Small Craft Missiles

[Cap]

As of right now light missiles like the piranha missile and wasp are rather useless since only the battle cruiser can use them and the lasers on weapons console handle small craft more than adequately. My suggestion is to allow ships like wraiths and corvettes to carry these small missiles. Perhaps a new ship that is designed to use missiles could be added as well, perhaps it is capable of carrying a few of the heavy missiles that the battle cruiser uses. This would make missiles, especially light missiles much more useful.

[DumbMarine]

I fully endorse the corvette being able to shoot light missiles. Besides giving those missiles purpose, it also gives the corvette some late-game scaling, instead of it getting shut down hard by destroyers.

[Sheogorath]

- Wraith shooting missiles: NO. Absolutely no. The Wraith is already quite powerful as it is, with boosters and EMP. And miner ping. It doesn't need missiles.
- Corvette shooting missiles: It's a possibility, but I thought of something else for the Corvette.
- Destroyer shooting missiles: Also another possibility, but as of late the Destroyer has been given quite a lot of abilities. Not sure if it also needs missiles.
- A new ship design?: Also possible.

The big problem with this is the reload. You would need to enter the ship and manually slap missiles inside your ship. Also, if you added a stacking function (so you can slap 50 missiles in a tiny rocket launcher on your tiny ship) it has to be balanced in some way, for example by adding a launching cooldown.

[LordDragon]

I've thought of this as well - I like the idea of a new "Missile Boat" style ship. Still, I think 6 should be more than adequate. The possibility of sending two or three of these on an attack run would be quite viable, yet risky. The risk vs reward system at its finest.

[Sheogorath]

I've thought of this as well - I like the idea of a new "Missile Boat" style ship. Still, I think 6 should be more than adequate. The possibility of sending two or three of these on an attack run would be quite viable, yet risky. The risk vs reward system at its finest.

How would you handle the reloading (or the max number carried of missiles) in a small ship - missile boat? Six missiles is not much at all, at least with the current missile system. Stacking missiles would mean somebody could take two missile boats and 50 missiles and annihilate everything, which might cause overpowered issues. Making missile boats weak is not a good counter: you could be unlucky, get destroyed, and waste all of your missiles. That's a bit too much.

[LordDragon]

I wouldn't allow stacking. 6 inventory slots=6 missiles. Considering that most BC's fly around with low shields until they're ready to fight the other BC, it shouldn't take more than 1 or 2 sabertooth missiles to break the shields (and hurt their core) followed by a salvo of hellfire missiles. The result would be chaos on the deck, unconscious marines and massive debris/hull fires. They have 1 or 2k shields up, flying around? Send 2 boats. 1 is fully loaded with sabertooth, the other with heavy merc. or hellfire. Same result.

Alternatively, you could send one in early on to hit the enemy with a predator missile. They either let you keep the sight it gives, or spend time removing the tracker.

Stacking missiles on it would make it potentially a better assault craft than the BC - albeit a very expensive alternative.

In all honesty, if you can't do some form of damage with 6 missiles...your doing it wrong. The idea isn't to solo- the BC in this thing, just give them a very bad headache.

[Sheogorath]

According to your current scheme:

Four hellfires wouldn't do a lot of damage. The price spent in buying and filling a missile boat is probably more than the price worth of damage you'll deal to the enemy. Also consider than in normal situations there 0 to 1 (rarely 2) marine(s) on a BC.

You will be detected with a ping, unless you buy a nullifier. Which means you're using one more inventory space. Which means you'll carry only five missiles.

Ships are likely to be slow, and weak, which means they'll be hit very easily.

You will be extremly vulnerable to small ships unless you have a very good aim with missiles, or unless they're homing.

[LordDragon]

Firstly, unless you are playing with a very undermanned team (like 3v3) there should always be 1 person on deck. I cant begin to tell how many games I've won simply because the enemy had nobody on deck. Even if they are running upgrades for most of their time (it can be a full-time job) the occasional ping every couple minutes is the difference between survival and death by broadside rush.

Back to the topic at hand...Missile Boats.
They've yet to be implemented. Any assumptions regarding their health, speed or abilities would be getting ahead of ourselves.
In regards to your statement on damage - - even merc. missiles (designed to be an all-around type) will do 400 damage to hull. If even 3 get through (meaning they had at least 1.2k shields ready) you're doing an additional 1.2k damage to hull, complete with debris blocking vital passageways and rendering the crew temporarily crippled. If you sent 2 boats fully loaded, the damage can add up very quickly.

My point being:

Being able to stack multiple missiles in a single slot would make a missile boat capable of destroying a BC in a single pass. We don't want this - BC should always be king of Cruiser Command.
Missile damage is already adequate, and the variety of missiles (in combination with scouting options provided by wraith, miner, or predator missile) means you can get the right warhead for the job. Even 1 of these things could do some serious damage to core, hull, and/or crew.

[Racism Minerbane]

Lol, I'd use it with cruiser pings to one shot miners with cheap rockets.

Oh and then when they try and intercept me with a small ship I'll one shot that too!

[DumbMarine]

Unless they have countermissiles. (wouldn't surprise me if nobody knew CC actually had countermissiles)

And unless I'm mistaken the small missiles do 100 damage and miners have more than 100 health. A single shield unit actually blocks a missile. I think this is fair. The BC should be the only ship with the big missiles IMO.