I really wish non-missile weapons were equally as feasible as the missile weapons. I'm not huge on ship design, and doing ship design, then tossing in ASM magazine, ASM launcher, AMM magazine and AMM launcher designs, THEN ASM fire control, AMM fire control, and finally the missiles really irritates me.
But missiles rule. They can have amazing damage and super long range, alongside a good chance to hit. You try to fight without missiles and your ships will be eaten by an enemy that uses missiles before you can even get halfway towards them.
I talk about this a lot, so I feel obliged to address it.
Missiles are much more effective than E/KW
in human hands.
A human player will do far better with missiles than E/KW in most circumstances. Aurora AI are, for several reasons, fundamentally incapable of using missiles anywhere near as effectively as humans, mostly because of the quirky, highly specific nature of their advantages. Here's a set of things relating to missile design and doctrine which humans do well and AI don't.
1. Maximize salvo size, even at the expense of reload time and overall volume of fire. You see AI ships all the time that are 16k//24k/32k whatever but have launcher numbers in the single digits, and they're absolutely laughable. This is why AI AMMs are so much more dangerous: they're the one type of missile which NPRs and spoilers naturally fire en masse.
We know that one salvo of 30 missiles every minute is better than one salvo of 3 every five seconds, but the AI doesn't.
2. Use of square-number warheads. As above, the AI just doesn't design like that, so their missiles themselves are suboptimal.
NPRs and spoilers don't get efficient missiles, missile platforms, or missile doctrine. This is exacerbated by the fact that
players are also exceptionally good at designing ships to beat missile fire. It's not particularly difficult to slap together a ball of armor, shields, turrets, and drives that can soak up missiles from three or four times its weight in enemy ships without taking any internal damage.
Also AMMs are a waste of time and resources if you're not using them to waste enemy anti-missiles before using your ASMs. Stick to E/KW PD and better defensive design+groupings.