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Author Topic: Beam Stuff  (Read 40475 times)

Wyvern

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #45 on: March 23, 2018, 12:51:08 PM »

A question for you, Goumindong: What sorts of fleets are you facing with this build, and what sorts of support ships do you have to deploy to make it work?  You keep saying that enemy capital ships are not an issue because they'll be "overwhelmed" - what ships are you using to do that overwhelming?  This seems to be a vital part of your tactics, without which the Odyssey wouldn't be usable.
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xenoargh

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #46 on: March 23, 2018, 01:04:48 PM »

More to the point:  what are you fighting?  I can't imagine an Odyssey build, with whatever backup, being super-great against anything but Pirates, at least in Vanilla. 

Now, if we're talking about heavily-modded SS where you're putting efficient modded weapons on it, mod Hull Mods that fix it up, etc., then fine, whatever, but don't tell us that it works in Vanilla against 500K+ Bounty Fleets that aren't Pirates, because I don't buy that.
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Wyvern

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #47 on: March 23, 2018, 01:15:07 PM »

The HIL is still pretty bad; it barely outperforms a Heavy Mauler for OP costs, yet takes a Large Energy slot... and that's just the surface numbers.  

If you look at the details, it doesn't at out-perform it, when we consider that it doesn't inflict Hard Flux and that, unlike the Heavy Mauler, it's artificially gimped vs. Armor (it does a mere 16.7 damage per tick against Armor, before the Armor reduction, after the hidden Beam nerf in Settings).
There is no "hidden beam nerf" - the number there doesn't do what you think it does (and is in fact a significant -buff- over what you'd get from naive calculations).

Here, then, are the -actual- calculations for the HIL.

It does 500 DPS, typed to HE.  So, before armor reduction, it does 1000 DPS against armor.  Since beams tick in 1/10th of a second intervals, that's 100 damage per tick.

Now, for projectile weapons, the armor reduction calculation is: total damage = damage * damage / ( damage + armor ); let's say we're up against an Eagle, a pretty typical mid-tech cruiser with 1000 armor.  So a Heavy Mauler would deal 400 * 400 / ( 400 + 1000 ) = 114 damage.

If we naively assumed that beams worked the same way, that first tick of the HIL would be doing 100 * 100 / ( 100 + 1000 ) = 9 damage.  Fortunately, they don't; instead of using the per-tick damage for armor calculations, they use 50% of their DPS (and that'd be that .5 value you found in settings and made assumptions about).  50% of 1000 DPS is 500.  So the actual calculation for a single tick of the HIL is 100 * 500 / ( 500 + 1000 ) = 33 damage.

Now, let's get back to that mauler comparison; the mauler fires once every second, so let's see what one second of HIL does... that's 10 ticks, 33 * 10 = 330 damage.  Already much stronger than a mauler, but wait, it gets better - each of those ten ticks is stripping armor, which makes the next tick do a little bit more damage.  Running the numbers out, and making some conservative assumptions along the way (i.e. always rounding damage dealt down to a whole number), it turns out that ten ticks of an HIL does a total of 369 damage against our target Eagle, more than three times the armor stripping power of the heavy mauler.
« Last Edit: March 23, 2018, 01:17:00 PM by Wyvern »
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Goumindong

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #48 on: March 23, 2018, 01:19:03 PM »

A question for you, Goumindong: What sorts of fleets are you facing with this build, and what sorts of support ships do you have to deploy to make it work?  You keep saying that enemy capital ships are not an issue because they'll be "overwhelmed" - what ships are you using to do that overwhelming?  This seems to be a vital part of your tactics, without which the Odyssey wouldn't be usable.
i tend to use a core of eagles with supporting Dover/Heron. Eagles are primarily fit for kinetic (gravitons and HVD) while the Herons/Dover have split duty (one on PD, one on Strike). The Oddesy cleans chaff and pushes enemy ships against the HVD/Graviton Fire as it circles around to the rear. If I can find monitors I add as many as I can. I prefer Herons to Dover because my AI Dover always seem to suicide no matter what orders or pilots are assigned.

I fight anything with this build. Though it falters against tier 3 redacted unless my fleet size is large enough to field an extra capital on strike duty. (Whether or not I do). Certain high tech frigates can be annoying but are never a real threat.  Astral fleets that outnumber me 2:1 can sometimes be a problem if the astral is full strike and my AI core decides to split its PD.

This is vanilla.
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xenoargh

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #49 on: March 23, 2018, 01:27:46 PM »

Hmm.  I was under the impression that that nerf served as a damage multiplier for that tick vs. Armor, not the total DPS.

It's HE, so 2:1; then it gets multiplied by 0.5.  So it's 1:1 at that point, 500 DPS, divided by how many ticks / second Beams actually do their thing.

I thought Beams were damaging stuff 30 ticks / second, not 10.  Wherever that number is set, that's very important.

This needs a clear answer from Alex.  I don't think you're right, based on how things feel in testing; going from 0.5 to 1.0 didn't result in HE Beams doing huge DPS to Armor; they were better but didn't melt Armor like the numbers you're waving around would imply.

Also, that's not what it said when that factor was added; read here:

http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=5813.msg91539#msg91539

And that's not what you said here, either:

http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=12268.msg208394#msg208394

So... where are you getting this "total DPS" argument from?  Everything that's documented here points to it being a per-tick multiplier that effectively nerfs Beams against Armor for some reasons lost in the mists of 0.6, when it was added.
« Last Edit: March 23, 2018, 01:37:40 PM by xenoargh »
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Wyvern

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #50 on: March 23, 2018, 01:40:27 PM »

I thought Beams were damaging stuff 30 ticks / second, not 10.  Wherever that number is set, that's very important.
Actually, it's not; since the armor reduction is based on DPS, not per-tick damage, we get -roughly- similar end results no matter what the actual tick rate is.
(It's also possible that the tenth of a second intervals I was using are obsolete; I calculated that many versions of starsector ago when I was testing burst beams, and found that a burst beam with a .25s duration did not, in practice, do any more damage than a burst beam with a .2s duration.)

This needs a clear answer from Alex.  I don't think you're right, based on how things feel in testing; going from 0.5 to 1.0 didn't result in HE Beams doing huge DPS to Armor; they were better but didn't melt Armor like the numbers you're waving around would imply.
Going from 0.5 to 1.0 would make the HIL's calculation for a 1/10th of a second interval of fire against an undamaged Eagle into 100 * 1000 / (1000 + 1000) = 50 damage.  Compared to the 33 you actually get, that's about a 50% improvement, which should be noticeable, but also well short of the doubling effect you seem to be expecting.
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Wyvern

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #51 on: March 23, 2018, 01:50:54 PM »

That's exactly what I've said before, and also exactly what the patch notes say.
Quote from: Alex
dpsToHitStrengthMult: used to compute vs-armor "hit strength" for beam weapons
That "hit strength" is specifically the number used for armor penetration calculations.  (Edit: In the post of mine you linked, I label this value as "armor penetration".)  For a heavy mauler, it's 400, because that's how hard a 200-damage HE projectile hits armor.  For beams, it's based on their DPS; for the HIL, that number is 500.  (500 base DPS, *2 from being typed as HE, *.5 from the dpsToHitStrengthMult value.)

Where it gets complicated is with burst beams (as discussed in the post you linked - note that the numbers listed in that specific post are all either effective "hit strength", or pre-armor damage numbers), who penetrate armor based on what I called 'raw' DPS; that's the number you'd see if you opened up weapons.csv, and the DPS you'd get if the beam was firing continuously rather than in bursts.  The codex, by contrast, shows a lower DPS value that represents damage done over time, counting the times where the gun is firing as well as the times where it's not.

Edit2: It's also worth noting that the post you linked to isn't actually one of my posts - it's a post containing a quote from me, and an incorrect application of some of the numbers I provided; you may want to also look at my response to it, here: http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=12268.msg208415#msg208415
« Last Edit: March 23, 2018, 02:03:28 PM by Wyvern »
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xenoargh

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #52 on: March 23, 2018, 01:55:35 PM »

Well, how we arrive at the number is important, actually.  Order-of-Operations pertains and in this case, it matters a bit.

Quote
dpsToHitStrengthMult: used to compute vs-armor "hit strength" for beam weapons
Isn't actually clear; it's totally unclear when the tickrate is applied- before or after baseline DPS.

I'll write some code to find out exactly how this works, I guess, if Alex isn't willing to post that code.
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Megas

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #53 on: March 23, 2018, 01:56:35 PM »

My grievance with Odyssey is primarily one-on-one duels against enemy capital, or one-against-many.  Every ship benefits help from a fleet, but if Odyssey needs help to fight capitals while other capitals do not (or need less of it), then why use Odyssey when I can use a better (and possibly more common) capital when I need a capital?

@ xenoargh: I am disappointed with most energy weapons, though phase lance really annoys me, with range no better than pulse laser (without hard-to-find Advanced Optics) yet still cannot hit for hard flux.  Even with Advanced Optics, if my ship cannot use kinetics to back Phase Lance up, why bother?

Quote
The Odyssey is kind of a poster-child for the way that all-Energy can only work if given a huge advantage via stats or System or other things, given the balance issues.
I remember times when I tried Medusa, I practically need to max vents AND nearly max capacitors just so a basic pulse laser and light AC combo can barely win the flux war over the likes of anything that is not high tech.  (Pulse lasers and Light AC because they are readily available and not obnoxiously rare.)
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xenoargh

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #54 on: March 23, 2018, 01:59:54 PM »

Medusa used to be fine, but only with high-level Captain bonuses to allow it to flee and kite.  It's kind of meh right now.
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Megas

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #55 on: March 23, 2018, 02:07:45 PM »

Medusa used to be fine, but only with high-level Captain bonuses to allow it to flee and kite.  It's kind of meh right now.
High level combat bonuses do not help my flagship when I need my skills to buff my fleet.  Fighting Lumen and Glimmer duos are a royal pain with Wolf or Medusa flagship.  (One mistake on my end, and they charge and cause serious damage with their near perfect-play AI.)  Now I deploy something with fighters and do not deal with that headache anymore.  I may use my starter Wolf for a while, but I do not always upgrade to Medusa, and if I do, not for long.
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Alex

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #56 on: March 23, 2018, 02:29:47 PM »

(Wyvern is 100% correct about the math. I'm not fully sure if it's 10 times per second or not - though I think it is - but, as already mentioned, that doesn't matter much due to how the calculation works. And, specifically, it's set up that way to be largely framerate-independent.)
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Wyvern

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #57 on: March 23, 2018, 02:47:35 PM »

(Wyvern is 100% correct about the math. I'm not fully sure if it's 10 times per second or not - though I think it is - but, as already mentioned, that doesn't matter much due to how the calculation works. And, specifically, it's set up that way to be largely framerate-independent.)
Thank you!  The verification is nice to have.  So is the new signature.
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Alex

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #58 on: March 23, 2018, 02:49:15 PM »

Hah, nice :)
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Blothorn

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #59 on: March 23, 2018, 03:22:28 PM »

@ xenoargh: I am disappointed with most energy weapons, though phase lance really annoys me, with range no better than pulse laser (without hard-to-find Advanced Optics) yet still cannot hit for hard flux.  Even with Advanced Optics, if my ship cannot use kinetics to back Phase Lance up, why bother?

For one thing, the pulse laser is garbage against armor--100 nominal damage per shot translates to a mere 20 against 400 armor. By contrast, the phase lance loses less than half its power against that armor. Its burstiness also allows you to make the most of HEF, exploit brief windows where the enemy turns a shield to catch a missile, etc.

Now I do tend to agree with "if my ship cannot use kinetics to back Phase Lance up, why bother"--but that highlights one situation in which the pulse laser is superior while ignoring the situations in which the phase lance is superior. Really, they fill entirely different roles--the phase lance (along with most slow-firing burst lasers) is a finisher, the pulse laser a setup/attrition weapon.
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