Topic: MIRV damage for Type-IV bus vehicle

[TarMinyatur]

I have yet to see a submunition do more than 2 points of damage. I get half as many missiles by selecting the large variety, but no increase in damage. Has anyone ever seen the 4-point warhead that we expect for large MIRVs?

Looks like we've had a major bug for almost 16 years and nobody noticed? I've tested the game with 2.552. I've used the Mirak UI. I only get six 2-point warheads per MIRV when it blooms, small or large.

The large MIRV could have 12 submunitions that do 2 points each, or it could have six that do 4 points each. But as it is now, it is a very bad deal to take large MIRVs.

[Javora]

My memory of this is really fuzzy, but I seem to remember that this was a balancing issue.  That the four point missiles was unbalanced and Taldren tried to fix it.  IMHO MIRV's were unbalanced anyway.  If you do make changes, you may want to review the damage output.

[Captain Adam]

Intentional or bug, that is the question.

[TarMinyatur]

I searched through these forums for "MIRV bug" and only found the one about customized Klingon ships with a mixture of MIRVs and other missile racks on a Dynaverse server. Sometimes your normal missiles would do less than expected damage. Well, I did some tests and found that if you skip spacedock, going straight into battle, and a MIRV rack occupies the highest weapon slot among missile racks, the DroC, for example, will do just 2 points of damage and only have 2 hitpoints! Weird. If you fiddle with spacedock, the correct data is written to memory (at least in skirmish mode).

Take a look at the damage estimator for DroM. It seems to always display 0-2 (2). You'll know your regular missiles are bugged if the estimator shows that info for Type-I or Type-IV ammo in a DroA through DroG rack.

Looking at the code, I see no function that assigns an alternate warhead to the bus vehicle or the submunitions. The MIRV bus is effectively a single 2-hitpoint, 2-explosive strength submunition with separate (but identical by default) speed values. When it blooms, the bus vehicle is destroyed and six little missiles are created (analogous to a scatterpack). If the bus vehicle encounters its target (as in an anchor) before it can bloom, it delivers 2 points of damage.

So a ship with, let's say, 4 fast MIRVs is really toothless (missile-wise) if you can manage to get to range 3 or less. They'll collectively do 8 damage per turn if they can't bloom. The deployment time can be reduced to a millisecond instead of 3.0 seconds, however. On the other hand, it can be increased to 30 seconds such that the MIRV has 4 turns of combined endurance and can strike from 128.0k away -- that's similar to off-map bombardment.

I'll make more MIRV variables customizable as I find them. And people can playtest them.

[TarMinyatur]

Intentional or bug, that is the question.

Converting 20 bus vehicles into 10 bus vehicles while gaining nothing sounds like a bug to me.

I think the best solution is to keep the MIRV ammo separate and to always use a Type-I bus. Only the DroA - DroG ammo supply would be divided by two when Type-IV warheads are chosen. This is not easy to do with a hex editor. I'd have to rewrite functions that I haven't yet found.

[Captain Adam]

Well you do what you can, if it's too difficult don't stress it. We can always remove the mirv from the shiplist and replace it with another drone that's balanced. It's not like many ships carry them.