Squadron Balance

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Svanh

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"If you can't mod it in and you haven't met anyone who has, don't suggest it."

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Svanh

Newcomer

5 900g2g pts

7 years ago

Jan 24, 2018, 2:36:05 AM

I've been doing a bit of modding and I noticed that squadrons are a bit of a mess. There's a few reasons for this:

Physical/Energy balance:

Squadrons have the penetration values you'd expect with physical squadrons having better shield penetration and energy squadrons having better plating penetration. Despite this, energy squadrons have 50% more health and less damage (20% less for fighter, ~17% for T1 and strat bombers, and ~11% for T2 bombers) and T2 and strat energy squadrons have increased evasion rather than increased critical chance.This makes them extremely difficult to balance because there are so many differences.

Generally, one would want to calculate a bomber or fighter's worth by multiplying the uptime by the DPS (with health and damage as proxies for each). This doesn't work because of the way fighter DPS is calculated. As far as I can tell, every 4 seconds a fighter makes an attack run that does a single burst of damage. This makes threshold values (shots-to-kill) far more important than DPS for balancing. Let's have a look:

Fighter shots-to-kill versus bomber	T1PB	T2PB	T1EB	T2EB
T1PF	2	4	3	6
T2PF	2	3	3	5
T1EF	3	5	4	7
T2EF	2	4	3	5

This table doesn't include evasion or critical chance but is still a good representation of oddities. We can see that energy fighters do not do 50% less damage to offset their improved health; the T2 energy fighter is especially noticeable as it is only worse than the T2 physical fighter against T2 physical bombers.

We see the same issue with bombers. As they are generally fighting targets with 10,000-30,000 health using DPS approximations is arguably justifiable. As mentioned previously, energy bombers have 50% more health but have 80% of the damage which makes them roughly 20% more efficient if your opponent has fighters.

Fighter/Bomber balance:

Given their anti-bomber and anti-fighter roles, it makes sense that fighters are worse against ships than bombers. I would argue that they shouldn't have as much of a disadvantage as they do.

First, bombers have higher DPS than fighters. In addition, bombers have penetration values of 0.9/0.1 (shields/plating for physical, plating/shields for energy) while fighters have penetration values of 0.3/0.1 and fighters receive bonuses (please correct me if these are penalties, they don't look that way in the files) of 40%/25%/10% against small/medium/large ships while bombers receive 50%/100%/150%.

Fighters are more survivable and you recieve 2 fighters for every bomber but there is no reason to use fighters against an opponent without bombers.

Anti-squadron flack:

This is a less important issue but all but one flack module seem to do 2.5% of their damage against squadrons. This means that the best flack in the game, with 420 DPS, takes about 19 seconds to kill a T1 physical bomber. A T1 physical fighter takes 8 seconds.

There is a kinetic weapon that has an extremely high DPS against squadrons but it is the worst anti-missile flack and the worst kinetic weapon in the game.

The problem here is that squadrons are currently balanced so that you use bombers against ships, use fighters to counter bombers, and use flack for attrition but bombers are the only mocule of the three with a role worth using.

Thank you if you read all this. Have I made any mistake or overlooked anything or are squadrons just as much of a mess as I've demonstrated?

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Ansa

Craver

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Ansa

Craver

11 600g2g pts

7 years ago

Jan 24, 2018, 9:21:42 AM

The problem as I see it, is fighters/bombers using weapon slots.

No way in hell would I ever, ever fit a fighter/bomber instead of titanium slugs in these slots.

Even on Carrier, with the "amazing" bonus of 10% to craft health - I fit weapons and it rips apart any fleet alone. So when I field 4 Carriers in a fleet, it's lights out.

Fighters and Bombers need their own special slots, maybe shared with Utility slots, but as of right now - taking up a juicy weapon slot? Hell no.

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samsonazs

Enthusiast

"Idiots try to maintain order - A genius can control chaos"

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samsonazs

Enthusiast

29 200g2g pts

7 years ago

Jan 24, 2018, 3:57:18 PM

Bombers aren't a great choice currently but they are not weak.

Basic bomber on a Coordinator Hull mean 100 damage / second to Hunter and Coordinator type hulls.

And 150 damage / second to Carrier hulls.

For an advanced bomber this goes up to 130 damage / second and 195 damage per second

Bombers have a 100% accuracy so the dmg/sec is what you actually get.

You need to substract from that the time bombers take to get to a target but then thay make up for it with the increased damage.

But they stay around after their carrier / coordinator ship is destroyed which isn't the case for weapons.

On the other hand a squadron can get destroyed and that is the end of damage that you will be inflicting.

Using the same slot you can get:

153 dmg/sec - Titanium Slugs

But that is only if every shoot hits and that isn't true even on close range.

At long rage this is only 15,3 dmg/sec due to accuracy, and on short it is 130 dmg/sec.

135 dmg/sec - Basic unstable slugs (long range 13,5 dmg/sec and short range 114 dmg/sec)

91 dmg/sec - Improved Opal Laser (at long and short range this is 45,5 dmg/sec due to accuracy)

52 dmg/sec - Basic Phased beam

136 dmg/sec - Advanced HELL array (at long and short range this is 68 dmg/sec)

True that you need to accound that slugs will also give you missile defence which is great and squadrons don't have that.

Also damage from weapons stays the same regardless of targer size which is great for small ships.

But once your enemy gets a lot of carrier class ships as their main fleet composition then bombers are what you need.

Before that it isn't something that you always want to go for.

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Gzar

Broken Man

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Gzar

Broken Man

15 200g2g pts

7 years ago

Jan 25, 2018, 9:14:33 AM

Didn't bombers have 0.9/0.5 penetration?

Currently bombers are very good and have no real counters.

Slug flak is a waste of slot for enemy because it's pretty much useless as a weapon so you only really get flak out of it. He'll be mostly protected from bombers if he takes flak but he'll also do no damage to you. Better counter is just packing more weapons to wipe out the enemy faster and attrition them since bombers are expensive.

Because of the stupid escort system if you pack fighters you'll be forced to only use defensive tactics and even then you'll only get 70% of them. If you pick offensive tactic say goodbye to your fighter cover.

T3 bombers are a little fragile but T5 are really good.

And the light bombers from the quest are just hilariously broken. You can easily double their survivability by adding one squadron HP module and then they are impossible to kill and deal absolutely ridiculous damage.

Updated 7 years ago.

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YertyL

Amateur in Disguise

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YertyL

Amateur in Disguise

6 600g2g pts

7 years ago

Jan 25, 2018, 11:04:38 AM

samsonazs wrote:
Bombers aren't a great choice currently but they are not weak.

(...)

Gzar wrote:(...)

Currently bombers are very good and have no real counters.
(...)

Can I just quote my post from this thread: https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/forums/66-game-design/threads/27965-fighters-completely-ineffective-vs-bombers?page=2

YertyL wrote:
Yeah, both bombers and fighters currently are just a bit...sad. In my last battle, 3 carriers with 1 bomber squad and 1 fighter squad each did a whopping...1k damage. Two beam weapons on the hero ship did 3.7k. And that's not even them all being slaughtered by slugs, they also spent most of their time idling around the carrier ships without actually attacking. If they immediately started flying towards the enemy ships during the "weapons ready" phase, I think it would already help their viability a lot.

I tested that battle a few times with different weapons, and replacing bombers with beam weapons multiplied the effective damage in this battle by factor 16 (!!). Bombers spend most of their time flying towards an enemy ship, idling, or being destroyed by fighters/flak, their effective damage values are nowhere near the pretty good ones stated in the ship builder. My quoted tests were before the last patch, but bombers and fighters then were basically useless, and I do not see anything in the latest patch notes.

Updated 7 years ago.

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Svanh

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"If you can't mod it in and you haven't met anyone who has, don't suggest it."

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Svanh

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5 900g2g pts

7 years ago

Jan 26, 2018, 6:13:06 AM

YertyL wrote:
samsonazs wrote:
Bombers aren't a great choice currently but they are not weak.

(...)
Gzar wrote:(...)

Currently bombers are very good and have no real counters.
(...)

Can I just quote my post from this thread: https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/forums/66-game-design/threads/27965-fighters-completely-ineffective-vs-bombers?page=2

YertyL wrote:
Yeah, both bombers and fighters currently are just a bit...sad. In my last battle, 3 carriers with 1 bomber squad and 1 fighter squad each did a whopping...1k damage. Two beam weapons on the hero ship did 3.7k. And that's not even them all being slaughtered by slugs, they also spent most of their time idling around the carrier ships without actually attacking. If they immediately started flying towards the enemy ships during the "weapons ready" phase, I think it would already help their viability a lot.

I tested that battle a few times with different weapons, and replacing bombers with beam weapons multiplied the effective damage in this battle by factor 16 (!!). Bombers spend most of their time flying towards an enemy ship, idling, or being destroyed by fighters/flak, their effective damage values are nowhere near the pretty good ones stated in the ship builder. My quoted tests were before the last patch, but bombers and fighters then were basically useless, and I do not see anything in the latest patch notes.

I think there might be some confusion about Samsonazs' and Gzar's points. Neither is saying that bombers and fighters are the best weapon, just that they're actually pretty good. The issues making them uncompetitive with beams are the same issues that dog battles in general:

- Overly high lethality:

A basic (just unlocked) Zelevas carrier can be equipped with a total of 24 equivalent weapon modules (an 8x and 4 4x). When equipped with the best non-strategic beams it has 960 DPS, enough to destroy 3.84 equivalent ships per battle (each phase is about 40 seconds). This makes it exceedingly rare for both fleets to last until the third or even second phase and puts a premium on weapon travel time and burst.

- Energy weapons are imbalanced:

Comparing the highest-tier non-strategic beam and laser weapons we see 40/40/40 DPS vs. 25/50/25 DPS. Yes, lasers have double the crit chance but including crits gives 42/42/42 vs. 27.5/55/27.5, hardly enough of an advantage to justify the massive disadvantage of starting outside optimal range. Since basic weapon upgrades are given every second tier this situation is reversed prior to that point with beams' 26/26/26 vs. lasers' 25/50/25 DPS (pre-crit).

In addition, beams are burst weapons while lasers have relatively constant damage.

- Kinetic weapons are worse:

Missiles have the highest DPS in the game. Kinetics have both high DPS and defensive utility. Railguns combine the DPS of kinetics with a complete disregard for defense modules. Swarm missiles counter flack. Only kinetics are worth using and only enough to deny missile DPS to your opponents.

Both kinetics and railguns suffer from terrible range disadvantages; the only way they can start within optimal range is if the other fleet has similar armaments. In the worst (read: every) case they must spend two phases with little ability to deal equivalent damage. Could I also confirm that kinetic tooltip DPS is correct? The files seem to imply they fire five shots per salvo which is inconsistent with their supposed damage value.

Missiles are extremely easily countered by flack. An equivalent tier kinetic module can kill a missile in every shot and fires twice in the time a missile takes to cross its range. While it does have a 20% miss chance one may argue that every kinetic module counters roughly two missile modules. In addition, three missiles must cross the zone within 0.5 seconds of one another to ensure a damaging hit which may be difficult given relative ship positions and formation.

Swarm missiles alleviate this by providing ten targets every time they fire to distract from your standard missiles. Unfortunately swarm and normal missiles only fire simultaneously every 45 seconds (remember, a phase is 40 seconds) rendering them ineffectual at this. Since they have poor DPS themselves you would only use them to distract from your bombers.

Most kinetic weapons also have relatively poor penetration values; beams and lasers have 0.9 and 0.8 plating penetration to missiles and kinetics 0.6 and 0.5 shield penetration ensuring that mixed defenses are better against kinetics weapons than energy weapons.

- Defense modules are imbalanced:

Shields and plating operate in similar ways. Shields provide greater damage absorption but cease to provide protection once depleted. Since defense modules provide flat bonuses and since hull weakness and CP usage increases faster than the module multiplier (100/1 for 1x, 250/3 for 2x, 600/6 for 4x) defense modules are less efficient for larger ships. Larger ships can equip more modules evening this out somewhat.

At the same time this creates an imbalance between defenses. Plating provides unconditional health and damage reduction while shields provide significantly less health and a damage reduction dependent on shield health that is an ever smaller fraction of hull health on larger ships. A small offense ship has 1x the shield health and roughly 2,000 health, a carrier 4x and 30,000; while shield health increases by a factor of 4, hull health increases by a factor of 15 and is still insufficient next to weapon lethality. Notably, the medium ships buck this trend being with defense modules scaling above their health. This is exacerbated by the quadrinix shield sacrificing shield health for per-phase shield reload.

Shield health also falls behind weapon damage with tech. Shield health triples between the first and final basic shields while beam damage increases 3.4 times in the same gap. All of these factors combine to make it easy for a beam-equipped fleet (with token kinetic modules) to blast through shield health and thus ignore their penetration disadvantage.

- Tactics are broken:

Barrage Fire is the best tactic in the game. Starting at long range and receiving a scaling damage bonus during the first phase is excessively powerful for its ease of acquisition. Compare this to tactics that merely increase shield absorption (depleting them quicker) or give 15 dust per enemy cp destroyed (completely overshadowed by a few recycling modules). Otherwise good tactics designed to boost carrier fleets are locked behind the same tech as privateers, making them a bit of a luxury.

There are other issues as well but I think these are the main things making beams so dominant. Please correct me if I've missed anything. :)

Squadron Balance

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