Planetary defences

[projekcja]

Currently the AI players often put "Heavy lasers" in their planetary defenses slots.
This turns out to be a really bad decision:

* It's range is too small to get to enemy ships unless they go out of their way to come close.
* It cannot target missiles or bombers heading to the planet.

Usually the enemy force can sit outside of range and bomb the planet's defenses with missiles and bombers, without getting shot at even once.

While I certainly attribute this situation to this being a beta and all, I still want to comment a bit about it.
* For me, it doesn't make much sense that heavy energy weapons cannot target missiles or bombers. These are precise weapons with speed of light action, why wouldn't they be used to target incoming projectiles.
* If you compare these to MOO2's ground batteries, those had increased range that allowed them to reach into ships in their starting positions. Any plan on giving beam weapons on planets some range bonuses (cant think of an excuse why, other than that it looks cool)
* Please make AIs more likely to have missiles/torpedoes/interceptors on planetary defenses in the next builds, to make it easier to test actually operational defenses.

It seems to me that Planetary defenses, when carrying missiles, can be atm too powerful and too standardized. I liked it in MOO1 where you could build as few as 1 missile base or as many as dozens, allowing defenses to be tailored for the amount of threat present and resources you're willing to spend. Having 2 slots of 22 missiles as the minimum you can put looks to me both over the top, and on the other hand too predictable for the attacker. Any chance of making a more flexible system, with defense slots only used as an upper bound on the amount of defensive systems on the planet?

[Arioch]

In the current build, the AI overvalues missiles on warships, and undervalues missiles on defense bases, and completely ignores point defenses (except on slots that are too small to hold anything bigger). These are issues that we have talked about and will be addressed.

I think that missiles are still too strong in terms of damage compared to beams (a ship can one-shot another ship of the same size with missiles if the target has no point defenses), but point defenses are an effective counter; we just need to get the AI to use them. The AI needs to learn how to build more heterogeneous forces instead of finding one best solution and then overspecializing.

Weapon balance and AI behavior are things that will fluctuate significantly through the process of development as changes are made.

I see ground bases as a relatively inexpensive stopgap defense to help counter attacks in the early game, and in the later game as a supplement to defending fleets and more expensive orbital defenses. Adding a few more slots to the ground base (such as a system slot for more ammo, or a turret slot to encourage point defense, might make sense. I think that adding a smaller armed station or defense satellite might also make sense, as that would require a trade-off for a station with an economic module instead of just being a flat buff to planetary defenses, which are already pretty strong (if used correctly).

In MOO1, each ship class within a fleet was aggregated into a single unit that could have hundreds of ships in it, so of course missile bases had to be aggregated in the same way to be effective. I don't think being able to build unlimited missile weapons on a planet would work in a system that has individual ship units.