Well, my forum avatar is the eye of a turtle, so, no, I don't dislike turtles. But I really dislike turtling in games.
There's a simple reason for my opinion.
If turtling is impossible in a game, playing against turtlers is boring. If turtling is possible in a game, it's very likely that the defenses are just imba.
Turtling as defined as: staying in ones starting area (or at least not moving around much, thus giving the enemy map control) and building up mainly defenses, research and resources to wait until one has (depending on the game) a very large army/fleet, an endgame building (super weapon or the like) to crush the enemy in one attack (or to achieve an other victory condition).
A turtler will always have fewer resources then one that expands, so to be not steamrolled by the enemy he needs defenses that pack a much more powerful punch for it's price then other assets. This makes it, as said above, much harder to attack then to defend, thus punishing attackers -> boring game.
But that's a bit off topic.People like missiles, people like defense platforms... its not that hard to balance it.
Well, you said it's not really need. That's what makes it hard to balance. Either it's superfluous, so nobody will build it because it's not needed or you find a reason for it's existence, which would make it balancable.
Is that even a word?Against what should it be good? The first poster's missile turret was just a variant of the hangar defense, but with missiles instead of fighters/bombers.
Other posters said it should have much longer range then a gauss cannon, but shouldn't do as much damage. That would make it either possible to attack as far as where ships are jumping in (something the devs doesn't want) or they would need an even more constricted build radius then gauss cannons. (Fighter/Bomber squadrons can attack everywhere, but you can kill them with your own fighters/flaks. You could make those missiles attackable by fighters/flaks too, but then you would have something similar to bombers).
hmm, more types of defensive structures, sounds good. something long range, yet frail and possibly only caphships effective could work as an addition to existing defense types.
With the current system of combat in Sins, anything that is powerful against capital ships would shred frigates/cruisers easily.
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I'm not per se against defenses (I really liked the options one had in Total Annihilation) but they need to serve a good purpose and shouldn't be overpowered. Especially the last part is very hard to do in Sins, because the battlefields (ie. the grav wells) are so small and we basically have only one type of units to attack (ships, the equivalent of ground units in other RTS with very limited fighter/bomber support).
