Fractal Softworks Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Pages: [1] 2

Author Topic: Fragmentation got left behind?  (Read 3934 times)

Nameless

  • Lieutenant
  • **
  • Posts: 93
    • View Profile
Fragmentation got left behind?
« on: April 29, 2021, 09:37:26 AM »

Every time I see this damage type I can't help but think why does it exist? It seems like you can just do better with the other 3 types of damage. Is there something i'm not aware of about fragmentation?
Logged

Goumindong

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 1889
    • View Profile
Re: Fragmentation got left behind?
« Reply #1 on: April 29, 2021, 09:40:36 AM »

Well missiles have only structure so having a type of damage that is bad against ships but good against fighters and missiles has value.

It would be difficult to replicate the Vulcan with energy, HE, or Kin as an example.
Logged

Albreo

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 176
  • A! Oh nyo!
    • View Profile
Re: Fragmentation got left behind?
« Reply #2 on: April 29, 2021, 09:49:50 AM »

It melts hulls really fast. Usually, very low cost to fire, and after 75% damage reduction can still do solid damage to both shield and armor. You won't see much on vanilla but there are plenty in other mods. Hence the massive controversy over should it exist.
Logged

Drone_Fragger

  • Lieutenant
  • **
  • Posts: 73
    • View Profile
Re: Fragmentation got left behind?
« Reply #3 on: April 29, 2021, 11:05:19 AM »

Issue currently is residual armour and the flat armour from bonuses tend to make frag damage completely useless even for that on the ships where you’d actually want to chew through hull.

My suggestion? Take a leaf out of battletechs book and make frag damage crit seeking. At 100% armour it doesn’t do anything special over what it does now but as armour gets damaged the frag rounds (which you’d expect to fragment into lots of nasty little bits of cable/conduit/crew/ammunition/etc shredding shrapnel) start to have a steadily higher and higher chance to do “critical damage” and deal hull damage directly through armour as well as an increasing chance to cause weapon or engine malfunctions as bouncing bits of scrap jam in delicate conduits and tubes and suchlike.

Would give you a reason to take frag in a loadout (to start to damage hull before the armour is fully stripped) and give ballistic builds a way to disable ship systems similar to how EMP does.
Logged

SCC

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 4112
    • View Profile
Re: Fragmentation got left behind?
« Reply #4 on: April 29, 2021, 11:11:57 AM »

Residual armour was actually put in the game precisely because frag damage (talons, mainly) was killing ships too fast.

Drone_Fragger

  • Lieutenant
  • **
  • Posts: 73
    • View Profile
Re: Fragmentation got left behind?
« Reply #5 on: April 29, 2021, 11:19:02 AM »

Agreed, it needed to be added for that issue - they could kill a paragon in like 10 seconds, particularly pirates fleets because they only tended to field talons and piranhas because lmao why would I sell them fighter bps. Just means against ships where you want to kill hull quickly with your frag weapons you bought for that purpose... they don%u2019t.

edit:

Hmm, yeah, okay so maybe:

1. Reduce raw numbers for frag damage by 33% across the board
2. Give frag the new bonus that it deals triple damage against fighters and projectiles (in-case there's any situation where non-missle items can be shot down)
3. Frag then deals critical seeking damage to targets depending on their missing armour at the target location, ranging from maybe a 5% chance at 95% armour to maybe 25% at 0% armour.
4. Critical seeking damage ignores armour for the purpose of calculation and deals double/triple/maybe emp, not sure, damage against systems, and maybe even has a chance of causing malfuctions a-la low CR.

end result:

1. Frag still *** up fighters and missiles, as you'd expect it too, happy days.
2. Frag deals moderate damage to hulls but has the bonus of dealing hull damage before the armour is completely gone - Makes it always useful, and has the advantage of knocking out guns and engines more often.
3. fighters and vulcans and suchlike still do reasonable hull damage on their own, but mainly do it via the critical damage, residual armour still reduces the non-critical damage which hopefully stops the "talons gib paragon when it's armours gone" issue.
4. Frag therefore becomes actually useful to take on ships as a psuedo-EMP option, and for chipping hulls down before the armour is stripped.
« Last Edit: April 29, 2021, 11:50:29 AM by Drone_Fragger »
Logged

Daynen

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 413
    • View Profile
Re: Fragmentation got left behind?
« Reply #6 on: April 29, 2021, 12:12:55 PM »

Agreed, it needed to be added for that issue - they could kill a paragon in like 10 seconds, particularly pirates fleets because they only tended to field talons and piranhas because lmao why would I sell them fighter bps. Just means against ships where you want to kill hull quickly with your frag weapons you bought for that purpose... they don't.

edit:

Hmm, yeah, okay so maybe:

1. Reduce raw numbers for frag damage by 33% across the board
2. Give frag the new bonus that it deals triple damage against fighters and projectiles (in-case there's any situation where non-missle items can be shot down)
3. Frag then deals critical seeking damage to targets depending on their missing armour at the target location, ranging from maybe a 5% chance at 95% armour to maybe 25% at 0% armour.
4. Critical seeking damage ignores armour for the purpose of calculation and deals double/triple/maybe emp, not sure, damage against systems, and maybe even has a chance of causing malfuctions a-la low CR.

end result:

1. Frag still *** up fighters and missiles, as you'd expect it too, happy days.
2. Frag deals moderate damage to hulls but has the bonus of dealing hull damage before the armour is completely gone - Makes it always useful, and has the advantage of knocking out guns and engines more often.
3. fighters and vulcans and suchlike still do reasonable hull damage on their own, but mainly do it via the critical damage, residual armour still reduces the non-critical damage which hopefully stops the "talons gib paragon when it's armours gone" issue.
4. Frag therefore becomes actually useful to take on ships as a psuedo-EMP option, and for chipping hulls down before the armour is stripped.

But...Frag damage already does all that.  It has a "critical" bonus; when it hits exposed hull it's dealing up to four times the damage as it does against anything else.  It's meant to deal low damage to heavy defenses because it's a finisher.  It already ruins fighters and missiles thanks to ease of use, generally cheap ordnance cost and usually generous rates of fire and coverage.  See Thumpers and Locusts for good examples.  I'm not sure I see the problem--and I'm a guy who tends to look for problems in game design.

The reason you use frag damage is because you want to save ordnance points to pack more stuff on your ships.  You combo it with the other damage types so you have cheap finishers that can hammer a stripped ship but don't take up your whole deployment cost.  "Accuracy through volume of fire" is a very real thing and fragmentation weapons tend to favor that.  If you've got the OP to spare or a build/strategy that doesn't need frag damage, that's totally okay, but it's there if you need a budget option and/or your personal fleet doctrine calls for quantity over quality.
Logged

Harmful Mechanic

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 1340
  • On break.
    • View Profile
Re: Fragmentation got left behind?
« Reply #7 on: April 29, 2021, 12:16:13 PM »

Frag damage is actually amazing, it's just that vanilla weapons (apart from the Cryoblaster) don't really showcase how awesome it can be in the right context. Probably the best vanilla examples are the Vulcan, Flak Cannon and Dual Flak; they're all highly-effective, high-DPS point defenses that in any other damage type would be unstoppable kill-hoses.

I strongly disagree with the way the Thumper currently works, but that has more to do with the weapon lacking sufficient per-shot damage; not the damage type. Bump it up to 150 or 200 and mess with the burst length and timing and it would be absolutely golden at 8 OP.

(I also love BT-style crit-seeking, which might be why I make so many frag-with-crit weapons...)
Logged

Drone_Fragger

  • Lieutenant
  • **
  • Posts: 73
    • View Profile
Re: Fragmentation got left behind?
« Reply #8 on: April 29, 2021, 12:25:23 PM »

I guess that's maybe the issue - I wouldn't ever take a frag weapon explicitly as a knife fight hull shredding weapon because they're all not... really... design with that in mind except maybe the thumper, and if you're taking thumpers you're not taking weapons to crack armour. That's kinda why I was suggesting making frag useful before that point - If you take nothing but frag, for instance, you're gimping yourself because you'll never get through the armour or shields in the first place.

I guess you're right - Frags insanely high damage already does act as a finisher of sorts, but I'm really struggling to see how you'd apply it in stock without flying into melee and letting your PD vulcan cannons or flak do some work.
Logged

Vanshilar

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 585
    • View Profile
Re: Fragmentation got left behind?
« Reply #9 on: April 29, 2021, 01:35:12 PM »

Frag weapons are generally very flux-efficient. They really shine versus bare hull, but you need something else to get past shields and armor to get to that hull first. So generally people focus on anti-shield (kinetic) or anti-armor (high explosive) and just continue using those same weapons versus hull.

But if you find enemy ships retreating too quickly into the rest of the fleet once their flux is high and you start blowing holes into their armor, then chances are, you need more frag. Having that high damage is very effective for preventing retreats and ensuring you finish off the kill.

One of the new [REDACTED] weapons is very good at demonstrating this. It is basically like a smaller version of the heavy blaster, somewhat more efficient versus shields, about 2/3 of the damage (but also 2/3 of the flux) against armor, but once the armor is gone, you'll be killing radiants about 3x as fast. That's very useful for catching them before they retreat.
Logged

Scorpixel

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 172
    • View Profile
Re: Fragmentation got left behind?
« Reply #10 on: April 29, 2021, 02:24:55 PM »

Honestly find fragmentation to be underwhelming even against fighters with high tanking values, let alone proper ships.
Outside the dual-flak and Aegis that's just a mod L version of it, nothing has either the range or post -75% efficiency to qualify as a proper weapon to win a flux war.

It's nice to have dps for when an enemy has lost both shield and armour, but by that point it's already dying, yes it would die quicker but it has already taken longer to arrive there than with the conventional duo/trio.

Also lmg>vulcan.
« Last Edit: April 29, 2021, 02:30:31 PM by Scorpixel »
Logged

Amazigh

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 284
    • View Profile
Re: Fragmentation got left behind?
« Reply #11 on: April 29, 2021, 04:17:04 PM »

One of the new [REDACTED] weapons is very good at demonstrating this.
I think the general issue with frag as a damage type, is that this is the only high-damage frag weapon, and with how residual armour works, all of the other frag weapons with their relatively low-damage per shot, really take the short end of the stick.
(the closest to a high-damage frag weapon in vanilla is the stinger mines on wasps which deal 500 damage, but those are short range, low fire rate on a fragile interceptor)


Also lmg>vulcan.

Vulcan has over 3x the raw DPS, and is a constant stream rather than bursts, add to this the vulcan having 50% faster turn rate, this makes it the far superior option for dealing with missiles.

I'd only ever pick mounting an LMG over a vulcan on a SO build, where you are generally OP starved, and will appreciate the LMG for being added kinetic dps as well as basic PD.
Logged

Scorpixel

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 172
    • View Profile
Re: Fragmentation got left behind?
« Reply #12 on: April 29, 2021, 05:03:13 PM »

Also lmg>vulcan.

Vulcan has over 3x the raw DPS, and is a constant stream rather than bursts, add to this the vulcan having 50% faster turn rate, this makes it the far superior option for dealing with missiles.

I'd only ever pick mounting an LMG over a vulcan on a SO build, where you are generally OP starved, and will appreciate the LMG for being added kinetic dps as well as basic PD.
3x the dps but only half as effective compared to lmg against armour and even worse vs shields.
Regular lmg is good enough to take down one missile per salvo contrary to the vulcan which often seem to struggle at target leading.

Small pd (outside frigates or SO) is only useful to defend the engines so ships do not perform a mating parade around the battlespace, fighters are far more annoying and and require more intense weaponry to be rapidly dealt with, although 9.5 dealt quite the blow to all of those.

The best pd is still fighters and superior firepower, any spared OP that can actually be useful is welcomed, 4lmgs cover more that 3 vulcans against the occasional missile and can still apply minute pressure vs flanking frigates.
« Last Edit: April 29, 2021, 05:06:26 PM by Scorpixel »
Logged

Thaago

  • Global Moderator
  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 7174
  • Harpoon Affectionado
    • View Profile
Re: Fragmentation got left behind?
« Reply #13 on: April 29, 2021, 05:52:19 PM »

I've got 2 vulcans on my enforcers instead of flak because they are so effective. I've seen them shoot down reapers, full volleys of harpoons, etc. They are certainly worse knife fighting weapons than lmg's, and the reduced range means they can't protect other ships, but they are fantastic point defense for the mounting ship. I'd say single lmg is... 20% as effective at PD, and double lmg maybe 30% as effective.
Logged

WeiTuLo

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 312
    • View Profile
Re: Fragmentation got left behind?
« Reply #14 on: April 29, 2021, 06:04:14 PM »

I'd say single lmg is... 20% as effective at PD, and double lmg maybe 30% as effective.

Would that be vs 1 vulcan or 1 flak (or dual flak) cannon?
Logged
Pages: [1] 2