Hello my Endless Space players,



I was bored while reading the forums so I thought I write a little guide about a commen question.

Please bear with my english as I'am not a native speaker.





How do weapons work? And how to minimize the damage taken? A quick overview:





Basics:



Combat is divided in 5 phases. Each phase determerminds the accuracy of the weapon type. If they do damage boni/mali are unknown to me, but it doesn't look like that way.







Phases:



1) intro: You can view the enemy ships and select card(s)



2) long range: most effective for missiles, medium for laser, worst for kinetic



3) mid range: medium for missiles, best for laser, medium for kinetic



4) short range: worst for missiles, medium for laser, best for kinetic



5) outro: ship warps out (if not destroyed)





Combat phases are 2,3 and 4.

Every combat phase has 4 rounds.







Crit:



The consense right now is that every weapon has a low chance to crit.

It is assumed that it is 2 to 5 %.

Missiles have a build in critical strike chance depending on their tech level.

There is also a module called "extreme fusion" which gives "7% critc chance on fleet weapons" (tech name is "Condensed Plasma", tier6 north part of the techtree).







Kinetic:



1 Salvo per Round, 4 salvo per phase (every weapon shoots many projectiles, each can miss, hit or get deflected)



Deflectors:



- every deflector fitted counters 1 kinetic weapon (supposed to be a bug)

- in addition you deflect as many projectiles as stated from the defence ("xy kinetic projectiles deflected per round")

- note that 1 kinetic weapon shoots more then 1 projectile a round, every projectile counts against 1 deflection

- critical damage is only applied to projectiles that actually hit the target





(assuming level 1 weapons and 100% hit chance, no crits)

(level 1 deflect: 3 deflect )

(level 1 kinetics: 4 shots per round, 2-3 damage per projectile, 8-12 damage if all hit per round)



example 1: the enemy has 2 kinetics and you have 2 deflectors

-> no damage will be dealt



example 2: the enemy has 3 kinetics and you have 2 deflectors

-> 2 weapons are nullified, 8 shots vs 6 deflects

-> there will be 2 hits (2-3 damage per projectile)







Laser (Beam):



1 shot per Round, 4 shots per phase (1 weapon do 1 shot)





Shields:



- the amount of absorbed laserdamage is the sum of the "xy laser damage absorbed per round" of all your shields

- a critical is counted as additional damage based on the laser used



(assuming level 1 weapons and 100% hit chance, no crits if not mentioned)

(level 1 shield: 15 absorb )

(level 1 laser: 1 shot per round, 10-20 damage per shot/round, x3 critic multiplier)



example 1: the enemy has 2 lasers and you have 2 shield modules (2 shields)

-> 30 absorb vs 20-40 damage

-> 0-10 damage a salvo / 0-40 damage a phase



example 2: the enemy has 2 lasers and you have 2 shields, the enemy crits with 1 laser

-> 30 absorb vs 10-20 damage (normal hit) + 30-60 damage (critical hit)

-> 10-50 damage in this salvo









Missiles:





1 shot per phase (!), the missiles are launched at round 1 of a combat phase and are hitting (or not) at the end of round 4



Flak:



- flak has 1 try per round to shoot down one missile

- flaks only shoot in round 2, 3 and 4

- the flak hits a missile based on accuracy vs evasion and is based on chance

- per round 1 flak can destroy 1 missile at maximum (it can miss)

- if a flak destroys a missile, next round it chooses a new missile to "shoot down"

- if there are more flaks then missiles (left) then 2 flaks shoot on 1 missile



"Interception :

a projectile is intercepted when the module InterceptionAccuracy is greater than a random number between 0 and the module InterceptionEvasion multiply by the



(module TurnToReach + 1)"



-> that means a flak roles a random number between 0 and "interception accuracy" (ia) multiplied by (2/1/0 + 1)

--> (0,ia)*multi > evasion = missile gets destroyed

--> (0,ia)*multi <= evasion = missile lives another round



(assuming level 1 flak vs level 1 missile)



example : 1 missile vs 1 flak

round 1: missiles get launched

round 2: (0,13)*3 > 10 (0-3: miss, >3 - missle dead - 71,4% interception chance)

round 3: (0,13)*2 > 10 (0-5: miss, >5 - missle dead - 57,1% interception chance)

round 4: (0,13)*1 > 10 (0-10: miss, >10 - missle dead - 21,4% interception chance)

overallchance to kill the missile: 90,3%

-> if you have 10 flaks vs 10 missiles the mathematical expectation is that none or 1 missile hits

-> but as we know murphys law there is even a slim chance that all hit







source:



https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space/forum/37-modding/thread/15715-adding-multiple-defenses-to-a-module

ThorTillas wrote:




Here are the "rules" for the several defense type for each battle round (4 round per phase for now).



Interception :

a projectile is intercepted when the module InterceptionAccuracy is greater than a random number between 0 and the module InterceptionEvasion multiply by the



(module TurnToReach + 1)



Absorbtion :

absorb the module Absorbtion damage.



Deflection :

deflect the module DeflectionPerTurn projectile. (automatically.)

Sincerly

this is a reserving Post

Sorry man, but I don't think your math on the missile/flak calculations is correct. First of all, the chance of missiles being successfully countered does not go down with each successive round. Also, the flak will fire 4 times, not 3. The tooltip for flak defenses are pretty clear that it fires every round in each phase. Now then, let's get down to math!



Basically what we're looking at here is die rolls. Take the example you gave: missile1 vs flak1. You're basically rolling a 14-sided die (numbered 0-13), on which all but 4 of the sides are a failure. The only successful rolls for that die are 10, 11, 12, and 13. So that means your chance per die roll is only 4 out of 14. Kinda sucks huh? Well the beauty of this system is that you get 4 chances per round for your flak modules to shoot down an incoming missile, so it's like you're getting to roll that die 4 different times (or just roll 4 dice at once) and if even ONE of those dice rolls a 10, 11, 12, or 13, your flak modules succeed in shooting down the missile. Well, the way that probability math works for a problem like this, is we have to set it up as a fraction. Let's call it X / Y. In this case, Y is the total number of possible outcomes, which is the number of sides on our dice multiplied exponentially by the number of dice we're rolling. So since we're throwing 4 14-sided dice, that would be 14^4, or 38,416.



X is the tricky part though. If you'll recall, our total number of successful possibilities with one die was only 4. If we were wanting to find out how many possible outcomes included ALL 4 dice rolling a success, we would multiply 4^4 too, but we don't need a success on EVERY die to shoot down the missile, we just need ONE, so we're not really interested in how many possible outcomes give us a "pure" win, just how many DON'T. In this case, the number of failures on the first die was 10, so we multiply 10^4 (which is 10,000) and take that number away from the total number of possibilities we found earlier (38,416 - 10,000 = 28,416).



So if X is 28416 and Y is 38416, then our true chance of getting at least one success in 4 tries is *insert drumroll* 73.97%. You're welcome.

Well I think both calcualtions are wrong regarding interception.



I guess Vanashe, your calculations were true if ThorTillas hadn't written this:



Interception :

a projectile is intercepted when the module InterceptionAccuracy is greater than a random number between 0 and the module InterceptionEvasion multiply by the (module TurnToReach + 1)



To me this means that when a missile is fired, a random number is rolled at round 1 (and possibly each round thereafter) between 0 and InterceptionEvasion and then it is multiplied by TurnToReach + 1. If the number is only rolled once, it means a steady increase in interception chance. If a new random number is rolled every round, it becomes a bit more hectic but the multiplier still makes sure that flaks have an increasing chance to intercept. This actually seems very logical, since flaks try to shoot missiles down, which should be harder from long range than short.



EDIT: scrap what I wrote. Just realized that TurnToReach is an attribute of the missile. So the chance really doesn't change, it only differs for slower and faster missiles. That's kind of sad, because shooting something from afar should have less chance than shooting it from short range...