About the only effective ships that can hold off the spam seem to paranid deimos and other similar M7s that can front mount a load of PSGs and you basically point the thing to whereever the spam is comming from and hold down the fire button until the M7M runs out of ammo and/or you get close enough to destroy it.
Player M7Ms can deal with them on a fire first, then jump the M&M out before it gets targetted while you sit in your paranid M7 (as above) and soak the spam with PSGs.
Maybe someone is having a better experience of this and has found a practical way to deal with angry cobras?
So this got me thinking about some modding to deal with it.
There is a good argument for limiting the maximum number of flails that can be in flight - just because of the slow down impact of it.
In terms of the way M7M firing apparently should work (or at least does for hammers) is some upper limit on the number of flail that can ever be spammed at a single target - regardless of the ammo situation.
I have seen a cobra spam a poor pirate fighter across the other side of the sector with what must have been 100+ *rounds* of flails (8 or 16 per round, 8 warheads per individual missile turret slot - thats a huge amount of spam for a little M3 pirate) and the frame rate drop from my usual liquid smooth down to 1 or 2 frames per second - probably partly because of all the missile tracking a defence script that everything has to run now (I suspect including 60+ docked fighters with their MDM and missile defnce turret where available).
Now if an M7M only has fdlailk missiles left, then of course it want to use them all on a destroyed or something that is going to require a full freight capacity load to be launched which will completely kill the game until you leave the sector, or it eventually stops. (My PC is a 4Ghz i7, Radeon 5770 - so its a top of previous generation CPU and good previous gen graphics and shouldnt be this bad).
So some thoughts:
- I dont want to change individual missiles - fine as is (with a caveat Ill come to)
- I dont want to change how hammers and flails are used by the AI - actually iuts great to see them being scary.
- I do want to place a limit on flail spam to stop them trying to spam something big to death.
4. Such an upper limit should be chosen such that it *could* potentially be applied to player controlled M7Ms for fairness (lets say the turrets overheat after N barrages and need a cooldown period). However such a cooldown must not impact slow single round use of flails - only mass spam use.
5. On a sensibly loaded out M7M it will generally have no effect becuase you will use hammers vs big targets and maybe some flails to deal with fighters and/or manage a targets shields for capping or just to provide a distraction for the targets guns to let the hammers though.
So thats thought on the pure performance aspect. Now though on actualy fleet protection (and this is about stoping M7M for hhaving a total walkover, not proetcting your fleet from even a scratch).
I first did some test with a test fleet - boreas, collosus, 2 aquillos, 4 gladiators, 4 austreus, 6 skirons a griffon full of drone and fighters, collosus full of fighters and the fleet arrange to place the austreus and skirons out as an anti-missile screen.
All of this lot is put in a fight vs a couple of hostile cobras at long range (within M7M spam range, but far outside gun range).
Prior to the MDM being available in the bonus pack - they all died very quickly to hammer spam from the cobras with only a handful of hammers being shot down.
Loadouts all using vanilla turrets:
Skirons has EBCs, Austreus mix of FAA and PBC. Aquillos FAA, Collossus some anti cap guns (ie a natural collosus loadout) with FAAs as you would normally. Boreas mostly anti-cap guns + some FAAs. Griffon has its mix - Think there was an FAA in there as well, but its quite insignificant for this. Im sat in a deimos to observe well back from teh spam fest.
Colosus is stuff full of solano and ventis, griffon has 200 mk2 drones aboard.
All turrets on all ships set to missiles only to give them their best chance.
All ships has a high loads of mosquito missiles.
Obvioius problems:
No moquitos being launched at all to act as anti-missile defence.
Turerts are firing oddly slow and oddly only when incoming hammers are well within firing range. (from subjective observing being using to seeing when the fire at fighters normally).
M7M dont use flails to attaempt to shoot down missiles.
None of the drones were launched nor any carrier based fighters (which are set to pretect the carrier).
FAAs while they do one shot the hammers, do so too slowly and too close to the ship, so ship dies quickly.
Skirons with their EBCs opened up on the hammers at a long enough range to actually trash a couple and they did correctly try to intercept hammers targetted at other ships in the ship, but EBC is basiucally way too weak as an anti-hammer weapon (takes too long to destroy the missile).
Austreus - same FAA problem, so I conclude FAAs are useless. The PBC however seems to be do quite a decent job, but agian seem too weak to be effectiove and opddly seem a bit cripled in missile defence mode vs normal fighter mode (perhaps AP has changed from TC and Im just not used to it yet).
Boreas and collosus just died weith barely destroying more than a couple of hammers themselves. Same with the aquillos. The gladiators of course just died without stoping a single hammer as well.
That leaves the griffon - HEPTs managed to get a couple, but that went splat quickly as well.
Which leaves the Demios and the way in which I learned to use the mains guns PSGs to survive hammer spam. (Deimos turrets dont start firing often and soon enough to be effective vs hammers).
Basically a total walkover. I later tried some other race ships, Deimos of course, skrike, tiger etc with their native loadouts and none of them faired any better.
Long range beam weapons seem to be the best (PBC being best overall I think), but they are too weak to be effective vs more than a couple of hammers.
I tried this again after the bonus pack - MDM helkps, buty it doesnt actually change the outcome of a total fleet wipeout.
(BTW - the aquillo and/or gladiators did kill the cobras with return fire before they died).
Any other ideas?
I resorted to having a long at modding the PBC weapon in a couple of ways to experience with the concept of a dedicate anti-missle beam weapon.
- Removing its shield damage down to an insignificant value (missiles dont have shields).
- Reduce size and energy requirement so it can be mounterd on corvettes enabling corvettes to serves as a fleet Am screen.
- Increased hull damage and fire rate. (Yes I know the problem here is now corvettes sudenly have devastating long range bare hull killers...)
- Increased speed (to increase range and accuracy - range is now about 10Km).
Modified M7 to accomodate them in all their turret slots as well, so now I can test again with these thigns fitted to skirons and austreaus.
The combination of the 6 skirons and teh austreus with the modified PBC now turns the encounter with a couple of cobras into a survivable enmcounter - still heavy losses depending, but you mioght esccape with half you fleet, that is until the flail spam starts.
So, next thing - outfit a load of deimos with a vanilla tri-beam and a psg in each turret (had to mod TCockpits for this). The isnt strong enough to deal with hammers, but it does deal with some of the flails. 4 of them still die however to a single cobra.
Thoughout all this the other thought that struck me was that not a single fighter launched and not a single drone was ejected despite the figters being set to protect, so back to fleet test and I manually ejected all the fighters and drones this time - they all basically head off to attack the cobra and eventually kill with heavy losses it at about the same time the spam for my M7Ms arrives, but thgey didnt try to do anther about the incomming missiles.
So now, Im having a look at the fighter scripts which I assume also happen to manage drone combat to see if drones can be coerced into priority targetting missile spam. Same with M7M flails as they should be able to provide an effective screen, at least vs hammer, but I guess that once a missile is launched then its default tracking is whatevr is hard code and they cant be coerced into tracking another missile once the original target gets destroyed?
The concept of corvettes being outfitted withn dedicated anti-missile long range beam weapon is actually very appealing (Im sure homeworld 2 had an anti-missile spam frigate to counter the missile frigates?). And it al;so looks very cool witthe the beams sweeping across the blackness of space - like out of those outdoor laser shows at night
The problem is how to make strikle a balance between an effective anti-missile spam weapon and something that is simply too deadly to be allowed on a corvette in normal use. Limitting shield damage to near nothing is obvious, however making the tracking too slow to track fighter seems to cripple their use against missilea way more than I expected - quite simply it takes way way too long for them to track when the ship moves, or track to initially engage. Anyone who knows the engine have other ideas?
Im not aiming for a perfect screen here, just something that keeps a conventional fleet combat viable and doesnt result in combat degenerating onto whichever M7M fires first and at what and whateher you can jump out in time.
Other mod idea from Xtended are of course the ECM and chaff, but whiel ECM might work for the initial batch, when you are spammed its going to be useless.
Another slightly crazy idea - strap a nuke to a recon drone and kill the M7M via stealth
