Autocannons need a boost

[RCIX]

After a discussion in the Strategy forum, i've pretty much decided that autocannons are promising, but they need to be changed to be useful. I propose that they offer an area-regeneration ability in a small area (similar in size to the FF bearer), but they lose cloaking and any bonuses they have against ships. This will make them a fast ship capable of boosting fleet longevity, with a minor weapon attack mainly useful in pestering and harassing the enemy.

[x4000]

Hmm, that's really a complete reinvention of them, but I do like the idea.  Right now they are a bit redundant with some of the other cloaking ships, so making them a bit more unique would be good.

[Fiskbit]

This strikes me as a way of potentially getting around not being able to use engineers to repair your ships while your fleet is out and about. Perhaps something else could be done with them?

[x4000]

That's a very good point. I think it would be a good idea to keep brainstorming.

[RCIX]

What about removing their weapon entirely and boosting their staying power some more? Then their primary goal is to attract units away from interesting targets and would do so quite effectively.

I still think the regen ability could be pulled off, it just needs the proper balancing. If done right, building these will boost the longevity of a ship group without significantly affecting their ability to deep-raid. Better yet, make sure that the regen boost does not take effect if the unit is in the "3-second period" after getting hit. This way, fleets will be able to heal some limited extent en route to targets but not be able to deep raid well.

[I-KP]

Another idea to storm...

Take Minipods out of the build list completely and instead have them dispensed from this...



The Submunitions Launcher is a mobile Minipod manufactory that instead of attacking with weapons of its own rapidly ejects intelligent submunitions (Autocannon Minipods) which then automatically seek out targets of opportunity to provide automatic harrassment and diversionary tactics whilst the fleet commander controls the remainder of his fleet.

- Relatively slow.
- Fairly tough.
- No point defence weapons of its own.
- Players only control the position of the Submunitions Launcher, not the Minipods it kicks out.
- Minipods cost nothing but a fixed resource drain could be implemented when the Submunitions Launcher is in 'Attack' mode.
- The cap on the number of Minipod submunitions that the launcher is able to maintain at any one time is [50|100].  Destroyed munitions are immediately replaced at the launcher.
- If out of supply the Submunitions Launcher only holds enough stowed resources to kick out [100|200] Minipod submunitions.
- When there are no more targets all active Minipods return to the Submunitions Launcher.
- If the Submunitions Launcher is destroyed or leaves the system whilst Minipods are still active those Minipods immediately self destruct.

Mechanically speaking the Submuntions Launcher does nothing (other than follow move commands) until the player makes an Attack order at which point the Launcher spews out Minipods at the rate of one / second into groups of ~10 that then immediately drop into a Free Attack Prowl (equiv. of CTRL-V) order and go about providing automatic harrassment duties.

Perhaps an equivalent could be done for Microfighters that way you have two styles of auto-harrassment submunitions launchers that are better for certain kinds of enemy (and perhaps the stats of the Minipods and the Microfighters could be tweaked a little to further accent the different roles of these submunitions).

PNGs can be found here.  Animation: the central blue band of the Launcher pulsates.

[TheWordWillSetYouFree]

Nice idea, but wouldn't this be invincible if you had loads of resources?

[x4000]

Bear in mind that I can never take a ship out of the build list, or remove a ship in general, as this would break existing games for everyone.  I went a bit of a different direction than this thread for buffing microfighters in the upcoming release:

-Autocannon Minipods are now a bit more expensive, and they now have an even lower base attack strength, but they now have a 2% cluster attack bonus, which makes them extremely much more powerful in large swarms.  Their internal ship bonuses have also been adjusted.

[RCIX]

I've gotten a chance to try them and they are simply awesome now. I did a little math and maybe TOO awesome?

340 (number of mk1 autocannons you get) * 0.02: 6.8

6.8 * 4 = 27.2

27.2 * 340 = 9248

So 340 mk1 autocannons output 9248 DPS before bonus adjustments. This means they absolutely pwn anything they dont have a penalty against. Overall quite a good choice to add to a fleet! It's painful to attack bombers or MLRS though...

[Kjara]

9248 dps isn't that overwhelming, consider say cruisers.  They do 8500 dps against things they don't have penalties against(170*1k/20) at a much higher range but are slower.  Then consider the fact that autocannon damage doesn't grow at higher levels nearly as fast(as its losing its max numbers, and thus its source of quadratic damage), while say cruisers are getting both faster attack speed and higher damage.

I wouldn't be against the growth rate scaling by mk level though, say .01 at mk1, .02 at mk2 and .03 or .04 at mkIII(then say .04 or .08 at mkIV?).

Edit: You make a good point that perhaps their bonus's need to be toned down a little though, since they have quite large multipliers against some things--I'm up in the air here.

[RCIX]

But the difference is that it's doing a constant 9248 DPS as opposed to a 170k volley every 20 seconds. Absolutely shreds a cloud of anti-armors or similar.

[Kjara]

Actually 9k/second is worse than 170k every 20 seconds, since you are front loading the damage in the 2nd case provided you aren't overkilling too badly.  No clue where the post went, but I did a handwavey analysis of that somewhere.

[RCIX]

There's situations where both is applicable actually. Here's a nice long post on the SupCom wiki with lots of maths dealing with developing an accurate battle simulation.

[Kjara]

Yeah, but many of the cases where faster rof is better needs more overkill than happens in ai war(except in some cases where you have huge multipliers--say cruisers vs bombers).  With the smart targeting + low per shot overkill/larger fleets the overkill aspects of it are minimized and generally being able to front load damage is better than higher rof.

[x4000]

One note: Autocannons don't have penalties against any ships.  For Bombers or MLRS, those simply have a lot of health and the Autocannon has no bonus against them.  If you look at a number of other ship classes, they can easily put out well more than 9000/s damage, just in a more directed fashion.  Autocannons are great for spreading it around and really chewing through a group of foes, but only if you mass your entire group of autocannons of a given level together.  I think that's pretty interesting, but we'll see how the balance shakes out in the end.

Thanks for the input so far, all!