Accuracy matters IFF EvasionDisorientation is low. However, even in 1.1.9 with EvasionDisorientation at 0.05, accuracy wasn't important. You just used more firepower.

Let's say you have 1.5 accuracy super laser versus 0.1 closed eyes shotgun attacks against a ship with 50% evasion.

How many shots could you miss with each of these weapons before ALL of the rest of the attacks hit.

Super Accurate Laser 150% - 50% = 100% = 0% of missing ever

Closed Eyes Shotgun 10% - 50% = -40% = 140%/5% = 28 attacks



What if we use a bonus that doubles our evasion?

Super Accurate Laser 150% - 100% = 50% = 50%/5% = 10 attacks

Closed Eyes Shotgun 10% - 100% = -90% = 190%/5% = 38 attacks



What if we are firing at long range and our shotgun is a short ranged weapon with a -75% accuracy modifier (per 1.1.14) (i'm guessing this is additive, it is the worst case scenario to be additive, but I think it actually is percentage based (multiply)

Super Accurate Laser 150% - 100% = 50% = 50%/5% = 10 attacks

Closed Eyes Shotgun -65% - 100% = -165% = 265%/5% = 53 attacks



This accuracy looks okay, yes? Well, now let's look at tonnage, fire rate, and damage v accuracy multipliers.

Lasers are designed to be medium weapons, so there would be 20% less lasers, or 20% more kinetics

Short Range Kinetics fire 400% faster than Long Range Lasers.

Lasers are actually worst when it comes to tonnage efficiency, but let's ignore that to give lasers an advantage.

Short Range weapons do the most damage when combined across all range zones, but let's ignore that to give lasers an advantage.



So worst case scenario is the first 53 kinetic attacks miss while the first 10 laser attacks miss. How much damage was lost?

For the lasers it was 10 laser modules worth.

For the Kinetics it was 53/4/1.2 = 11 modules worth



Oh, right. So when the lasers should be the best, they are actually virtually the same. The first 11 modules worth of damage would miss. Then EVERYTHING hits after that.

Since math and I favor ship designs that have more than 11 weapons and coordinating fire so that my targets are going to be suffering more than 11 attacks per round, accuracy just means I loose a couple of shots worth of damage before the hellfire rain of a billion missiles (or in this case, kinetic shots). This is also why Short Range Kinetics are the king of weapons, especially in 1.1.14.



To fix it, either Evasion disorientation needs to be smaller or gone (remember this analysis was done using EvasionDisorientation at 0.05 AND with a additive EvasionBonus, "real" game scenarios are going to favor my side of the argument even more).



If it was gone, then your to hit chance would be fixed. If your accuracy was 1.5 versus evasion .5, you'd still always hit. However, if your accuracy was .3 against a .5 evasion ship you'd never hit (think roadrunner vs coyote). Alternatively accuracy could be converted into a defense like scale tohit = accuracy/evasion or = accuracy/(accuracy + evasion). I haven't done the math on these alternatives, but my faiths is starting with setting EvasionDisorientation=0 and seeing where we go from there.

thuvian wrote:


To fix it, either Evasion disorientation needs to be smaller or gone (remember this analysis was done using EvasionDisorientation at 0.05 AND with a additive EvasionBonus, "real" game scenarios are going to favor my side of the argument even more).

I doubt evasion disorientation would ever be gone, once again to prevent the all of nothing scenarios they have tried to get away from with the new defense strategy.



So i wanted to take a look at Bilun's counterargument for a second with some new math. So here's the scenario. Let me take 4 120 accuracy weapons that do 100 damage per salvo. It will have 2 salvos per phase, so 8 salvos or 800 max damage. The damage when factoring various evasion numbers is the following: (if anyone knows a good way to enter tables i would appreciate it, they are so much cleaner than trying to do it this way):



Evasion: Damage

100: 290

80: 418

60: 545

50: 609

40: 671

20: 800

0: 800



So to compare apples to apples, i'm going to take the same type of weapon at the same range, and adjust the accuracy down to 30, but increase the damage. The break even point of damage is 334 per salvo, that means the 30 accuracy weapon just equals the damage of the 120 accuracy weapon at 0 evasion. So bottom line, the lower accuracy weapon has to do more than that number or there is literally 0 reason to use it. I chose 600 damage per salvo to see what the numbers look like:



Evasion: Damage

100: 0

80: 0

60: 180

50: 402

40: 621

20: 1096

0: 1440



So i know that's terrible to read without a table, here's the cliff notes: At lower evasions the 30 accuracy weapon is doing about 37-80% more damage. At higher evasions (such as the 50% mark most small craft hangs at) the 30 accuracy weapon does 33% less damage, and quickly drops to doing no damage at all. So looking at a corner cases that heavily is in favor of accuracy/evasion mechanics, there is a strategic element. One type of weapon would be good against low evasion ships, but another one would be good against high evasion ships assuming the right damage balance.



So at least in theory, there is a strategic element that could be pulled out of this mechanic. Now the followup discussion is with other factors and our real world numbers, will that ever play out?



Here is a quick question i have for everyone so i can guage some numbers.



How many weapon modules do you put on your ships? Give me a low number for more defensive ships (but not scouts, the ship is intended to fight) vs full glass cannon ships.

• You can save your table as a picture a just post that.
• Wrapping text in a CODE tag using a fixed width font is easiest.
• You can use advanced editor to generate a table too, apparently. Instead of <> brackets use square brackets []. You can general a table in a spreadsheet (Excel or whatever), copy & paste that into a WYSIWYG html editor (Frontpage or whatever) and then paste that into the advanced editor WYSIWYG mode or write it in regular code mode. I suppose I should use that more often.
  
  

[TABLE="class:grid,align:center"] Weapon

Defense Sandwich Preferences

[TD="width:33%"]Laser[/TD]

[TD="width:33%"]200[/TD]

[TD="width:34%"]Peanut Butter[/TD]

[TD="width:33%"]Kinetic[/TD]

[TD="width:33%"]800[/TD]

[TD="width:34%"]Ham[/TD]

[TD="width:33%"]Mustard[/TD]

[TD="width:33%"]90000[/TD]

[TD="width:34%"]Hot dog[/TD]

[/TABLE]



I've never gotten around to play ES Classic, only Disharmony. My Disharmony ships tend to be either 1 omni-defense + all weapons or just all weapons. My attempts at building "resistant" ships leads to very expensive tax deductions. Your basic destroyer can hold 14 weapons and your end game destroyer holds 35(?) weapons.

Also note: The evasion mechanics is PER ship PER round! So if you are being fired at by 3 ships, the first ship may have some misses, but likely the other two ships are ALWAYS going to hit. And of course, if your using late game destroyers, well... everything dies just add more when necessary, accuracy & evasion are just rounding errors.

The only way make Accuracy, Evasion, & EvasionDisorientation relevant is to reduce the number of salvos fired. This essentially means you have to drastically increase the weight of weapons. This is because we are already pretty capped out on minimizing the number of salvos per weapon, so we have to reduce the raw number of weapons. You also have to consider that Weapon Accuracy is fixed, it doesn't very, whereas evasion drops off dramatically with hull size. Where we might think evasion is important, in destroyers, we are dealing with fighting ships that are going to suffer huge amounts of overkill. Reducing the accuracy of that overkill will decrease how much "extra dead" the destroyers end up, but not change their life expectancy. In contrast, ships that have the ability to survive more shots (big ships) are also going to be targeted by more ships (3:1 at current CP rates) combined with their already low evasion, accuracy is pretty meaningless at this end.



One of the tricky things you could do is add a bunch of light weight modules that fired many shots, those shots would swamp the evasion of the ship, leaving your less accurate by higher damage weapons free to hit with impunity. The only way this worked was because of EvasionDisorientation. If Evasion was set across the board, then you are free to add as many of whatever type of weapon you want, it still wouldn't affect your ability to hit the target.



I like accuracy, I want to see high accuracy weapons being necessary to hit high evasion targets, but EvasionDisorientation is NOT the way to do it. EvasionDisorientation rewards using weapons that fire lots of salvos which makes their accuracy pointless. In one sense this makes sense, you throw out a ton of of shots, some of them HAVE to hit. But it doesn't. The idea would be is that you shoot the ground for the first 20 times and then the next 800 shots you perfectly hit the target every time. In contrast if you had a 50% evasion, then 410 shots might hit and 410 might miss. That is much more reasonable in my mind. And that is all about the relationship of accuracy to evasion sans this successful dodge penalty.



What does EvasionDisorientation give us? It gives us a penalty to dodge. You can only dodge X shots before the rest of the hit. This is only going to effect ships who can dodge in the first place. Ships who, if they can't dodge, can't actually deal with the major damage coming their way regardless. So the evasion penalty means that destroyers are going to suffer from being shot at many times, and will not really change large ship combat. Was it EVER a problem that a destroyer was surviving attacks in an unreasonable fashion? Nope. With our current targeting rules (which I also have problems with) it is overkill all day, every day. Especially on little ships. This is one of the reasons that glass cannons are so good. Nothing is going to survive so why bother with defense in the first place? You just need cheap guns and more cheap guns. By removing EvasionDisorientation you make Accuracy pretty important. By having EvasionDisorientation you minimize accuracy and evasion.

So, how about I propose something useful then?

Well, currently, we have a distribution of Accuracy vs Evasion that looks like this.







The important point is that an Accuracy .5 weapon fired against a Evasion .3 ship is the same as an Accuracy .7 weapon fired against an Evasion .5 ship. (Ignoring Accuracy and Evasion modifiers). Now, currently they both start at 20% chance to hit and increase that chance to hit after every miss by EvasionDisorientation. That means we have a chance to hit distribution like the following.





I plot three different starting Chances to Hit, -50%, 0%, 50%. Note that it doesn't really matter where they start, but trajectory is the same.



Now, my alternative would be have the following characteristics

• Doesn't vary based on the number of evades
• Does give evasion a consistent, although not overpowering effect
  
  

And... I'll be back later to talk about what that is.

(still not back to really finish this)

The current Accuracy Evasion system made me sad today. Have you seen what happens when 2 default scouts encounter each other and try to fight? It isn't pretty.



I think doing something like Accuracy * (1-Evasion) is getting into a better direction. Although this breaks for Evasion >=1, the multiplicative effects of accuracy is what I'm trying to get across.

This is out of my league.



Never really been a fan of dodging in a space battle.......with 250m ships, but making an opponent miss? That could be nice.