Space is big and predictable. If you make your missiles pretty dumb so they move in roughly a straight line and at limited speed then they can always be avoided at long ranges. Alternatively you should provide a way to disarm missiles you see coming from far away (maybe lasers, maybe decoy flares). In either case the long range missiles/projectiles will require some response, but the response should be an easy action to completely nullify the attack. The only time you can't nullify them completely is when you're busy defending from other ships in close range because now you need to defend from 2 enemies at once.

Bit of a selfish plug, but I was designing Space Chess which has these gunships that shoot projectiles in a straight line. In my playtests, the projectiles haven't ever hit any ship yet because you can simply move out of the way... Worse, because my map is a sphere and projectiles can orbit around, the shooting ship has to eventually spend an action point to move out of the way too.

Space is big and predictable. If you make your missiles pretty dumb so they move in roughly a straight line and at limited speed then they can always be avoided at long ranges. Alternatively you should provide a way to disarm guided missiles you see coming from far away (maybe lasers, maybe decoy flares). In either case the long range missiles/projectiles will require some response, but the response should be an easy action to completely nullify the attack. The only time you can't nullify them completely is when you're busy defending from other ships in close range because now you need to defend from 2 enemies at once.

Bit of a selfish plug, but I was designing Space Chess which has these gunships that shoot projectiles in a straight line. In my play tests, the projectiles haven't ever hit any ship because you can simply move out of the way... Worse, because my map is a sphere and projectiles can orbit around, the shooting ship has to eventually spend an action point to move out of the way too.