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[TJJ]

Are those "dps vs armour" referring to a ship with X total armour, or X amount of armour in a given armour cell?
I.e. is the armour value of 2500 pre, or post, the division by 8 that happens as part of the damage calc?

The reason I ask, is that in vanilla you'll never encounter an armour cell with more than ~500 armour, even with all the armour mods stacked on an onslaught/paragon.
So the area of interest in the dps vs armour table is everything below 500 armour; it doesn't matter which weapons perform best against higher values.

[Wyvern]

if, say, it turned out that the assault chaingun was better anti-armor than the heavy mauler; I'm pretty confident that that's not true, but will admit I haven't run the numbers.

You might be surprised.

Hm.  Interesting.  The mauler's higher dps against armor ranging from 300 to 900, which covers most of the ships in the game (and adding in the effects of player skills should push that range even higher).  So color me mostly unsurprised.

On the other hand, the assault chaingun would be better against an Onslaught with heavy armor hull mod and a captain with max ranks in evasive action... assuming you can survive at short range long enough to chew through its armor, anyway.

@TJJ: As I understand it, the armor you're going up against is the combination of several adjacent cells, such that a ship with a listed armor strength of 1500 will - when undamaged - actually be using that 1500 in the resulting damage calculations.

[Drewsen]

You guys must play on Easy, because I tried the Enforcer with the HVD/Mauler setup and it's utterly useless.

Cannot solo with Enforcer, Medusa eats this thing for breakfast.

[SafariJohn]

That spreadsheet is awesome, Aeson!

Thinking back to when I played for a while with 100% possible damage reduction, I modified the formulas to see what the results where. Turns out every weapon still does at least 0.01 (the precision the game's calculations use IIRC) damage per shot even to 2500 armor. The Thumper does a whopping 0.200; Vulcan is, of course, the worst at 0.0155.

You guys must play on Easy, because I tried the Enforcer with the HVD/Mauler setup and it's utterly useless.

Cannot solo with Enforcer, Medusa eats this thing for breakfast.

Augmented Engines or Unstable Injector is your friend in that fight. Medusa has superior DPS and the speed to catch you. It'll still be faster even with AE or UI, but at least you're closer to its speed.

[Dri]

Haha, wow, Assault Chaingun starts to do more DPS to armor over the Heavy Mauler at 1100 armor and above - so its actually better at cracking very heavy armor than the Mauler.

Well, then. Basically, due to that 85% armor damage reduction cap weak rapid-fire shots become better at busting armor than slow, heavy hitters once the armor gets high enough. Though, glad to say that the game currently doesn't have any ship with high enough armor to unseat the Hellbore and its amazing per-shot-damage as king of armor breaking (missiles/torpedoes don't count).

Some highlights:

* Storm Needler does almost as much DPS to armor as H Mauler @ 2300 armor (basically only Onslaught with armor mods)
* Light Dual Machine gun does more DPS to armor than Light Dual Autocannon @ any armor level.
* Autopulse Laser is the best energy weapon to use vs armor (though probs not true when it runs out of charges)
* Mjolnir Cannon is less effective at breaking armor than the Assault Chaingun starting at 1500 armor.

[TJJ]

@TJJ: As I understand it, the armor you're going up against is the combination of several adjacent cells, such that a ship with a listed armor strength of 1500 will - when undamaged - actually be using that 1500 in the resulting damage calculations.

That's not how I interpreted the wiki:

"Armor is divided into cells, distributed around the ship. Each cell has an armor rating equal to 1/8th the ship's armor rating. When the armor takes a hit, the cell at the point of impact and 20 surrounding cells[1] combine their armor values, with weighted average used to calculate the amount of armor that defends against the attack."

Thus a 4000 armour ship has armour cells of strength 500.
When an armour cell is hit, its strength is averaged* with the surrounding 20 cells, which still gives an armour rating in the range 0 - 500 (shipArmourRating/8).

*(weighed in some way, probably to favour the cells closest to the impact point)

I'm not sure I'm right, but Aeson's spreadsheet doesn't match up with the actual in-game experience.
So either:
1) Aeson's numbers are wrong.
2) My unscientific observations of actual combat are wrong.
3) Neither are wrong, we're just misinterpreting the meaning of the numbers.

It required least effort from me to tend towards opinion 3).

[Linnis]

3) Neither are wrong, we're just misinterpreting the meaning of the numbers.

It required least effort from me to tend towards opinion 3).

His numbers correlate exactly with what I noticed in-game.

That heavy single shot kinetic are horrible against armor. They don't seem to do anything to hegemony enforcer or dominator armor, not to mention onslaughts.

And that needlers in numbers eat through even onslaught armor.


After so many playthoguhts I am starting to notice that there is no need to put explosive weapons on ships like the dominator or onslaught. Often needlers and assorted fire can pin-down and strip armor just as well. the Auto cannon series are absolute crap, and that even ONE heavy mauler puts out too much HE damage than needed.

[Euphytose]

You guys must play on Easy, because I tried the Enforcer with the HVD/Mauler setup and it's utterly useless.

Cannot solo with Enforcer, Medusa eats this thing for breakfast.

But the Medusa is the best destroyer period. The only reason others even see use in your fleet is because the AI doesn't know how to use them properly. I run mine with 2 pulse lasers, 2 antimatter, 2 reapers and rest as burst PD and it obliterates everything short of capitals. The combination of teleport + good generator and ridiculous firepower makes it vastly superior to everything else, and it's shown in the deployment cost.

That said, Enforcers with 2 single flaks on the edges, 2 HVD and 1 mauler in the center, aka the elite loadout, are very hard to kill (with the right mods and skills), and the range enables them to harass from long distances.

[Alex]

Thus a 4000 armour ship has armour cells of strength 500.
When an armour cell is hit, its strength is averaged* with the surrounding 20 cells, which still gives an armour rating in the range 0 - 500 (shipArmourRating/8).

That's not how it works; the resulting armor value can go all the way up to the listed armor value for the variant. Also, the cell that was hit, plus the eight surrounding cells, contribute 2x as much to the effective armor value as the 12 cell on the outside. In effect the hit area looks like this:

 111
12221
12221
12221
 111

Cells marked 1 have their armor contribution halved; cells marked 2 contribute their full amount. The starting armor in each cell is 1/15th of the listed armor value.

So, for a hit vs undamaged armor, with the base armor value A, you get:
9 * A / 15 + 0.5 * (12 * A /15) = 15 * A / 15 = A

Basically, due to that 85% armor damage reduction cap weak rapid-fire shots become better at busting armor than slow, heavy hitters once the armor gets high enough.

After so many playthoguhts I am starting to notice that there is no need to put explosive weapons on ships like the dominator or onslaught. Often needlers and assorted fire can pin-down and strip armor just as well. the Auto cannon series are absolute crap, and that even ONE heavy mauler puts out too much HE damage than needed.

I think it's important to note that the rapid-fire weapon still needs to have higher base vs-armor DPS (adjusted for damage type) than the slower heavy hitter in order to outperform it vs armor. I mean, as armor goes up, what we're seeing is the DPS reduced to 15% of its value regardless of what the hit strength is.

[TJJ]

Thanks for the thorough explanation.
Looks like the wiki needs rewording, and updating.

So when considering weapon performance, sacrificing dps for per-projectile damage is only worth it for high damage values. (Relative to the armour of the intended target)

I suppose it doesn't really change very much; range is still king, with accuracy a distant 2nd.

[Copperwire]

Thanks for the thorough explanation.
Looks like the wiki needs rewording, and updating.

So when considering weapon performance, sacrificing dps for per-projectile damage is only worth it for high damage values. (Relative to the armour of the intended target)

I suppose it doesn't really change very much; range is still king, with accuracy a distant 2nd.

Maybe for player piloted ships.

For AI, speed and cap efficiency are the royalty.

[Cycerin]

One thing I remember from when I started playing SS was that armor is called "Armor Rating" as opposed to "Armor Points" or "Armor". I hoped that it was a hint at some deeper modelling and was very pleased to find out I was right. It's a tricky little hint at the underlying mechanics and depth of the game.

[Histidine]

Updated the wiki.
(I think it would be/have been nice to get the whole armor explanation in one place, even if that meant RTFS...)

[TJJ]

One query regarding armor cells; what happens when the neighboring cells lie outside the ship bounds? (as will be the case most of the time).

Taking the example screenshot from the wiki page;


The 5x5 grid of cells that were damaged by the hit (and thus contributed to the armor strength calculation) are obvious.
What's also apparent is that not all the cells are inside the ship:

 111
12221
12221
12221
 111

When this occurs, is the effectiveness of the armor reduced? or are the values scaled to compensate?

[Alex]

The armor cells extend beyond the bounds of the ship and form a square grid, the size of which is such that any impact on the ship is guaranteed to have the full set of cells - i.e. there's at least a 2-cell padding beyond any boundary.

(Conceptually, one might think of those "outside out of bounds" cells as being on the side/bottom of the ship... not that it matters very much.)