This is the latest version of my attempts to map out weapon balance. This comes with a chart showing relative efficiency and outliers, for people who just want the Cliff Notes. This formula will get used for the next version of Rebal; I'm fairly certain it's reasonable and sane, as it built on previous work on Rebal, but includes a lot of improvements to my approach.
Google Sheet: View HereI'm not 100% certain, but I think people should be able to make a copy of the Sheet and view / edit the formulas on their copies. I went back to basics on everything; there aren't many fudge-factors (and those that are there are clearly explained).
Why are there any fudge factors at all? Isn't this just math in, math out?1. Well, first off, any comparison exercise needs a par value. We don't have any "ideal weapon" candidates, so I had to choose something. Every weapon is par-balanced against the Pulse Laser.
I think that it's about the closest thing to
par we can find in the core game's weapons; it's about 1:1 efficient on Flux, 1:1 on damage, perfect accuracy, medium range, and a slight bonus from having faster-than par shots (i.e., it'll hit smaller targets than par a little more reliably than usual). If anybody wants to argue for a superior case, please make that argument, with some math to back it up. But, as we all appear to agree that it's All Right, that's what I ended up using.
This meant adjusting the value of raw damage output and the relative value of range for all other weapons to compare to par.
2. Valuing different types of damage requires judgement. The absolute value of KINETIC vs. HIGH_EXPLOSIVE vs. ENERGY can be argued until the cows come home. Basically, when the dust settled, I decided to treat ENERGY as "neutral" and all other types compared to it. I may have over/undervalued KINETIC or HIGH_EXPLOSIVE or FRAGMENTATION, but I suspect it's reasonably close.
My previous version of this used a different approach, whereby I was measuring TTK, instead of measuring average damage outputs.
3. Like the previous versions, this ultimately
measures efficiency for each OP spent.
The total_efficiency value does not tell us how "good" a gun is. That's largely about
designing the parameters of the weapon to suit a particular role. This value simply tells us whether the gun's "worth" more, per OP spent, than other weapons, using the combined data. Think of OPs as points we'd spend, in any game system where we build up game objects (OPs are essentially like Tonnage in Battletech, which is clearly where Alex started the idea).
I understand that this approach seems pretty confusing to a lot of people. They're hoping to see a simple chart that says, "X is OP, here's why, with Math".
But it's not that simple. Weapons aren't just their efficiency values; a weapon can be "efficient" but have a design with marginal utility, like the AM Blaster.
Some weapons are great bargains for their OP costs, like the Light Mortar (OP cost of 2, surprisingly-good stat lines); it's just too bad they're not terrific in any way that would make them attractive vs. other choices.
The biggest surprise in the findings, at least to me, was seeing that the Thumper is kind of a serious bargain, lol. It's just too bad it has stats that make it pretty lousy for any particular niche role.
Other weapons are designed pretty well for their intended use case, and are
also OP bargains, like the Railgun; it has perfect accuracy, above-average range, attractive Flux stats, pretty decent DPS in all categories for a lightweight Kinetic.
total_efficiency helps us understand when a gun might be over / under-priced; it won't tell us to fix it in any particular way. That's the right way to use something like this; don't limit people's creativity by forcing weapons design into pigeon-holes, just give folks a tool to construct reasonably-balanced stuff with.
4. I haven't engineered the formulas to arrive at pre-built assumptions about what's "best" or to prove my biases. Some stuff really surprised me, frankly, but the math's been looked at over and over again and I'm fairly certain there aren't any big mistakes in the core formulas.
The factors regarding damage-type weighting can be explored and argued about if people want, but I feel I was quite fair about damage to Armor; that and the value of range and accuracy are all arguable points. I feel like this is a very good starting-place, though.
5. Accuracy is an average between min and max. I realize that's not perfect, as the vast majority of weapons are 100% accurate on their first shot and degrade. But it's extremely difficult to write anything more satisfactory. For what it's worth, in Rebal, I don't use different min/max values or use accuracy degradation; if a weapon's supposed to be inaccurate, it just is- this keeps balance easier to maintain.
6. Alpha and rapid-fire guns are inherently covered by
kill_power, as is Flux efficiency; kill_power is not just TTK; it's DPS with Flux efficiency applied. This produces some interesting results; a weapon can do tons of damage but have a pretty lame kill_power, because it's so inefficient on Flux; this represents a gun that can only be used situationally, and that's why it's penalized vs. guns you can fire all day long and expect good results.
7. How can this be used to arrive at better overall balance for weapons? It's pretty simple, honestly:
A. Simple buff / nerf on OPs could get things roughly par without changing anything else. That would mean a few guns got cheaper, a few got considerably more expensive, etc.
B. But, if we're trying to keep OP values the same as Vanilla (which is usually what people have said they'd prefer), then buff / nerf of the "god stats" (i.e., range, DPS factors, Flux efficiency, accuracy) gets us there.
C. For guns that are already bargains, OP-wise, but still suck because they have no clear niche, define that niche through better design. For example, I made the Thumper actually relevant in the last private builds of Rebal by making it a rapid-fire "burp gun"- high Frag DPS, mediocre accuracy, long bursts with long pauses between. Suddenly, I had a weapon that killed fighters half-way decently and was efficient enough that putting one on a ship wasn't a huge waste.
8. Why is the Plasma Cannon dead last? I mean, that gun rocks, right?
That's not terrifically complicated. Basically, the bigger guns that eat more OPs are
all pretty low on the efficiency curve; this was a consistent finding. This is something I've brought up before, and it bothers me quite a lot from a game-design POV; a weapon using a rare, precious Large Slot should be more efficient than a common Medium, not less, imo.
But the numbers explain things pretty clearly. While the Plasma Cannon is great for what it does, it's
not terrifically efficient.
Average kill_power, if we drop the huge outliers (see below) is around 4.5 or so. It's at 3.6; it does a lot of damage, but it eats a lot more Flux than the damage it outputs. Other than that, the weapon's just a little better than average in terms of range, etc. So, while it has perfect accuracy and great core DPS, it's not really all that super, unless it's pounding a target that's near Overload or doesn't have a shield facing the weapon.
The Plasma Cannon's a perfect example of designing a gun to do a job well...
and then pricing it incorrectly.
9. Why'd you drop TTK?
I didn't; the DPS vs. various things is really super-clear now. Kill_power represents TTK vs. Flux efficiency, with accuracy factored in; if your shot misses, then Flux is being wasted;
this is why inaccurate guns often feel much weaker than their core stats would otherwise suggest.
10. What's with the huge outliers?
They're just... there. People have been saying for years that, under the right circumstances, LMGs and Vulcans make great assault guns. They're totally right, because these weapons are
massively cheap for what they do.
Honestly, seeing those outliers made me question whether 600 range (the Pulse Laser's range) was the right value to hinge the value of range in general on, because sure, they're great guns, if you don't mind closing to belly-button ranges. But as I said, just because total_efficiency is "good" doesn't magically make the weapons good; in the end, it's just a numeric tool that tells us whether the weapon's too expensive or cheap for what it does. Game designers make the weapons good or bad; that's a separate issue from whether they're par-balanced (these things are related, though). I'm pretty sure that these weapons can be made par-balanced and yet still do their main jobs (being cheap PD, not crazy-good assault guns).
11. You've been saying Energy weapons suck, but they're pretty evenly distributed on the chart. What's up with that?
First off, re-read #3 until you get what I'm saying. Really understand that total_efficiency isn't a magic, "this gun is OP" tool; it merely flags weapons as over/under-priced for their OP costs, compared to the par weapon.
Second off, I don't think
all Energy weapons suck. Just most of them.
I was a little surprised at the ranking of the IR Pulse, personally; but the shot speed bonus helped it a lot (it's double the range- the shot arrives at the end of its range in half a second). So that makes some sense; it doesn't miss much against speedy targets; that's kind of valuable. If it had a standard shot-speed, it'd probably need some help to be OK.
I was really surprised by the ranking of the Mining Laser. It still sucks, but not because it's inefficient, but rather, that it has no clear job it does well. It lacks the burst alpha to kill missiles or damage fighters reliably, yet it's also not Flux-efficient enough to use as a trader unless you can win with practically anything. It's quite efficient, but not well-designed. Can it be in a better place? Yes, it can; either accept a range reduction in return for much better Flux efficiency, much higher damage output in exchange for being pulsed with long pulse cycles, etc., etc.- there are plenty of valid choices.
Anyhow, that's it. I was actually pretty happy with the current formulas for Rebal, warts, odd factors and all. But this seemed like a good time to take one more whack at a purist set of formulas and this is probably as close as we're going to get; now I have to apply all of this to Rebal and see what happens in playtesting; I'll report back if the fudge factors needed tweaking, etc., if anybody's interested.