So i'm trying out the new expansion, and while the dev blogs have told me about some of the new mechanics, i'm still scratching my head on a few. I'm hoping with this thread we can clear everything up:



Weapons

1) Accuracy, min/max damage, crits. As far as i can tell nothing much has changed here (except now evasion opposes accuracy).

2) Rounds to reloads, rounds to hit target. From what i remember there are 3 phases with 4 rounds each. So let's take a look at long and medium range kinetics to see if I understand correctly.

Long: 3 rounds to reload, 3 rounds to hit target.

Medium: 1 round to reload, 1 round to hit target.

Melee: This doesn't mention rounds to reload and hit. Does that mean it just fires every round and hits instantaneously?

1 - 1st LR shot, 1st MR shot

2 - 1st MR shot hits, 2nd MR shot

3 - 2nd MR shot hits, 3rd MR shot

4 - 1st LR shot hits, 2nd LR shot. 3rd MR shot hits, 4th MR shot

5 - 4th MR shot hits, 5th MR shot.

6 - 5th MR shot hits, 6th MR shot

7 - 2nd LR shot hits, 3rd LR shot. 6th MR shot hits, 7th MR shot.

8 - 7th MR shot hits, 8th MR shot.

9 - 8th MR shot hits, 9th MR shot

10 - 3rd LR shot hits, 4th LR shot (will hit on round 13, so is wasted). 9th MR shot hits, 10th MR shot.

11 - 10th MR shot hits, 11th MR shot

12 - 11th MR shot hits, 12th MR shot (would hit on round 13, so is wasted).

So if i'm right, long hits 3 times and medium hits 11. Or am I wrong on those wasted rounds, would each fire shot always get a chance to land?

3) Damage: So with these calculations, damage appears to be the following (no crits, defense, or evasion).

Long: 35 damage x 5 shots x 3 rounds x .7 accuracy = 367.5 (122.5 per burst)

Medium: 14 damage x 15 shots x 11 rounds x .3 accuracy = 693 (63 per burst)

So long range does less damage overall but more per burst. However, since i showed up top that as the 1st long range hit lands, i've gotten in 3 MR hits, than that means LR has done 122.5 damage vs MRs 189 at long range.

So at first glance, there's nothing to tell me that LR is better than MR. However, perhaps defense and evasion play a big role. Because MR has a lower accuracy and fires more often, it should be more vulnerable to evasion and defense that absorbs per hit. Which brings me to the next part.





Defense

Defense is pretty confusing to me right now, so could use some help. Let's look at those layered kinetics:

1) Every 25 MP grants a +1 Point Defense bonus. What does this means? Is this for fighters?

2) -1% accuracy on weapons. So 10 defense provides a -10% accuracy. For those medium weapons up top, that goes from .3 to .2, a 33% drop in damage. Ouch! Looks like you use high accuracy weapons with this kind of defense.

3) +1% evasion per module. So for the price of losing accuracy on all yours weapons, you gain some defense against all weapon types through evasion. That's interesting.

4) 100 defense. If i review the dev blog, I have this formula: WeaponModuleDamage *1- Target.Defense/(Target.Defense+ Target.DefMod)

Target DefMod: Where is this defined?

WeaponModuleDamage: Is this the damage per projectile, per salvo, total damage after accuracy?.

This is how i believe it works:

Let's look at that long range attack above. Lets assuming no evasion. So i fire 5 shots, based on accuracy lets say 3 of them get through. Each does 35 damage a shot. So for each shot i check defense (lets assume a targetdefmod of -10:

35 damage - (100/100-10) = 35 - 1.1111 = 33.9999 damage gets through. No something seems screwy with that unless target defense mod gets a lot higher. Any help here?

If we look at deflectors, they actually provide bonus ship repair when combined with repair modules. However, they also provide "hull weakness". What is that, is that simply a loss of hp for the ship?



Engines

Original notes say that this provides evasion bonus, but the initial engines at least didn't seem to do so. Am i missing something?



Misc

I just made a few early ships and found they had a 50% accuracy and 50% evasion score. Does that mean if two of these ships fired at each other they would be effectively invincible?

Stalker0 wrote:


Misc

I just made a few early ships and found they had a 50% accuracy and 50% evasion score. Does that mean if two of these ships fired at each other they would be effectively invincible?

I feel like they would still have a 25% chance to hit.

Igncom1 wrote:
I feel like they would still have a 25% chance to hit.

The original math the devs put up was a straight accuracy - evade. But your method does make a lot more sense.

I think that Target.DefMod is the same thing what is called "HullWeakness" in Hull.xml.

It's 100 there for all the Hulls. Decreasing it should make Def-Modules more effective and Increasing it should weaken Def-Modules.

Stalker0 wrote:


4) 100 defense. If i review the dev blog, I have this formula: WeaponModuleDamage *1- Target.Defense/(Target.Defense+ Target.DefMod)

I think i might have figured out the answer, I think the formula is missing a parenthesis in the original blog. It should read:



WeaponModuleDamage * (1- Target.Defense/(Target.Defense+ Target.DefMod))



If Ail is right about hull weakness equaling the targetdefmod, then a 35 damage attack vs 100 defense looks like this:



35 * (1 - 100/(100+100)) = 35 * (1- 1/2) = 35 * .5 = 17.5, which is a lot more reasonable.



If we had 4 defense modules, 400 defense, then it would look like this: 35 * 1 - 5/6 = 5.83.





What is interesting is that if this is right, then that means defense applies a flat percentage damage reduction on all damage received from that weapon type. The number of attacks doesn't matter, 35 damage resulting from 1 hit or 5 is the same end damage.



It also means that you can't overcome defense with raw power. 1000 missiles totaling 1,000,000 damage would still get a 50% reduction from 1 flak module (ok technically it would be a little less since flaks add hull weakness).



Still seems like something is missing. If this is true i can't imagine not having at least 1 defense module of each type on every ship.

Well why not? Its better then the alternative of on-off damage. lol I remember raging about it one before.



The % reduction ensures that you can basically always do damage, but without making the defences useless.

thank you!! i was confused

Stalker0 wrote:
If Ail is right about hull weakness equaling the targetdefmod, then a 35 damage attack vs 100 defense looks like this:



35 * (1 - 100/(100+100)) = 35 * (1- 1/2) = 35 * .5 = 17.5, which is a lot more reasonable.

Hmmm... The only hull weakness values I've seen have been on defense mods, and they're generally +/- 2%. If DefMod is Hull Weakness, wouldn't it start out at 0? Where are you getting the 100 for hull weakness?

I thought hull weakness just changed the DefMod value.



I will investigate.

kane_t wrote:
Hmmm... The only hull weakness values I've seen have been on defense mods, and they're generally +/- 2%. If DefMod is Hull Weakness, wouldn't it start out at 0? Where are you getting the 100 for hull weakness?

Ali found that value in the hulls.xml file

still many questions here



since all def-moduls add defense, the question is wether they add up against any type of weapon or wether each value is only used vs its corresponding weapon type (or possibly not weapon type but range setting ? )



additionally confirmation on the mechanics of hull weakness (for the equation used above) and evade (interaction with accuracy) are needed



i noticed that from shield modul t2 to t3 hull weakness changes from +10 % to -15 %, is this a bug or just a tooltip error or even intended. the tooltips on the engines regading hull weakness arent too clear either



and i noticed that while change of the evade score is directly accounted for in the design view, adding deflect moduls has no effect on the displayed accuracy score (scout module does though).

and whats the effect of heroes, faction trait "offense first" ?

EmperorMing wrote:
and whats the effect of heroes, faction trait "offense first" ?

I want to know this as well. I was just playing a game where I maxed out "offense first" because I was planning on building ships with high HP and repair but no defense. I fought a very weak fleet with only 125 melee kinetic power on 2 ships with 450hp and no beam defense, and they killed 6 of my 1k hp ships in the first phase, while my 150+ beam per ship failed to kill more than one in the same period. WTF?? I think maybe "offense first" is not operating the way it's supposed to, because it seems to have outrageously multiplied the damage I received. Clearly that's not supposed to happen since I don't have any defense in the first place so the trait should not affect me in this case.



Maybe "offense first" was implemented in such a way as to create a negative number when you start with no defense that goofs a subsequent formula?

theres stuff going on I simply dont understand. I created a fleet in one of my previous matches. Early game, it was designed to be my block-holder on a bottleneck system. I knew from scout-contact that the enemy was using kinetic weaponry and put defense into missiles. I designed my ships accordingly relying on medium-range lasers with kinetic defense.



Contact equal size fleets both having 5 ships, he using melee range kinetics. I think its an easy win and select 3 cards and go automatic. Heres the shocker. Even tho all 3 cards defeat his selections he flat out destroys my fleet without a single loss.



Enemy AI was the Sheredyn and yeah there "could" be empire bonuses from exploration but cmon.......3 card penalties PLUS optimally designed counter-ships. Thats why I dont like the disharmony combat that much. Things simply dont fall into place for me.

Empire bonus can be very important, monopole is 40% (defense/attack) I don't remember single resource bonus. Can't you check it with diplomacy? If you are in war and can request a cease fire, fake request it to identify enemy resources.



EDIT: Ooops ok "from exploration". :-)