You can already add sensors (active, thermal, or ME) to missiles, but to my knowledge people rarely do. Correct me if I’m wrong). My understanding of why it’s rare is that you get almost no control over what target it goes after once it picks up the targets via the onboard sensor.
I’m not sure what the right solution is, but I’d love to see some refinement in autonomously targeted missiles. Maybe allow priority setting for targeting based on tonnage, EM or thermal strength, military vs commercial engines (if a thermal sensor), shield vs EM sensor str, etc? This could work similar to STO targeting. Maybe it’s something that’s set at time of missile design, to reduce difficulty of coding the change and reduce micro when employing in the fleet, but still give some level of improvement?
As I said, I don’t pretend to have the solution, but want to spark the conversation. As a high level goal, any changes should make putting sensors on missiles closer to equally useful as not doing so, either by making them much more useful in some situations, or making them slightly more useful in most situations.
What are your thoughts/suggestions for implementation?
I’d prefer a salvo targetting tab, similar to that of StO targetting, yet letting change targetting patterns for those salvos only, that are in range of any parent Empire missile fire control.
It sits well with missile-heavy SciFi narratives like Honor Harrington series, easy enough to implement and makes possible to emulate some interesting tactical situations (like losing fire control links when parent ship is running out of range or knocked out).
By the way, I think there is a serious gap in Navy Officers bonuses: Tactical is useful for direct fire combatants only. I think it would be very good to see missile chances-to-hit increased from a tac bonus of the parent ship if it’s currently in range.
I use active sensors and retargeting on the missiles.
In my first games, I didn’t install them.
But having lost too many missiles because they missed their target, I tried sensors and retarget, with satisfying results. So, now I use them regularly.
Yes. I would like to be able to, for example, tell my anti-fighter missiles to only go after targets below 500t. Or giant anti-ship missiles to only go after military engined ships above 30k tons. Or only things with speed below 2km/s, to go after orbiting defense stations. Etc.
Maybe it should depend on the type of sensor. Missiles with thermal sensors go after the largest thermal signature (or maybe largest relative signature, i.e. highest engine boost percentage), EM goes after highest EM, and active sensor missiles go after the highest cross-section that is under their max resolution (or just highest TCS if there’s nothing under their max res).