The first thing I needed is a controlled test scenario. This means it has to be tests over and over and over and over again on the same ship. The Centurion is the perfect ship for this for several reasons. One, it has middle of the road stats - decent flux stats, average armor, etc. So the tests will give me a general sense of the armor penetration of every weapon. Secondly, the Centurion is one of the most flexible ships to build. It has a lot of weapon mounts that can fit multiple types of weapons. That is important since I can test literally all weapons without breaking the control. To further emphasize build diversity, I made a couple of changes and made the center turret composite instead of just ballistic and the rear side turrets universal instead of hybrid. I also gave the Centurion 5 more OP.
Here are some of the resulting builds: (yes they have been added to the campaign as well
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So the goal is to make weapons balanced enough that builds designed to perform similar roles perform relatively equally as a trend. After numerous tests, I think this mostly holds true. When I talk about roles, I'm not just talking about Strike, Assault, PD, and Fire Support. I am also talking about subcategories within those roles such as "anti-frigate" or "fights larger hulls well" and taking into consideration how well the builds could handle fighters and to what degree. The idea of course is that there has to be tradeoffs in each case.
The idea of subcategories of roles is a new idea that stemmed from the rework of missiles. Rockets such as the Annihilator and Javelin have been completely reworked to feel different over guided missiles such as the Rapier and Swarmer. Really, rockets in general are now designed to provide high amounts of dps spread out over a fairly wide area and are more vulnerable to PD mitigation. Swarmers, on the other hand, hit more reliably and really take a bite out of armor when they connect with unshielded targets. These traits make them ideal against frigates or even gunships. Since missiles as a whole have a lot more ammo and can last a lot longer at optimal dps, using them on gunships or bombers shouldn't feel too painful. The AI shouldn't do it as often compared to anti-fighter missiles though.
So how are rockets and torpedoes different? They now act as a heavy weapon that can give frigates a way to get closer to destroyers in damage potential - with the drawback that these weapons are more useful against larger and slower targets and hit frigates a lot less often. Some of this was already mentioned in prior posts, but the concept should be more refined and now has been implemented across small weapons as a whole.
An example of a non missile weapon that this concept applies to is the Photon Cannon. It now has the highest sustained dps of any small weapon in the mod except for I believe the Tactical Beam. It also hits for 500 per shot and so it has very, very good armor penetration for a small weapon dealing energy damage. However, since it has a much slower projectile speed, it can't hit frigates all that well. It performs best when it targets larger ships and there it shines as a heavy assault weapon. Something like the Pulse Cannon or the Avalanche Cannon is much better at hitting frigates, and fill the role of strike (high initial dps, low sustained dps) and assault (flux free average sustained dps) respectively. This opens up the need for a hard hitting but slow anti-armor ballistic weapon, and the Fissure Cannon fills it nicely. Whereas the Avalanche loses its initial dps more quickly, the Fissure keeps it longer at the expense of projectile speed. So now the Avalanche and Fissure don't feel as much like they are competing for the same spot on a ship where the main consideration is OP. They are used for different things and that feels nice to me.
You can make similar comparisons to the Autocannon and Assault Autocannon. (Which I need to rename at some point.) The Autocannon has really good armor penetration and like the Assault Autocannon it is cheap to install, but it is also flux free and has higher range. That said, it misses a fair amount against frigates and even sometimes destroyers. The Assault Autocannon hits much more reliably and with substantially higher initial dps, but it costs a bit of flux and its damage falls off eventually as the magazine needs to reload. Hopefully, this means that there is much more consideration about which weapon you'd ideally want on a ship - depending largely upon what you want that ship to do and the needs of the build. So maybe the Assault Autocannon would be better, but is the build already heavy on flux generating weaponry? It might be better to take the Autocannon and deal with the potential of missed shots. Or if the build is targeting larger ships, the armor penetration and higher sustained dps might be more ideal. It just depends.
Finally, looking at fire support weapons I decided to rework them a bit. They still cost a lot of flux to use, but instead of also being coupled with lower dps they now work similar to strike weapons. They have a large initial dps mitigated by the flux stats of the ship, but eventually that dps falls off to very low levels. Therefore, fire support ships essentially have a limited window of effectiveness to support close range ships hopefully without them dominating the battle from continuous concentrated fire through allies. These changes also generally improve the AI performance of allied ships because running out of ammo gives the AI some breathing room to vent or retreat, etc, in a 1v1 scenario. This means that fire support ships still shouldn't be able to beat close range ships in 1v1 scenario in most cases (there are some heavily optimized builds that can but largely they can't otherwise) and work best when used in conjunction with other ships.
To test this out, I ran simulations of 4 Centurions vs 4 Centurions and 5 Centurions vs 5 Centurions testing out a variety of builds in the same role while keeping the enemy fleet identical in each case. Yup, very tedious, but the data is worth it most of the time.
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Topic: [0.95.1a] TC: Archean Order: Rebalanced Combat/Lore RPG - *hotfix* 4/14/22 (Read 759406 times)