Asteroid Appears Unbeatable For AI Using Ballistics + Missiles

[voyager]

So today was my civilization's doomsday, and for RP reasons I wanted the ship I sent out to use large missiles and piercing heavy weapons ammunition. Unfortunately, it seems the officer could not destroy it using 300 missiles and 3000 rounds of QL >150 ammunition. For the missiles, I think the issue was that the AI follows the asteroid at a distance of >5k by default, thus at 1km/s, the 5s lifetime of the missile is too short to actually impact the target. As for the bullets, they seem to just shoot off to the side of the asteroid. While I understand getting the AI to work better is an ongoing project, I feel this could negatively surprise many of the expected steam players as not everyone might have energy weapons in reserve or the time/skill to handle the asteroid themselves.

[Deantwo]

I still beg for the ballistic weapons to return to being projectile-less direct damage weapons like the lasers. Projectiles just aren't reliable enough in the game right now. But even if projectiles worked perfectly, I still suggest for basic ballistic weapons to be direct damage, just because it is simpler and causes less issues. Simply rebrand them as railguns or whatever. Same with ballistic turrets, it just makes it easier to use for players and AI alike if they are hitscan like lasers are.

A heavy artillery cannon can take over the current projectile mechanics, giving it a worthwhile damage and AoE to trade-off from being hard to hit moving targets with.