I find this interesting, but am unable to decipher the excel formula for the hit probability (based on circular error probability, as you mentioned). Would you mind writing it out in formula form and posting? Some of the values it has are... odd. Just looking at the kinetics, it gives Gauss and HVD's a 100% chance of hitting, Heavy autocannons 25%, and needlers 45%. Those number are not consistent with my experiences.Well, there is certainly some fudging necessary here, because we cannot address every case.
I think you massively over-rate the effects of Dissipation drain. Let's do some math:
4 IR Pulses vs. a ship with 300 Dissipation and 3000 Capacity: TTK for the Shields is 3000 / 50 * 4; it's 15 seconds. Meanwhile, the ship's Soft Flux base shrinks 200 with every hit.
4 Tac Lasers, same stats: TTK is 3000 seconds. No drain in Soft Flux base.
...
Oh, and Thaago... give IR Pulse Lasers 1000 range. Get back to me about how great Tac Lasers are.
I just put up a demo that speaks for itself. Science!Using skills doesn't count as they are currently OP as all hell and most high quality content is balanced around level 0
Beams just ~look~ magical, because when you exceed the Dissipation stat, the extra Flux-per-second climbs really fast, instead of being staggered. The basic mechanics aren't special. They're just a gun that does damage over time very consistently and has a huge range advantage. Take away the range advantages and they're not powerful at all.
As for the dodged / feathered, yeah, yeah, that's so much a part of what actually happens in big fleet battles... not.
Players do that fancy stuff as they kite / aggro their way to victory; the AI generally doesn't, and when it's a big fight, it's even worse. I'm pretty sure I could take down all 10 of those beam ships with the IR ship solo, frankly.
Take away the range advantages and they're not powerful at all.
you really need to try things in situations other than 1v1 duels.Uh... you did try the demos, right? Because they're 10 vs. 10 fights, no human intervention unless you spend Command Points, by design.
Perhaps if you spell out explicitly your metrics?Remember Vacuum?
The main problem is that ships don't seem to be taken into account.That's next, and harder. I think that can be done, too, it's just going to take a lot more work.
-snup-You know, I'm not even going to ask why some of the numbers in that screenshot are as high as they are.
...because it was a totally different gameplay in a Total Conversion, maybeso?That broke the game due to unimaginative and broken zero stacking, which makes me think that this new "balance" mod is just vacuum 2.0
| (http://i.imgur.com/sXUldFL.jpg) | Balancing without considering ships and combat is bad. To be honest, if EVERYTHING is absurdly efficient it doesn't matter what ship you're piloting, just number of weapons. You can murder everything with basically whatever you want since there are no comebacks - either you overload enemy/disable enemy first or enemy does. Ships stats and weapon stats feel extremely disjointed. Speaking of efficiency, it's all over the place. Why do mark IX and gauss cannon have the same dps? Why is hellbore firing a hammer-equivalent every 3 seconds? Why hephaestus has only 100 dps advantage over mauler? I like arbalest being decent at penetrating armour, but why is HAC basically better arbalest, then? Why autopulse laser has such absurd dps? ...Why the heck reaper typhoon shoots 4 reapers, but cyclone only 2? While I'm at that, why basically every missile is crap since either other weapons deal almost the same damage anyway or waiting time makes them irrelevant. I like regenerating missiles, but I don't like you are stuck with looong cooldown. I'd rather have them have rack + regenerating missiles at a slower rate. <- onslaught equivalent Also, what is Vacuum? It looks like fun. |
Also, what is Vacuum? It looks like fun.Vacuum is an old Total Conversion done by Xenoargh here and all it was, was insane zero stacking, which broke SS.
Vacuum is an old Total Conversion done by Xenoargh here and all it was, was insane zero stacking, which broke SS.What's zero stacking?
Vacuum is an old Total Conversion done by Xenoargh here and all it was, was insane zero stacking, which broke SS.What's zero stacking?
Combined with their range, this gives beam weapons an unusual power curve where they begin poor and, after reaching a critical mass of beams in your fleet, become utterly unstoppable.
And this is good?No, and the first rounds of changes from Xeno made them begin good, thus they immediately reach that critical mass and utterly break the game.
name,id,tier,rarity,base value,range,damage/second,damage/shot,emp,impact,turn rate,OPs,ammo,ammo/sec,reload size,type,energy/shot,energy/second,chargeup,chargedown,burst size,burst delay,min spread,max spread,spread/shot,spread decay/sec,beam speed,proj speed,launch speed,flight time,proj hitpoints,hints,tags,number,weapon_special,hit_percent,Damage/flux,time_to_kill,total_efficiency
Reliant HMG,ssp_reliant,0,,50,450,,10,,1,60,2,,,,KINETIC,5.6,,0,0.12,1,,15,15,0.2,15,,800,,,5,PD,,4350,,0.3405021148553171,2.678571428571429,119.99999999999999,1.0260666407470498
Contender Cannon,ssp_contender,0,,100,500,,150,,10,25,3,,,,HIGH_EXPLOSIVE,65,,0,2.5,1,,5,5,2,10,,800,,,10,,,4351,,0.9170234260893169,1.846153846153846,166.66666666666666,1.0157797950527818
Plasma Flamer,ssp_plasmaflame,1,,1000,450,,30,,0,10,9,100,10,50,ENERGY,16.5,,0,0.05,9999,0.05,15,15,0,0,,1000,,,10000,DO_NOT_CONSERVE,,4352,,0.3405021148553171,1.6363636363636362,16.666666666666668,1.0029335019374794
Lightning Gun,ssp_lightninggun,3,,3500,1000,,200,250,100,10,15,10,0.25,,ENERGY,200,,0.25,1,1,,0,0,0,0,,7500,,,10000,,,4360,,1,1.275,50,1.0199999999999998
Heavy Ion Blaster,ssp_ionblaster,3,,3000,600,,500,3750,20,12,14,,,,ENERGY,250,,0.5,8,1,,0,0,0,0,,1250,,,300,FIRE_WHEN_INEFFICIENT,,4361,,1,6.3,160,1.0125
Aegis Flak Cannon,ssp_tripleflak,2,,8000,600,,250,,10,30,18,,,,FRAGMENTATION,19.5,,0,0.4,1,,15,15,3,15,,700,,,50,PD,,4362,,0.25537658614148767,3.2051282051282053,16,1.0231433739642937
Light Phase Lance,ssp_lightphaselance,2,,700,500,650,,,0,30,5,,,,ENERGY,,250,0.25,0.75,0.5,3,,,,,3200,,,,,,,4363,,1,2.3400000000000003,138.46153846153848,1.014
The math's solid
The problem is balancing weapons in a vacuum, purely though math while not taking into consideration any other factors of the game simply does not work... At the least, ships and general tactical situations must also be considered.
Re Reliant: It's actually better than the LMG at point defense because the projectile speed is extremely high and the range is better; it's more likely to actually hit the missile. What it sucks at is attacking anything. LMG of course beats it at attackingand Vulcan beats it at defending, but both are more expensive.I haven't found that to be the case, personally; it's just kind of a junk gun. It is a gun that can't kill missiles as well as the Vulcan, whose only real benefit is the lower costs. That said... I can see a case for making it Frag and then being really efficient and accurate, but at a higher Flux-per-round cost.
5) Ion Cannon/Ion Beam. I believe you are over-valuing EMP by a factor of 3 or more. Remember that it does nothing against shields. I don't think there is a single ship that could mount even 1 ion beam. Ion cannons are in a good place in vanilla imo (perhaps needing a bit more range).A quick note: "Does nothing against shields" is inaccurate. Ion Beam has a shield arcing effect that scales with hard flux. (Like the Tachyon Lance) And both have a modicum of energy damage.
A quick note: "Does nothing against shields" is inaccurate. Ion Beam has a shield arcing effect that scales with hard flux. (Like the Tachyon Lance) And both have a modicum of energy damage.Agreed, this will get handled differently, once I look at the code under the hood. I'm not valuing that stuff directly just yet. So it's probably OP until that's adjusted.
Frankly, I think these arguments-from-ships are kind of BS, anyhow; "oh, but it's all right on this one squirrel-case build with OP ship" is not valid.
When Alex decided that what Beams really needed was 1000 range because I made a convincing argument about how underpowered they were, the fix broke the Hound, BMII, etc.; a whole group of ships got invalidated by one poor decision regarding weapon balance. I'm as guilty as anybody for the current state of affairs, frankly.Yeah, you did a good job at making all vanilla beams the same weapon with different sprites, and the most overpowered one of the game. Tells you a bit about the validity of your "weapon first, ships after" method instead of the "take all the systems into account as a coherent whole, and then playtest the cr*p of everything you did" that pretty much everyone else uses.
Systems are going to be value-judgements, for sure. Anybody sane's in agreement on this point.So I guess 90% of SS players are insane then
This ain't "armchair"; it's math; it doesn't care about what you want it to say. You wanna argue about weighting, fine, let's have a grownup discussion. Otherwise, go away, the adults are working here.Spoken like somebody who has never been within 20 feet of a course on statistics and data analysis. Bad math is worse than no math, and how you analyze a set of data can have immense implications on the validity of your results. The math can't lie, but how you interpret and choose to apply it can, because your interpretations and applications are fundamentally subjective.
I think you are using the wrong assumptions for hit rate so have bad valuesWell, the hit-rate now reflects things that are Destroyer-sized; I think that's as far as we can push that out without it getting silly, in a game where we have very small targets (missiles) up to huge targets (a Paragon with its shield up). That bar has to get set somewhere, and I think presuming that hitting smaller targets is important is valid, given that since 0.6, I've never seen a point to buying ships larger than Destroyers (other than the Apogee in 0.72). Combat, even at the large-fleet stage of SS, is largely about killing faster escorts before destroying larger ships, when we're talking about fleet engagements; if you're engaging in Megas-style gameplay, then your argument makes more sense, but I'm aiming for more fleet-style combat, where I expect both sides to have a lot of small stuff. 0.8's emphasis on fighters reinforces this need, imo.
TTK is ok, but does not take into account that shields are a regenerating resource while armor is not.TTK isn't where that's been factored; it's factored in Damage / Flux, where the different damage types get their weighting values applied. TTK is straight damage-to-hull; Damage / Flux is where I'm approximating the value of different damage.
I disagree on the light needlers vs heavy autocannon. The heavy autocannon is a superior choice against anything that it can hit consistently - cruisers, capitals, and slow destroyers.I really didn't find this to be true in Vanilla, largely because of the efficiency of Light Needlers, in terms of Damage / Flux; they're simply better at Flux-locking, and that was what mattered most. The Heavy AC's inaccuracy is a significant factor as well. In 0.72, this was more clear-cut than it is in 0.8, to be sure; the rebalanced Hammerhead makes a stronger case for the use of the Heavy AC, because it finally has a stat-line that can use it well, and the Enforcer's no longer able to use three Light Needlers and a pair of Flaks and be one of the best solutions to all problems, because of its speed and lack of fixes through Captain buffs to fix it. But that's ship balance / skill balance creating a case, which is a bass-ackwards way to balance things. Start with the simple stuff first, get it right, then move to the more complex cases.
using a ratio for damage/flux is fundamentally wrongIt's about the only way to reliably deal with Vanilla's basic schema, where these things are close to 1:1 except when they're not, because <reasons>. I'm totally open to another way to handle that and would welcome another way to deal with it mathematically, but in the end, it's pretty much why it's there in the final equation.
This wouldn't be a problem if the resulting numbers were solid, but they haven't been: each iteration has had some or most weapons being extremely out of balance, worse than anything in vanilla.Can you provide a good example of that from the current numbers? I'm generally feeling that this has been pretty close to the mark, when playing over here.
you've repeatedly promoted the method you are using as the one true way of balancing, implicitly and explicitly disparaging the balance work that others have doneI'm not backing away from that. Playing modded SS is like watching a train-wreck of bad game balance; modders tend to either over-nerf their stuff or have balance that's both over-powered and under-powered in the same mod. Yet everybody acts like this is some mystical process, when it's not; they're simply responding to feedback, like Alex is, just with a smaller sample size. None of this looks like serious attempts to grapple with the issues; weapons aren't all that complicated in this game and we shouldn't just say, "it can't be done".
Unfortunately for your calculations, that's not the choice a player faces. And if, say, you've installed two heavy needlers on on Eagle, that drastically changes the value of choices for that Eagle's third medium ballistic slot; adding a third heavy needler won't improve the kill time much, and will allow your targets to safely drop shields and absorb hits on armor (giving them a major flux advantage for hitting you back). Adding a mauler, by contrast, will dramatically improve kill times, as well as making it much more likely that your needlers will actually win the flux war as intended.
On armor and time-to-kill:
Yes, you're right, that flux-locking low-per-hit-damage high-dps kinetic weapons are generally superior to high-per-hit low-dps HE weapons, and that if you have to choose to field solely one or the other it would be better to go with the former.
Unfortunately for your calculations, that's not the choice a player faces. And if, say, you've installed two heavy needlers on an Eagle, that drastically changes the value of choices for that Eagle's third medium ballistic slot; adding a third heavy needler won't improve the kill time much, and will allow your targets to safely drop shields and absorb hits on armor (giving them a major flux advantage for hitting you back). Adding a mauler, by contrast, will dramatically improve kill times, as well as making it much more likely that your needlers will actually win the flux war as intended.
In other words, weapons need to be examined in context, not just on a one-for-one comparison. Having a mostly-kinetic-damage loadout with one high-per-hit weapon for stripping armor is a vastly more potent configuration than going for exclusively kinetic damage, and the high-per-hit weapons need to be valued on that basis.