are guided missiles underpowered?

[mynystry]

Missiles are cheap to produce - one a turn? and you can load them onto subs.

They can't be intercepted, and your subs can't be seen until the missles are flying.

Have you ever stacked five subs against an enemy coastal city and let loose with the Ordnance? It doesn't matter how many defenders there are, once that lot has piled in you'll take any city with 3 transports of Marines and not lose one of them!

what if instead having five subs carrying missiles you have 5 carriers loaded with fighters? you'd have almost same devastating effect to the defenders + you keep you airfoce to take the next city...

but ok, i agree with the one that pointed that missiles can be stockpiled without limit... if you take one city and move 30 misiles there, the enemy will have a real nightmare next turn... you cannot do that with aircraft cos there is the 4 limit.

 

[r_rolo1]

^^Fighers can be intercepted, and given the AI love for SAMs, it is a certainty that a good deal of them will never launch a bomb before being dropped to the ground.

 

[mynystry]

^^Fighers can be intercepted, and given the AI love for SAMs, it is a certainty that a good deal of them will never launch a bomb before being dropped to the ground.

hmmm.. well, if AI has SAM units then maybe missiles get more useful... even more now that artillery cannot attack amphibious... missiles get more important... i still think that maybe giving the a small collateral dmg or ability to kill units could make them awesome... maybe increasing their cost and putting a limit to stockpile to balance the equation

 

[buffalo6542]

Missiles are cheap to produce - one a turn? and you can load them onto subs.

They can't be intercepted, and your subs can't be seen until the missles are flying.

Have you ever stacked five subs against an enemy coastal city and let loose with the Ordnance? It doesn't matter how many defenders there are, once that lot has piled in you'll take any city with 3 transports of Marines and not lose one of them!

Instead of missiles, try tactical nukes!

 

[GooglyBoogly]

AAh, but SDI can cause nukes to fail. There is no counter to guided missiles

 

[Wheem]

AAh, but SDI can cause nukes to fail. There is no counter to guided missiles

Tactical Nukes bypass SDI, don't they?

Using nukes will cause global warming issues though, even if they're the tactical variety. Wish there was an option to "turn off" global warming (or at least make nukes not affect it, since it doesn't make a lot of sense that they do).

 

[r_rolo1]

Tactical Nukes bypass SDI, don't they?

No.... they only have a smaller chance of getting caught.

 

[blitzkrieg1980]

^^Fighers can be intercepted, and given the AI love for SAMs, it is a certainty that a good deal of them will never launch a bomb before being dropped to the ground.

This is where a mixture of the two tactics becomes more economical. Using 2 subs worth of missiles will damage the defenders a good deal. A damaged SAM unit seems to have a lower chance of intercepting. This might just be luck, but it seems pretty consistent in every game I play.

So based on this, use 2 subs worth of missiles to hurt the defenders, then bring the pain with the fighters. Follow up with marines and defender machine guns/infantry and you have a city. However, only using 2 of the 5 submarines allows you to repeat the process 2 more times for a strong coastal foothold.

 

[kurtkage]

I've seen it mentioned in this thread a couple of times so let me just state that:

Guided Missles Are in fact capable of Killing a unit, ground and naval units Can be killed by them. As far as I know they always have been.

Now, they only kill a unit when the unit is already damaged enough so that the damage the missle does puts it down to 0HP. So it could take a few missles to kill a unit or some air support perhaps but they do destroy units.

One more note, when you kill a unit with a guided missle you do not get the victory sound nor do you get the message scroll saying You've destroyed an enemy blah. The unit simply dissapears.

On the topic of their usefulness, if you have an enemy that has an airforce on intercept + SAMs then GMs are the way to go to destroy that oil resource or uranium. Also can be useful for softening up defenders for your amphibious assault if you are taking too many casualties on your carrier fighters. Granted however that fighters are not too much more expensive than missles to replace.

 

[Shylock76]

I recently used Guided Missiles as an anti shipping weapon and it worked well enough for that purpose though the Chinese navy dominated my coast so i was penned in.

The range is a bit of a problem and there should be a way of getting an increase, maybe something that increases the range or allows you to pinpoint buildings or specific units. Possibly a small Wonder such as Peenemunde (where German rocketry testing took place in WW2) which allows you to give your missiles a 'Precision' promotion and maybe reduces build time by -25% for nukes. The 'Precision' promo could let you pick targets in stacks or in cities if close enough, including buildings. You could also have a random event that increases the range of your missiles by 1 to 5 squares "Your rocket scientists have made a breakthrough and extended the range of your guided missiles by x"

 

[Jerrymander]

Guided Missiles aren't underpowered.

Actually, if anything, they're overpowered. They will always hit. Provided you have a large enough stockpile of them, you can win any war you fight. You just have to have enough.

The range, yeah, is the killer.

 

[sgrig]

Guided missiles can also be fired from forts, so this makes them extremely useful not just in an amphibious assault, but in a land war as well. Just build forts along the border within range of enemy cities, and load them up with missiles. Five missiles are enough to bring the 80% defense bonus down to zero. Also, if enemy cities have bunkers, and you don't want to sit out a whole turn to wait for spies to take out them out, then guided missiles are even more useful than bombers. I think it's not a well-documented feature that bunkers deny collateral damage from air strikes. Moreover, if the AI has SAMs and some fighters, you are bound to lose quite a few of the bombers.

With enough missiles and gunships, and a few paratroopers, in one turn you can take every enemy city four tiles away from your border. Then consolidate your gains, and repeat.

Since guided missiles are so cheap, you can dedicate some low production cities to produce nothing but missiles, while your high production cities focus on more expensive hardware.

 

[Siesta Guru]

Their effect isnt too bad but the cost and the logistics involved in getting loads of them at the right place at the right time are the dealbreakers for me. A single missle has such a small effect that bringing 10 with you will hardly make a difference (you can kill a grand total of 3/4 units with that, yay!), its simply not worth it when youll have to build the subs and misslecruisers for them.
To make them work, give them the ability to target a unit or building, give them a small amount of colleteral damage or lower the cost and increase the amount of missles that subs and cruisers can carry. A small range increase of 2 will do wonders aswell.

 

[Jerrymander]

Hm, you know, I have never thought of a Missile/Gunship/Paratrooper approach.

 

[Inky]

Bombers, with collateral damage, are better at smacking stacks than guided missiles. But missiles are cheap. You don't have to use one or the other. Use some missiles to weaken defenders, bombers to crunch the stack down, then more missiles to finish off or weaken the best defenders even more.

Subs and missile cruisers are going to be around anyway, so being able to load missiles on them is a bonus. While I find Tac Nukes better for stack smashing than anything else (even with SDI you can expect a sub's full load to get a hit), guided missiles are better if you don't want the fallout -- political and pollution.

Subs can reach areas safely where a carrier couldn't, and use missiles to pick off key resources such as oil. In the opening of an invasion, every bit of extra firepower you can manage helps.

Don't think of missiles as unit killers. Think of them like one-shot stealth fighters. The idea is to weaken the enemy stack with it, not outright destroy it. That's what the rest of your forces are for.

Still, more range could be nice, but the same complaint applies to Tac Nukes. You can't strike very far inland with either. But if they were much more powerful, we'd be asking if they were overpowered.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Guided Missiles aren't underpowered.

Actually, if anything, they're overpowered. They will always hit. Provided you have a large enough stockpile of them, you can win any war you fight. You just have to have enough.

The range, yeah, is the killer.

You could win any war with "enough" of ANY modern unit . Are they cost effective though?

I like them better to deal with enemies who've massed fighters, or as softeners for a very late naval war which pretty much never happens for me but if it did I'd use them.

They're good units though - very easy to mass and mobile. They compliment marching troops very well. I will also gripe about the range like everyone else however. If I could change them, it would be range (and no, I'm not going to dig into my xmls over something so minor, but IMO a balance patch would up their range even if just by 1).

 

[Darvon]

Guided missiles are good. You're using them wrong.

 

[SirDrake]

Tactical Nukes bypass SDI, don't they?

Using nukes will cause global warming issues though, even if they're the tactical variety. Wish there was an option to "turn off" global warming (or at least make nukes not affect it, since it doesn't make a lot of sense that they do).

Assets/XML/GlobalDefines

Search for this line:

<Define>
<DefineName>GLOBAL_WARMING_PROB</DefineName>
<iDefineIntVal>20</iDefineIntVal>
</Define>

... to turn off global warming (set to zero). Or this line:

<Define>
<DefineName>GLOBAL_WARMING_NUKE_WEIGHT</DefineName>
<iDefineIntVal>50</iDefineIntVal>
</Define>

... to turn off global warming from nukes (again, change "50" to "0").

I'm not a "real" modder, just an XML hacker, so if anyone wants to correct this I won't take offense. But I've done it this way and it works.

Cheers,
Jason

 

[MattX]

For a unit like a guided missile why can't a city build more than 1 in a turn? Just as it is possible to turn a city to gold, beakers, culture why not units like these? An option to turn a city to mass production of any single unit type until turned off again? At just 60 hammers plenty of cities could build 2 or more in a turn. The current system penalises efficient production.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

For a unit like a guided missile why can't a city build more than 1 in a turn? Just as it is possible to turn a city to gold, beakers, culture why not units like these? An option to turn a city to mass production of any single unit type until turned off again? At just 60 hammers plenty of cities could build 2 or more in a turn. The current system penalises efficient production.

Just overflow into something else occasionally. You do need *something* to walk into cities.