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Author Topic: Beam Stuff  (Read 40684 times)

Thaago

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #60 on: March 23, 2018, 04:01:34 PM »

Did someone say the Fortress Shield is a bad system on the Paragon? Its immunity to strike weapons for the slowest, longest ranged capital, and lets you vent soft flux while tanking fire. Charge based weapons like burst pd lasers and autopulse are recharging during it, so you don't lose overall DPS with them either. Of course the ship would still be a monster with a different system, but it certainly doesn't hurt.

On topic: for anything below destroyers I find pulse lasers underwhelming without something else to help crack the armor. I'm quite in love with having 1 heavy blaster in the center medium slot of an Eagle though. The short range works well with its role as an armor/hull high dps cracker - by the time its in range, tactical conditions are correct for it to fire. And against smaller threats that might try to skirmish, its a 'go away now or be wrecked' gun.

My go-to AI Eagle at the moment for end game work: 2xHeavy Needler, 1x Heavy Mauler, 1xHeavy Blaster, 5x burst pd laser (really pretty to have all 5 in a ring...), 2x sabots, 2x pd lasers in rear.
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xenoargh

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #61 on: March 23, 2018, 04:31:37 PM »

Well, that sounds great, but there's the order-of-operations issues here, Alex.  Where does the tick get applied?

Let's do that math.

If a Beam with HE damage hits a target, the results vary quite a lot, depending on what's going on.  Let's say it's 1/10th of a second and hits a target with 1000 Armor, for the sake of argument.

If the tick's applied before the damage, then:  (100)^2 / (1000 + 100) = 9 damage, per tick, at dpsToHitStrengthMult of 1.0.

If the tick's applied after the damage, then ((1000)^2 / (2000)) * 0.1 = 50 damage per tick.  But if dpsToHitStrengthMult is applied afterwards at 0.5, it's half that; it's the nerf I was implying.

If dpsToHitStrengthMult is applied before the other factors, then:

((500)^2 / (1500)) * 0.1 = 16.7

So, uh, what's the order of operations here?  Beams aren't straight-line like an ordinary hit, both because of the tick and dpsToHitStrengthMult (which, to keep things simpler, I didn't move into the equation here- that would also change the order of operations).  Where they get applied matters.


Oh and Thaago, yes, I think it's a bad system.  When you need it to work (surrounded by DPS you can't tank normally) you just lose the Flux war faster than you would by dropping shields and firing, generally; there are edge cases where you take less damage, because you're just facing down one thing that can't dump enough Hard Flux, but it's not great and there's a threshold where it's counterproductive, because it costs Hard Flux while it runs.  You don't get immunity to strike weapons, either; they just do less Hard Flux; the immunity isn't total.

« Last Edit: March 23, 2018, 04:40:52 PM by xenoargh »
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Megas

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #62 on: March 23, 2018, 04:34:32 PM »

@ Blothorn: Phase Lance is better than pulse laser as a burst weapon, it has that advantage.  But if I want a burst weapon, blaster is usually superior.  Better damage, hits for hard flux, and best of all - no need to maintain fire for about a second.  Just pop of a shot in an instant, and it is done.  Now if phase lance hit for hard flux or had some meaningful advantage (like more range), okay.  But, it really does not.  Well, I guess it does if you have Advanced Optics (meaning either Tri-Tachyon commission or lucky endgame drop) or Safety Override (if ship cannot support pulse laser).

Pulse laser is not that great at armor, but with an all-energy ship, shields are a greater problem than armor.  Armor will wear down eventually.  Shields regenerate.  If my ship can use mixed arms, sure, I will think more about armor.  But if all I can use is a one-size-fits-all hammer.  Well, regenerating defense is higher priority to neutralize.
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xenoargh

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #63 on: March 23, 2018, 04:39:46 PM »

As for Phase Lance... yeah.  It needs to have pretty absurd efficiency to be all that great, at its short range.  IIRC, I currently have it doing some pretty ridiculous burst damage with a long timer, so that it has a role as "evaporator of Frigates" and can kill Destroyers in two bursts over 10 seconds or so.  That gave it a point as a close-in assault gun that did something nothing else does- it won't put Hard Flux on like AM Blasters, and you don't want to hit shields with it, but it's nasty vs. unprotected armor.
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Blothorn

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #64 on: March 23, 2018, 05:09:06 PM »

Well, that sounds great, but there's the order-of-operations issues here, Alex.  Where does the tick get applied?

Let's do that math.

If a Beam with HE damage hits a target, the results vary quite a lot, depending on what's going on.  Let's say it's 1/10th of a second and hits a target with 1000 Armor, for the sake of argument.

If the tick's applied before the damage, then:  (100)^2 / (1000 + 100) = 9 damage, per tick, at dpsToHitStrengthMult of 1.0.

If the tick's applied after the damage, then ((1000)^2 / (2000)) * 0.1 = 50 damage per tick.  But if dpsToHitStrengthMult is applied afterwards at 0.5, it's half that; it's the nerf I was implying.

If dpsToHitStrengthMult is applied before the other factors, then:

((500)^2 / (1500)) * 0.1 = 16.7

So, uh, what's the order of operations here?  Beams aren't straight-line like an ordinary hit, both because of the tick and dpsToHitStrengthMult (which, to keep things simpler, I didn't move into the equation here- that would also change the order of operations).  Where they get applied matters.

You still have the equation wrong--a beam uses nominalDps*dpsToHitStrengthMult strength for calculating the armor reduction, and its damage for the tick is multiplied by that. The tick length has no role in the armor reduction calculation.
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xenoargh

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #65 on: March 23, 2018, 05:14:38 PM »

OK, then it's:

(500)^2 / (1500) = 166.7 per tick, or 1667 Armor per second.  

That's unbelievably high.  I'm pretty sure HIL's don't pierce Eagles in less than a second.  Remember, on the next tick that would be the same equation, but against lower Armor; this way simply can't be correct.

The tick-length has to be factored in here.
« Last Edit: March 23, 2018, 05:17:02 PM by xenoargh »
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Alex

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #66 on: March 23, 2018, 05:19:27 PM »

@xenoargh:

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.

It's like everything else, except the "hit strength" is half the vs-armor dps of the beam. So, use the hit strength to figure out the vs-armor multiplier, then apply that to the actual damage, which in this case is 1000 * 0.1 (for the 1/10th of a second tick).

(I think what's tripping you up comes from factoring the damage into the equation and thinking of it as the armor damage reduction formula, so you've got "damage^2/(damage + armor)" in your mind, but the armor reduction is just "hit strength / (hit strength + armor)", and beams are a case where hit strength != damage.)
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Goumindong

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #67 on: March 23, 2018, 05:32:37 PM »

Well, that sounds great, but there's the order-of-operations issues here, Alex.  Where does the tick get applied?

Let's do that math.

If a Beam with HE damage hits a target, the results vary quite a lot, depending on what's going on.  Let's say it's 1/10th of a second and hits a target with 1000 Armor, for the sake of argument.

If the tick's applied before the damage, then:  (100)^2 / (1000 + 100) = 9 damage, per tick, at dpsToHitStrengthMult of 1.0.

If the tick's applied after the damage, then ((1000)^2 / (2000)) * 0.1 = 50 damage per tick.  But if dpsToHitStrengthMult is applied afterwards at 0.5, it's half that; it's the nerf I was implying.

If dpsToHitStrengthMult is applied before the other factors, then:

((500)^2 / (1500)) * 0.1 = 16.7

So, uh, what's the order of operations here?  Beams aren't straight-line like an ordinary hit, both because of the tick and dpsToHitStrengthMult (which, to keep things simpler, I didn't move into the equation here- that would also change the order of operations).  Where they get applied matters.

You still have the equation wrong--a beam uses nominalDps*dpsToHitStrengthMult strength for calculating the armor reduction, and its damage for the tick is multiplied by that. The tick length has no role in the armor reduction calculation.

He doesn’t have armor damage reduction as a function of tick rate.  He has total dps as a function of tick rate. It’s all multiplicative so it’s cummative.

As an aside while tick rate doesn’t have an effect on immediate armor pen it does have an effect on armor pen/second.

The higher the tick rate the faster you penetrate armor because you’re stripping armor. For the next tick armor has been reduced and so you do more damage.  



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Megas

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #68 on: March 23, 2018, 06:03:01 PM »

Did someone say the Fortress Shield is a bad system on the Paragon? Its immunity to strike weapons for the slowest, longest ranged capital, and lets you vent soft flux while tanking fire. Charge based weapons like burst pd lasers and autopulse are recharging during it, so you don't lose overall DPS with them either. Of course the ship would still be a monster with a different system, but it certainly doesn't hurt.
I like to use Fortress Shield to trade Paragon's full bar of soft flux into about a third bar of hard flux before venting, if under fire from the enemy.  Less time armor or hull getting shot at.

When AI uses such ships, Fortress Shield is annoying to fight against since the AI can flicker it well.

P.S.
Re: Pulse Laser vs. Heavy Blaster
If the ship has two medium energy mounts, what I like to use instead of two pulse lasers is one heavy blaster and one tactical laser.  The latter combo is nearly as damaging and efficient as two pulse lasers, except it costs much less OP to use.  The only weakness of the combo is the obnoxious rarity of heavy blasters (unless I fight a bunch of enemies with blasters and loot them).
« Last Edit: March 23, 2018, 06:08:21 PM by Megas »
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Thaago

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #69 on: March 23, 2018, 06:04:06 PM »

...

Oh and Thaago, yes, I think it's a bad system.  When you need it to work (surrounded by DPS you can't tank normally) you just lose the Flux war faster than you would by dropping shields and firing, generally; there are edge cases where you take less damage, because you're just facing down one thing that can't dump enough Hard Flux, but it's not great and there's a threshold where it's counterproductive, because it costs Hard Flux while it runs.  You don't get immunity to strike weapons, either; they just do less Hard Flux; the immunity isn't total.



I think I see the problem - is your Paragon flux neutral? The cycle for a Paragon that is surrounded should be:

1) Maul the crap out of any ship in the game by dumping the flux pool. Seriously, everything but another Paragon should be hurting.
2) Activate Fortress Shield to bleed off soft flux/recharge weapons. The hard flux gain is significantly less than the soft flux lost.
3) Either repeat step 1-2 or do a tactical quick vent, taking some rounds to the armor but not a strike barrage. In practice, you can do several cycles of 1-2 if your enemy is light, or you can do a 1/3 flux vent and start fresh.

This is why a Paragon should always be "overgunned", even with its high dissipation. Very, very overgunned.

Did someone say the Fortress Shield is a bad system on the Paragon? Its immunity to strike weapons for the slowest, longest ranged capital, and lets you vent soft flux while tanking fire. Charge based weapons like burst pd lasers and autopulse are recharging during it, so you don't lose overall DPS with them either. Of course the ship would still be a monster with a different system, but it certainly doesn't hurt.
I like to use Fortress Shield to trade Paragon's full bar of soft flux into about a third bar of hard flux before venting, if under fire from the enemy.  Less time armor or hull getting shot at.

When AI uses such ships, Fortress Shield is annoying to fight against since the AI can flicker it well.

Beat me to it! In addition, the faster vent means that missiles/torpedoes have less time to get to the ship, so you can usually avoid a reaper barrage that would hit during a full vent.

Flickering well as a player requires so much situational awareness, but is very rewarding. Nothing like switching on for a half second to catch a sabot salvo. But yeah, annoying to fight against.
« Last Edit: March 23, 2018, 06:10:29 PM by Thaago »
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Megas

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #70 on: March 23, 2018, 06:10:40 PM »

Beat me to it! In addition, the faster vent means that missiles/torpedoes have less time to get to the ship, so you can usually avoid a reaper barrage that would hit during a full vent.
I forgot about this too.  AI will unleash Harpoon storm at Paragon with high flux, then Paragon turns on Fortress Shield and shrugs and laughs off all of the harpoons the enemy wasted on Paragon.
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xenoargh

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #71 on: March 24, 2018, 05:48:13 PM »

@Thaago:  hmm.  Most of the time, I'm equipping a Paragon to be the "anvil".  It's too slow to be fun to play that style, and the AI can't really do what you're describing all that well.   I can see the point, if you're taking practically no Hard Flux during the fight, though. 

Most of the time, though, a Paragon doesn't get the luxury of putting everything around it into Flux trouble; against high-level Bounties, it has to survive being surrounded and under pretty constant fire.  That doesn't allow for a maxed-out, wasteful alpha build.  In general, under the current conditions of fighting high-end Bounties, I don't find alpha designs at all attractive for the AI and generally speaking, they're usually not as good for human players as having something maneuverable that can be the critical mass.


@Alex:  Right, that's what I'm trying to get to the bottom of; where that number's coming from.

So, 33 damage a tick for the initial hit, and second hits onward go up.  Roughly 390-ish / a second and rapidly rising after that; roughly 2 seconds to pierce an Eagle.  OK, that's maybe a little more like the reality here.

The Mauler does 200 HE.  So it's (400 * 200) / (1000 + 200) = 66.7 and the second hit's around 71.  

So, 138 for two hits vs. 390-ish for the HIL?

That seems a bit strange, given how the real-world results tend to go.  I don't think of the Mauler as something that gently chips armor off, or takes roughly 10 hits on the same spot to penetrate an Eagle.  The nearby-armor-cells rules tend to make big hits go exponential past the early tipping-points when the reduction's high enough.

I'm simply going to have to write some code and test this stuff out, I guess.  Meanwhile...

The problem with the HIL is that, for a weapon that takes a Large Slot, uses 20 OPs, does no Hard Flux and is, in general, not scary vs. anything with a shield up, it's simply not competitive.  The Tachyon Lance is better, simply because it avoids Shields if Flux is high enough; the Plasma Cannon's better, because it puts Hard Flux on shields.   That's kind of the end of the story; for it to perform well-enough in HE, it either needs to be efficient-enough that it's not a pathetically-bad Flux trader, or it needs a mechanic that gives it a good advantage.  Perhaps it should trade continuous fire for a pulse; then it can trade very effective performance and Flux efficiency for lower DPS overall.
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Thaago

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #72 on: March 24, 2018, 07:48:53 PM »

On a Paragon being surrounded and under constant fire is exactly where you want to be for an alpha build. Its a target rich environment for dumping flux into straight murderatory fun time! (Murderlicious? Murderatrocity? Shialebuffamurderationtime?)

I get where you're coming from - with any other ship/system having a high alpha build and being surrounded is bad news, and a less aggressive flux ratio is totally the way to go. I recommend giving it a second chance on the Paragon though.
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Goumindong

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #73 on: March 24, 2018, 08:27:43 PM »

Being surrounded is definitely the point where the flux dump strategy works. So long as you kill what you hit you can chip the enemy force down to size fairly easily.

Key is to have semi-efficient weapons in the non-large slots. Heavy blasters in the medium slots go a long way to murdering things.

Re: HIL

The HIL is not “strictly inferior to the tachyon beam”. Ok it is on the Paragon and Oddesy but on other ships the HIL has twice the damage/flux against armor. It also has nearly three times the total DPS against armor.

This is tempered by the high burst values of the tachyon lance but the HIL will generally be more efficient.

I prefer the HIL on the Apogee for instance. And sometimes on the sunder too
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Wyvern

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Re: Beam Stuff
« Reply #74 on: March 24, 2018, 10:06:59 PM »

@Alex:  Right, that's what I'm trying to get to the bottom of; where that number's coming from.

So, 33 damage a tick for the initial hit, and second hits onward go up.  Roughly 390-ish / a second and rapidly rising after that; roughly 2 seconds to pierce an Eagle.  OK, that's maybe a little more like the reality here.

The Mauler does 200 HE.  So it's (400 * 200) / (1000 + 200) = 66.7 and the second hit's around 71.  

So, 138 for two hits vs. 390-ish for the HIL?
Still not getting the math quite right.

Here, let's try this again.

Damage dealt to armor = damage of attack * reduction from armor
reduction from armor = hit strength / (hit strength + armor)

For any projectile weapon, damage of attack = hit strength.  So a heavy mauler's 200 damage gets multiplied by two, to 400, because it's typed as HE.  Then we plug that into the above formulas.

reduction from armor = 400 / (400+1000) = 2/7 ~= .286
damage dealt to armor = 400 * 2/7 ~= 114

The mauler's fire rate is one shot per second; if we pretend that there's no bleed-through to hull and that we're dealing all of our damage to a single armor cell (both bad assumptions, but they make the math -much- simpler), then it ends up taking seven hits to reduce that 1000 armor to zero, so, seven seconds to completely strip an Eagle's armor with one heavy mauler.
1000 - 114 = 886
    400 * 400 / (400+886) = 124
886 - 124 = 762
    400 * 400 / (400+762) = 137
762 - 137 = 625
    400 * 400 / (400+625) = 156
625 - 156 = 469
    400 * 400 / (400+469) = 184
469 - 184 = 285
    400 * 400 / (400+285) = 233
285 - 233 = 52
    400 * 400 / (400+52) = 353
And we've hit zero armor after seven seconds.

* * *

For beam weapons, hit strength = 1/2 DPS.  The HIL is 500 DPS; x2 because it's HE; plug that in and we get a hit strength of 500.  So for 1000 armor:

reduction from armor = 500 / (500+1000) = 1/3 ~= .333

Now, how much does one tick of the HIL do?  Let's consider three different tick rates, just for fun.

Ticks once per second (it definitely doesn't do this, but if it did, here's how the math would work):
damage per tick = 1000 * .333 = 333, for 333 DPS.

Ticks ten times per second:
damage per tick = 100 * .333 = 33, for 330 DPS (actually slightly higher due to intermediate armor reductions, but if we were shooting at something where 1000 armor was its 5% minimum value, this is what we'd get.)

Ticks thirty times per second:
damage per tick = 33 * .333 = 11, for 330 DPS (with the same caveats as the 10 ticks per second case).

If I run the numbers out for the ten ticks per second case (and no, I'm not going to write down all the equations along the way like I did for the mauler), it ends up taking twenty ticks to burn through 1000 armor... which is all of two seconds.

* * *

Now, all of the above is just theorycrafting - as noted, I ignored the fact that armor is split into multiple cells, and the fact that some damage can bleed through to hull even before the armor's gone.

So, let's run a test in-game; fire up a mission with an Eagle (The Last Hurrah works fine), give it 2x heavy needler under player control, and 1x heavy mauler on autofire; put yourself in the simulator against another eagle and see how it goes.  Stop firing the needlers when the enemy eagle drops shields, and, depending on how accurate you are with the mauler, it does indeed take around seven shots to break through its armor.  (It took me nine shots, personally, but that's because I wasn't able to land all my shots on the same spot every time; two of them went wide.)

Now let's try again with an HIL; the Sunder is probably the best platform for this...  There's also a Sunder in the Last Hurrah; I went with 1x HIL, 2x railgun, ITU, hardened shields, flux distributor, stabilized shields, 17 capacitors and 20 flux vents.  It's a bit harder to convince an Eagle to drop shields like this - I had to use the HIL to shoot down its sabot missiles, and vent while in beam range a few times - but it's doable.  One mississippi, two mississippi, yup that's hull damage I see going past.

Conclusion: the theorycrafting I did under a single-armor-cell assumption is at least close enough to how the actual game works that I'm happy to continue using it.
Edit: Just for funsies I ran one more test, using an Eagle again, and this time -not- halting fire of other weapons when the enemy Eagle's shields went down.  With the extra chip damage from other weaponry mixed in, its armor broke after only around five mauler hits on the same spot; this is probably what you'd be more likely to see in actual play.
« Last Edit: March 24, 2018, 10:17:06 PM by Wyvern »
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Wyvern is 100% correct about the math.
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