First of all, this is not a post on any specific weapon or any specific trend of weapons. This isn't about missiles being too good or bad or ugly.



This is about combat as a whole





Alright, so currently speaking ships ships have health.



Health is:

300 per command point base

Ranging 4.5+.28% to 12.5 health per unit weight.



Weapons range from(Assuming all hits):

5.65-44.1 damage per pound per phase for guns



5.41-28 damage per pound per phase for missiles



6.66-31.5 damage per pound per phase for beam weapons



Defenses, best my ability to tell:

Run slightly short of Kinetics

Run slightly ahead of Missiles

Run substantially behind Beam Weapons.



In terms of their ability to shut down an equivalently massed portion under 100% accuracy conditions.

Weapons are inaccurate meaning they:

Run slightly ahead of Kinetics

Run slightly ahead of Missiles

Run slightly ahead of Beam Weapons.





Lets look at what this means:

After you beat their defenses...

It takes about 10 pounds of Ballistics to kill a destroyer in a combat phase.

It takes about 12 pounds of Missiles to kill a destroyer in one salvo.

It takes about 10 pounds of Beam Weapons to kill a destroyer in a combat phase.



This unduly weights combat towards to first combat phase, making it incredibly lethal towards even somewhat even ships.

Defenses are also very hit or miss. By their nature they usually wipe out the damage almost entirely or mean almost nothing.



Health stacking always loses out to equivalent-tech weapons stacking. For every weapon.



What I recommend

Revisit how defenses function.



Make every defense approximately twice as good as its equivalent weapon at its given tech level.

If a basic gun shoots 6 shots, a basic armor deflects 10. Factor in accuracy for it being twice as good.



Add in 0-10% Chip damage for weapons after armor is calculated.

If you would do 50% damage, you instead do 50-60% damage. If you would do 0%, you instead do 0-10%.



For missiles extend this range to 20% on the case of being intercepted completely. They are harder to counter and function at long range, but the improved interception rates threaten to shut them down entirely.







Why is this good?

1: This reduces the need to get your defenses just right.

2: This encourages more phases of combat to be explored more regularly.

3: This leads to a more engaging RPS mechanic when dealing with multiple fleets.

4: This improves large ship balance by generally improving defensive gameplay and adding many total attack volleys with which to attack enemy ships.

5: This encourages casual repair technologies which are generally less necessary.



I don't like this because of X

You think defenses should continue to scale? Perhaps your problem is fixed if every 1x you beat the attack value you receive -10% Chip damage.

You think this is too complicated? It is little more complicated than the current system. Just make it clear how much total offensive power the given armor is equivalent to in a graph in the ship builder.

You like things the way they are? Exactly? I can't help you then.

Have you considered the effect of ship levels and shipyard quality in this? Not to say the current system is perfect, but a level 10 destroyer built in a shipyard with uniform shielding has a few more hitpoints.

davea wrote:
Have you considered the effect of ship levels and shipyard quality in this? Not to say the current system is perfect, but a level 10 destroyer built in a shipyard with uniform shielding has a few more hitpoints.

Those levels do not substantially or fundamentally change the amount of hitpoints ships have. At the end of the day it is still just an all or nothing defense and offense with a little more lag time.

Well, defense doesn't seem very efficient against weapons of the same technological level, true enough but if you don't get it right, we will have a lot of battles that end in draws.

Ketobor wrote:
Those levels do not substantially or fundamentally change the amount of hitpoints ships have. At the end of the day it is still just an all or nothing defense and offense with a little more lag time.

Sorry, what? Uniform shielding adds +25% hitpoints. Each ship level adds around +10% hitpoints.

davea wrote:
Sorry, what? Uniform shielding adds +25% hitpoints. Each ship level adds around +10% hitpoints.

+50% health is nothing.



If it now takes 15% of a ship's weight to kill an enemy ship instead of 10, this is an increase of less than one weapon system

fixou wrote:
Well, defense doesn't seem very efficient against weapons of the same technological level, true enough but if you don't get it right, we will have a lot of battles that end in draws.

Fair enough. Lets assume that my math is approximately right. You can do further research to indicate if I am wrong, but I will not just fundamentally assume it.

Given the base numbers, lets look at the change -



Kinetic weapons: Deal 5% damage average per weapon phase.



Given that it takes 10 pounds of ballistics, it would take an average of 20x this to kill an enemy ship with full defenses in a single combat phase.

This means it would take 200 pounds of ballistics to kill the ship in one phase.

It would take 67 pounds of ballistics to kill the ship in three phases. There is also enough left over that you could, yourself, effectively be immune to their defenses if you had the appropriate equivalent kinetic tech.



Given that it takes 10 pounds of beam weapons, this math remains about the same.



Given that it takes 12 pounds of missiles, but they have 20% max chip for an average of 10%...

It takes an average of 40 pounds of missiles to kill an opponent in 3 phases, or 120 to kill in the first. Missiles suffer severe drawbacks in repeated volleys, especially if they don't have the ability to reliably kill all enemies in the first wave.



The ease of killing enemy ships is further improved by the ability for multiple ships to target the same one potentially overwhelming its defenses.

The ease of killing enemy ships is reduced by the newfound ability for health to actually matter, but not if the defenses are overwhelmed by focused fire.

I suppose I will bump this even once.

Ketobor wrote:


Lets look at what this means:

After you beat their defenses...

It takes about 10 pounds of Ballistics to kill a destroyer in a combat phase.

It takes about 12 pounds of Missiles to kill a destroyer in one salvo.

It takes about 10 pounds of Beam Weapons to kill a destroyer in a combat phase.

How are you judging the effectiveness of defensive systems?

AngleWyrm wrote:
How are you judging the effectiveness of defensive systems?

I don't understand why you quoted that section with that comment, but moving on.



I judged them based on their ability to deflect a weapon of their equivalent tech level, assuming perfect accuracy. Missiles are a bit hard to judge with certainty, but I am working under the assumption that the missile evasion is directly subtracted from the tracking until the missile swarm breaks through.



I judged weapons as Most to Least accurate from Missiles to Beam to Kinetics. This pattern generally showed that less accuracy generally means worse defenses. The exception was with Beams, which consistently had a base damage negation equal to the minimum damage of their equivalent damage beam. This lead to my final conclusions, though I suppose Beam Weapons are likely the best comparable to their defense, after you consider accuracy, which is not well represented in the data.





If you want, I can go over the numbers more specifically, but they are pretty readily available in game.