Can someone tell me how to dodge these? None of the old tactics work. You can no longer outmanuever them (or at least strafe-rolls no longer work) and you can't outboost them if you do manage to make them miss the first time around... how do you pull this off and still stay in the fight?

I can't really develop a tactic to fight them because I'm dead or running before I have a real chance to try it out. I checked in game and many of the tracking missles are proximity detonated - now that they track better, can this be removed or shortened?

I ask because suddenly everyone I fight is carrying swarms or geminis, and if fighting is reduced to tracking missle spam the game will have become what the devs didn't WANT it to be when they made the max speeds so low.

As a little addon - this only became a problem when I began asking for a cargo jettison. I can revert to my old ways and avoid the problem, somewhat, but it's still there.

The art of creating an AI for homing missiles is a very very very fine line to walk. Make the AI too weak and you end up with the situation we used to have, where a whole tube of gemini's could be dodged with a few small keystrokes. Make the AI a bit better and you end up where we are now. Here's my suggestion for balancing this.

Leave the AI the way it is now, and take the following steps 1 at a time.

1 reduce the speed of the seeker missiles by approximately 5m/s across the board, this will give a bit more time to respond without making a drastic change.

2 If this still doesnt solve the problem, reduce their agility by just a bit, eg give them a slightly wider turn radius when making course corrections/tracking.

3 If they are still overly deadly, then reduce the proximity radius by maybe 5 meters on all of them. This will reduce the amound of dodge players need to use in order to succesfully avoid.

In the event that after step 3 more needs to be done, start over at step 1 again.

The idea is to make homing missiles dangerous, but not unavoidably deadly. The way they were before, they werent even a nuicance. As they are now, they are UBER. It will be very difficult to find a happy medium on this issue.

Or, alternatively, leave the missiles as they are, but give us chaff, flares and/or ECM to make them easier to avoid.

And you can currently avoid missiles by having them smash into asteroids. Not an ideal solution, but it still gives you an option.

Not if there are no asteroids nearby, or you are near the player when they fire.

Currently the only way to avoid missles is to be far away when they are fired - far enough that you can get your speed up to where they can't catch you, or to get behind somehthing.

Countermeasures would be cool - but then we'd need a widget slot that would accept a countermeasure launcher. I think the devs are going to need to add a widget slot eventually, but I don't know how difficult it will be. This close to release there may be other priorities. Worse comes to worse, just put the homers back the way they used to be and wait to fix them. If they are left the way they are it's going to be homing missle wars all over.

>>>And you can currently avoid missiles by having them smash into asteroids. Not an ideal solution, but it still gives you an option.<<<

Chances are, if your already traveling that fast you can out run the missles. Otherwise your probably slow enough to allow the homing missles to follow right behind you, not hitting the asteriod.

But running is boring :) :P. We want a way to dodge homers :D.

Hit turbo and outrun them. Homers are very slow. Where exactly is the problem? You are not supposed to be able to continue the fight with swarms on your tail. That will give traders some additional time to escape while Icarus is circling around a roid trying to get rid of them evil swarms.

I agree with andreas. Before missiles were practically useless, now they are an actual threat. That is good. Now you just have to be a little more aware than before, and get boosting before the missiles get too close. It's actually a lot of fun: a tactic I like to use is boost in toward my enemy at 200 m/s and when I get close start letting the missiles go, then zoom right out of range before he has a chance to retaliate. There's a whole new set of strategies based on missile warfare we're going to have to develop!

Phaser, you realize that you just described the type of combat the devs were trying to avoid by making ship and weapons speeds so low?

The problem is that unless you are already traveling at speed, they hit you. I don't know about you, but when I attack someone, I am usually heading toward them and pointed at them. When they fire homers at me, I have to turn around and hit the turbo - by the time I actually start GOING the other way I am caught and hit by the swarms. If I manage to dodge them on their first pass and turbo away, they will catch me before I make speed. Or if I do make speed, the fight is over because I had to run 2km away to avoid the missles.

Basically, there will be no use for any weapons except missles if nothing changes. Awarness doesn't mean crap when you can't close to within 1km of a player without being dogmeat for seeker spam.

I agree... If missile AIs are improved to hit targets more reliably, you must improve anti-missile systems so that balance is restored. You could have flares for heat-seeker missiles, chaff and electronic jammers for other missile types. Several different flare "temperatures," and several different chaff quantities, and different jammer levels to compete with different missile levels. Large countermeasures may require a weapon slot, smaller ones may only require one widget's worth of cargo space (so single weapon ships like the Bus and the Centurion can carry countermeasures). This also means you can have different levels of missiles.

Might be interesting to have a ship in a convoy loaded up with nothing but countermeasures, to keep missiles off the rest of the group.

"Also, the change I made threw off the "balance" of homing missiles, such as they are, since they tend to turn faster now (even though they stay within the same turning rate limit) so we'll probably need to adjust tracking rates and crap."
-a1k0n

The original thread's in bugs; I'm too lazy to link it.