Muon Farstrider
Partial Safety
1
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Posted - 2015.10.02 18:29:25 -
[1] - Quote
In my opinion, I'd rather just add these capabilities to the existing tracking disruptor modules (and probably rename them). Just have the base module do all four effects in addition to the current three effects, then give it all 4 scripts.
Why? Well, tracking disruption is already not that strongly used, partly because it doesn't affect so many ships. If you make separate missile and tracking disruptors, you still have the same problem. Either you have to know in advance exactly what you're fighting, or else you'll either be stuck with useless ewar modules if you guess wrong or have to reduce your overall ability to disrupt any one type of target by fitting a mix. Meanwhile, damps and target paints work on everything. And while racial ecm is a thing, an off-race jammer still at least has partial effectiveness.
If it's deemed too much to have one disruption module fully effective against both weapon types, then I would alternately suggest following the pattern of ECM by giving each disruptor the ability to affect the opposite weapon type at half effectiveness. (So, for example, a T2 tracking disruptor would still have its current -17.2% base tracking/optimal/falloff, and then also have -4.5% flight time/velocity, -6% explosion velocity, and +6% explosion radius. A T2 missile disruptor would have full strength missile disruption stats and half strength turret disruption stats. Fitting either of them with a range or application script would appropriately remove/double the penalties for both weapon types.) This at least avoids the problem of getting caught with a literally useless ewar module, while still preserving the relevance of correctly choosing your module type if that is deemed desirable.
Also, while this might seem a bit odd in light of what I wrote above, I'm a bit concerned that this whole thing might represent too severe a decrease in the overall viability of missiles. Missiles not having any ewar counter *was* weird and probably should have been corrected, but that was arguably one of the things helping balance them. Not all missiles are bad - rockets and light missiles, for example, are in a good place overall (and RLML can even be argued to be a bit OP) - but there are a fair number of missile types and platforms that are struggling. (Oddities like BCUs inexplicably using 25% more CPU than turret damage modules or the absence of remote missile guidance computers don't help either.) It's probably time to take another pass at individual missile types and hulls and see if they need buffing. (And for pete's sake, if you're not going to remove damage type locking, at least give those hulls half-strength bonuses to the other types just so that the designed advantage of missiles being able to switch damage types isn't *completely* negated for them.) |