Lately I've been thinking about the recent nerf to anti-missile range. It's quite a drastic change, they seem to have a shorter range now than even defense lasers (7 vs 9). Although being missiles they don't suffer accuracy penalties at long range, they still can't fire at trackers that other PD would be able to potentially hit. actually they do, even if the range drawer doesn't show it.
What if instead of just being another flavour of point defence, anti-missiles filled a different niche entirely?
The idea I have is sort of inspired by real life naval defences, where missiles are used to shoot down incoming targets (such as anti-ship cruise missiles) at medium and long range, but close-in weapons are used as a last line of defence at short ranges where missiles are less effective.
In game terms anti-missiles would fill the role of area coverage. The idea is that having longer range allows ships equipped with anti-missiles to provide overlapping coverage of each other and the rest of the fleet. Whereas direct fire PD is only able to effectively cover the equipped ship and it's immediate vicinity.
In order to get the two types of PD to really complement each other though, we need to make sure that direct fire PD maintains it's role of close-in defence. It's not perfectly clear how to do this, but one idea I have is that, in exchange for their increased range, anti-missiles lose the ability to reaction fire at incoming trackers.
Anyways, the desired outcome is that researching anti-missiles would give you a very useful tool that complements the basic direct-fire PD, but you would still get the best benefit from mixing the two.