I increased my TAF. 4x TAF should be comparable with 4x lower FPS, so about FPS=25 on my system. Results:
With high TAF values (probably similar as low FPS values), there is a much higher spread in explosion distance to my hull and damage received. With 1x TAF only 75% of my front shield is blown away. With 4x TAF my shield was blown away in two tries together most of my energy banks.

Ah, now that would explain the difference. My normal FPS is around 30 in flight, and I definitely get the sort of variation you see at TAF4x - sometimes a missile will leave me with plenty of shields to spare, and sometimes - especially, as you'd expect with this behaviour, if I'm not moving directly away from it - it will destroy my iron-ass Cobra instantly.

If they were consistently like the first sort then I would definitely be in agreement that they weren't at all unbalanced. Perhaps all that's needed then is an adjustment to the damage/distance curve on their explosions so that implausibly close detonations don't do ridiculous damage.

[sdrubble]

Now, if I only wouldn't botch the correct command-sequence [Shift-T + select pylon + arm + fire] 80% of all times when attempting this in a hurry...

When you have the right missile selected, you can immediately fire when targeted with the missileAnaliser. When you have it selected with shift-T, I think you loose the target again when arming the missile.

Now that's a good explanation for my botched attempts - as I have sometimes have attempted the above sequence 3 times in a row, aiming at the same incoming missile, and couldn't make my Interceptor launch at all.

I also just (re)read the following:

When the pilot also has a Target System Memory Expansion installed, the MA is connected with it on installation and with an incoming, not standard missile, it will transfer the missile location to the first position in the target memory. When the pilot has anti ballistic missiles on board he just has to press T (to target his ABM) followed by M (to fire the ABM).

Mmmm, I had forgotten that the MA performed auto-locks on incoming missiles !!! But wait - there's more:

I also have had (and just removed BTW!!! ) Target Autolock Plus installed. Where I can read the following:

...if the ship is attacked by surprise, or any other situation where there is currently no target set, then the attacking ship is automatically targetted.

Now let's suppose a situation (which is indeed quite common) where you're fighting 3 baddies, and one of them has just fired a missile at you. You're a very smart and forewarned commander, so that besides the Interceptor Rack you've also got Missile Analyser and Target Autolock installed...

... so that, if I understood this right, the end result is a complete mess. MA loads the incoming missile into one memory position in the target system. But before you can react, one of the baddies fires at you and TA adds its position to the target system (displacing the incoming missile to another position). The Commander is in a hurry, presses Shift-T to re-lock the missile (instead of pressing minus to rotate the targets), arms the Interceptor and immediately loses the lock (as per Eric's description). Meanwhile ANOTHER pirate fires at you, and TA dutifully loads it as the first target. And then... OK, you get the picture.

I'll see if my gaming improves with Target Autolock removed. Coming to think of it, it looks like it does more harm than good when you're fighting multiple ships, and mostly gets in the way when you're prioritizing that darned incoming missile.

Cheers

[snork]

Alternatively, what about making hardheads (compared with a normal missile):
- faster (so even injectors won't quite outrun them in a Cobra, but might buy you time)

No, thanks.
Flying some other core ship than a Cobra3 or Boa2 is already not very attractive, this would make it even more undesirable to fly a slow or/and sluggish ship.

Looking at the code, it is possible that on low fps situations the impact can be fiercer, because the missile can fly closer to the target before triggering the detonation. And detonating closer to the target does progressive more damage. I have no idea how noticeable this effect of fps will be. Could be an interesting study Some time ago I wrote a test missile oxp that logs the distance and impact of every blow. Could be interesting to see how that would behave on low fps values.

Thank you for providing me with this excellent excuse.

I do fly at framerates typically somewhere between 30 and 16, with occasional dips down to 9 or sth. (but never learnt debug console and such, so can not help with your study.)
But it is my impression that I die of missiles mostly because I got too close to the opponent, or I simply did not get it that there was a missile in the first place. (sound off)

[Thargoid]

@sdrubble - if you have a target set (either by MA or manually) target autolock won't do anything at all. If you have no target set, then it will lock onto the missile. But the chances are if you have something hostile enough to be attacking you, then it will already have autolocked onto that (again if you haven't manually locked onto something else beforehand).

TAP explicitly doesn't trigger on shipAttackedWithMissile, only on shipAttacked. I thought using the former would make it too unbalancing and would also conflict with MA in exactly the way you describe.

But if your ship is turreted, if you get a lock on the missile (either manually, by MA or by TAP) then they too will start trying to shoot it down.

[sdrubble]

@sdrubble - if you have a target set (either by MA or manually) target autolock won't do anything at all. If you have no target set, then it will lock onto the missile. But the chances are if you have something hostile enough to be attacking you, then it will already have autolocked onto that (again if you haven't manually locked onto something else beforehand).

Thx Thargoid!

But (maybe I misunderstood this), a few posts back Eric described a situation where a missile lock is actually unset when you're arming your own missile. While I'm yet to understand how this happens , the situation matches my constant difficulties to make an Interceptor actually launch (i.e. , pylon is not armed when incoming missile is locked, and incoming missile is not locked when pylon is armed)...

I reckon I haven't done a careful and cold analysis of this frustrating sequence of events (as such things always happen in the middle of some hectic activity... ), but this is the general impression that I have. Then when I heard Eric commenting about locks being lost, I figured it might be exactly what had been happening to me !

It seems to me that if a lock on an incoming missile can actually be lost as Eric says, then Target Autolock would likely be a complicator in such a situation, for when a lock gets lost TA would immediately get another lock again (either on the same missile or on an attacking ship).

Removing Target Autolock and seeing how things work after that (which is something I haven't actually done yet) seems one promising way to better understand what's been happening here re this lock-arm-unlock dance.

Cheers

[Thargoid]

My guess you had an ident lock ("r") rather than a missile lock ("t"). The two aren't the same - you can't fire a missile until you have a missile lock (pressing "t" if you have an ident-lock will switch it to a missile lock, so you can then fire it off with "m").

I know in the heat of combat before I've had to stop and think why my missile launching wasn't working - 99% of the time it's due to this.

[sdrubble]

My guess you had an ident lock ("r") rather than a missile lock ("t"). The two aren't the same - you can't fire a missile until you have a missile lock (pressing "t" if you have an ident-lock will switch it to a missile lock, so you can then fire it off with "m").

I know in the heat of combat before I've had to stop and think why my missile launching wasn't working - 99% of the time it's due to this.

Thx Thargoid - although I'm not sure to know what this 'r' ident-lock is... and how to act upon it.

In any case, I did do some patrols, and after flying around back and forth in 3 systems I could find only one good bad soul to fire anything meaner than a softhead at me.

But with this one hardhead fired upon me I was able to draft a cheat-sheet (which WORKED, btw) re firing the quirky Interceptor. I will proof-run this sheet against one or two more hardheads before posting it here... for the moment I can say that, after removing Target Autolock, the lock obtained thru Missile Analyser is indeed lost the moment you ARM the Interceptor pylon; the next step is then pressing '-' [minus], when the lock becomes 'live' again and the Interceptor can be launched immediately.

Ahhh, what a relief that 'swoosh' sound brings...

Stay tuned... thx and cheers

[Commander McLane]

Thx Thargoid - although I'm not sure to know what this 'r' ident-lock is... and how to act upon it.

That's a little bit like saying you don't know what this 'w' acceleration or 'a' laser-firing is. 'r' is one of the most basic key controls in Oolite. It turns your targeting system on and off (you know, the square box around a ship when you have it in your crosshairs, and the small arrow thing which points to its direction when you don't have it in your crossheads, and your target's name and legal status written next to the box). It's really one of the more basic functions of Oolite.

Perhaps you press 't' rather than 'r' if you want to put the box around a ship. But that's not correct. By pressing 't' you lock your current missile to the ship, which is an unfriendly act (personally I think NPCs should treat that as an attack and go into defense mode). That also the target box appears around that ship is really only a side effect of locking your missile, a courtesy of your ship computer.

So, press 't' only if you also want to fire a missile. If you just want to study a ship you need your target system, 'd', not a weapon.

[sdrubble]

Thx McLane for the lengthy explanation.

My fault - I have the habit of emptying my memory of many data I no longer use, and as my playing habits gradually changed so I replaced many of Oolite's original info with some new 'mind translations'.

So that now I went to revisit the meaning of everything, documentation- and configuration-wise.

'r' for me means 'ID recognition' - and as it was mapped to a joystick button, the original keyboard value got erased from my mind. Indeed I use it a LOT, as while it's meant to be a toggle I find myself constantly having to re-enable it. But I NEVER did associate the word 'lock' with that, as it only meant a way to get the description box around some ship.

As to 'w' and 'a' I must confess I didn't really remember those... acceleration and firing went to the joystick and therefore their keyboard equivalents disappeared from my memory. But I just checked and found out that I did a major shuffle of keyboard commands - so that firing is 'f', 'a' is roll-right, and pause is 'space'. Only the last one of these 3 is actually used from the keyboard, as I didn't figure a way to put 'pause' into the joystick.

As to the famous 't': the official reference sheet describes that as 'Missile target seek', which is not the correct meaning IMHO. I treat 't' as 'ARM', meaning that some pylon is now primed for launch - and only use 't' (or rather, its joystick counterpart) AFTER the square targeting box is already active around the enemy ship. So it looks like I'm doing it 'right'.

The t=ARM command is also what I use, in a possibly confusing way, to bring up the pylon icons whenever they become hidden (not sure now if this is a HUD-dependent issue - the ChupaCabra HUD is my current one).

So finally, in the very-specific-case of launching-missiles-at-missiles, the t=ARM command has to be used twice in a 5-command sequence (full cheat-sheet writing & validation is in progress ): 1st time to bring up pylon icons, 2nd time to arm the chosen pylon.

If you just want to study a ship you need your target system, 'd', not a weapon.

Maybe you wanted to say 'r' here... ?

Anyway, speaking of 'd': I've mapped 'd' to roll-left and 'D' to dump-cargo.

Thx again & cheers