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[PotatoFarmer1]

Hi!

I was just experimenting with some AI Doom builds and I put one of my lvl 7 officers into it mostly because he had systems expertise and I thought that would help him spam out more mines, but he also had point defence elite and maybe I am just going crazy but when my character (who has no combat skills) pilots a doom the mines hit like a wet noodle, but I just saw the AI 2 shot the Atlas freighter in the combat sim... I am starting to think that the mine that you generate from the mine strike is counted by the game as a point defence weapon and may be benefiting from his elite skill?

Also when I am watching him in live combat he seems to just absolutely annihilate enemy frigates! He seems especially good at killing enemy Kites. When they are approaching him in formation he plants a mine behind them and they keep their shields forward towards him and the mine explodes 3 or 4 Kite lengths behind them and they just die getting instantly one shot. Also the AI is shockingly clever with the mine usage; he starts the engagement barely using any, always keeping 5 of his 6 in reserve, but when he sees enemy fighters or bombers he attacks them like a rabid dog spamming almost all his mines out at them (this is another reason I think the game counts the mines as PD weapons).

If there are no fighters involved I've seen him put out just one or two mines at a time but when my other ships pressure the target ship so much that it is close to overloading, causing them to drop their shields then he will pounce and spam out all his mines right around the target. It seems that if a ship's shields are down then the mine can be teleported much much closer to the hull, so I watched him plant 4 or 5 mines all the way around the perimeter of some poor pirate Mule (one of which must have spawned 3 inches from the port side window). I think that Mule was annihilated so hard that it teleported into another dimension.

I really can't shake the feeling that this guy is getting the extra 200 unit range to PD weapons from the elite skill which is making his mines just so much more deadly in every circumstance. Can anybody say for certain? I feel that this is really far too difficult for me to test conclusively in the combat sim. Can anyone get any insight from the game code?

Also while I'm on about the Doom, I tested the phase anchor hullmod and it doesn't seem to effect the recharge rate of the mines, but again if anyone is more knowledgeable on this topic could you let me know if it actually does?

Thanks!

[BCS]

Hm, according to minelayer2.wpn the mines are medium missiles so they shouldn't benefit from PD. Maybe the scripts interact with it weirdly because it's a ship system?

(On a side note digging through the files I finally confirmed that PD skill does in fact affect fighters)

[PotatoFarmer1]

Hm, according to minelayer2.wpn the mines are medium missiles so they shouldn't benefit from PD. Maybe the scripts interact with it weirdly because it's a ship system?

(On a side note digging through the files I finally confirmed that PD skill does in fact affect fighters)

Yeah I just thought of a way to test this and it would seem that it does not in fact get any range benefit from the skill. Damage I'm not really sure about but from running the following tests it didn't really seem to be making much of a difference and since the mine one shots every single fighter/bomber in the game anyways whether or not it benefits from extra PD damage from the skill is kinda irrelevant anyways.

So what I did was set the ship CR to 50% for all tests, and swapped between myself (I have no combat skills) and the lvl 7 officer in question. I used the range bands on the reaper launchers to guesstimate ranges and make sure that mines detonate at known distances to the ship. Because the mines have a drift this took some careful piloting but they take long enough to arm that it wasn't that hard to align the same velocity to the mine so that it detonated where I wanted it to relative to the ship. Obviously I kept the ship's facing direct towards the mine for every detonation so that the shape of the ship's face wouldn't affect the test.

What I found was that at exactly the second band from the ship in the screenshot the mine will detonate and do absolutely no damage to my ship. If the mine's top farthest edge is touching the 2nd range band (so the mine is closer than 2 bands to the ship) then it will do damage. This is very very reproducible, the drift on the mines can seem a bit random but the explosion radius is definitely fixed.

What I found was that there is absolutely no difference between my skill-free character piloting the ship and my lvl 7 officer. If the mine was getting a 200 range benefit from the skill it should have been very noticeable in this test, starting to do damage farther than the second range band away.

So this means that I am so bad at piloting this ship and the AI is so good at piloting this ship that it's mogging me hard enough to make me think that it's mines must somehow be more powerful than my mines when we are piloting the same ship. This makes me sad.

On the bright side I am so impressed with this ship's performance that I am going to buy several of them and move several Afflictor officers over to Dooms now that I know that they don't need the PD skill to be effective in this ship. 

Also apparently I cannot upload a 1920x1080 screenshot because the file size is too large so please enjoy my cropped and extremely deep fried 16.4kb screenshot instead
 

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[Doctorhealsgood]

If they are medium missiles wouldn't they get affected by the missile skill?

[PotatoFarmer1]

If they are medium missiles wouldn't they get affected by the missile skill?

Well the missile skill gives 4 bonuses across the basic and elite versions.
I believe that +100% missile weapon ammo capacity does nothing since my lvl 7 officer who has missiles elite gets 6 total charges from his systems expertise skill and I get the base 5 without systems expertise.
+50% rate of fire for missile weapons is also irrelevant since you can spam the mines out as fast as you can pull the trigger. Even if it was conferring some bonus it would be basically unnoticeable.

The real question would be if the +50% missile hitpoints affects the mines in any way since that would actually be really helpful when the mine is planted right next to a ship and it's PD gunners are desperately trying to shoot it down. I am not sure how to test this since I don't think a friendly ship can damage the mines in any way, and getting consistent results from an AI opponent would be basically impossible.

Likewise with the +10% Missile Damage. If it was +100% or 200% then I could reasonably test this but getting the mine to detonate in the exact same spot over and over is basically impossible. The tiny 10% difference would be easily hidden by the noise of the slight differences in the mine positioning I think. I wonder if I can ram my own mines and cause them to detonate? I don't think so but I'll give it a try when I get home. A point blank detonation might be the only way to get an accurate reading.

Anyways I really doubt that missile skill will affect the mines.
 

[PotatoFarmer1]

Ok I have an update and it seems that in fact yes the elite missile specialization does actually improve the damage of the mine!

The test:
I swapped my own character who has no combat skills with a different officer that had the following skills:
Helmsmanship elite, point defence, systems expertise, field modulation, target analysis, and missile specialization elite.

I had to swap out the lvl 7 officer I was testing with before because he had polarized armour elite, damage control, and impact mitigation elite.
To my knowledge none of the skills the level 6 officer I used for the test have any impact on the damage received from the mine, only the damage dealt from the missile specialization elite skill.

So for the test I spawned the mine direct front as close as I could and then drove into it. As I thought you cannot actually impact detonate the mine, instead the mine floats over your ship as if it was a fighter, so what I did instead was drive over the mine and plant it as close to dead centre of the left arm of the Doom as I could.

I kept a spreadsheet open and recorder my results as I swapped back and forth between myself and this lvl 6 officer.
I quickly found that the spreadsheet was useless since the test always produced the exact same numbers:

target analysis plus missile spec:
1399 yellow - 1404 red

just missile spec:
1399 yellow - 1086 red

nill (me):
1400 yellow - 898 red

Support doctrine:
1399 yellow - 673 red

Comparing to my unskilled character as a baseline; the top skilled officer (with missile spec elite and target analysis) was always doing 1 less yellow damage (which I suspect is due to rounding) and ~36% more red damage for a total of ~18% more damage over all.

Just missile spec was doing ~17% more red damage than base for a total of ~7.5% more damage over all.

And of course the support doctrine took the same armour damage but took basically exactly 25% less hull damage.

Even though the missile specialization skill says that it does +10% dmg dealt by missile weapons it seems to be actually doing a bit less than that which I suspect is because armour reduction takes a percentage out of the damage. Over all if I redid this test with already stripped armour I'm sure the bonus would be very close to 10% but either way I think to my surprise I showed that against ship combat both damage boosting combat skills actually do something to the mine damage.

The question still stands whether the point defence skill increases damage against fighters but I literally do not have an officer with only PD skill and no missile elite. I could retrain but it would be a pain in the ass. Maybe I will try that later to see if it does any difference in damage to the combat sim mining drones on the venture or something, but honestly who cares. To my knowledge there is not a single aircraft or destructible missile that can survive an explosion from the mine, and I think I already proved before that the PD skill doesn't increase the radius of the mine explosion so even if the PD skill does increase damage to fighters it wouldn't matter to how you build your officers for the Doom.

TL;DR
An ideal officer for the doom would have systems expertise (for obvious reasons), missile spec elite, and target analysis.

Just from experience you should also strongly consider field modulation elite because it buffs the phase cloak more generally but also reduces the cooldown by 50% which could be the difference between your AI diving just in time or eating a reaper torpedo to the face.

Also: I cannot post a single damn screenshot on this stupid forum!!!!! Just trust me on the data and use your imagination for the pictures!

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[Jackundor]

it's a system weapon on a system that isn't mainly intended for PD usage, so it's wouldn't be classed as PD
also, the range stat doesn't mean the explosion range it means the weapon range, wich already works differently for missile weapons (afaik it only affects AI behaviour and such, and has no actual bearing on how far a missile goes which is based on burn time) and the Doom system isn't even a normal missile weapon

[Not a Pirate]

Hm, according to minelayer2.wpn the mines are medium missiles so they shouldn't benefit from PD. Maybe the scripts interact with it weirdly because it's a ship system?

(On a side note digging through the files I finally confirmed that PD skill does in fact affect fighters)

It's little pieces of quality like this is why I like this forum so much.

Not to mention the HUGE amount of work and testing that the OP does to prove/disprove his initial question.


I'm one of those pilots who throws himself into battle, trusts his own personal skills (not the ones you get from the game even if I have or don't have them) and puts any odd victories or defeats down to the vagaries of war, and moves on.

I find it so interesting that people spend time and effort doing these tests so they can answer 1 tiny specific question.

Respect.

[Not a Pirate]

Ok...Seems I don't know how the "Quote" system works on this forum.....


 

[SCC]

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Aside from that, Doom's Mine Strike doesn't benefit from elite Missile Specialisation, or at least in any meaningful way (since mines have very low cooldown anyway, and fire rate and charge regeneration are two separate things).

[Vanshilar]

target analysis plus missile spec:
1399 yellow - 1404 red

just missile spec:
1399 yellow - 1086 red

nill (me):
1400 yellow - 898 red

Support doctrine:
1399 yellow - 673 red

Thanks for doing the testing! So, each mine doing 1400 damage to armor, presumably blowing up all the armor cells in its range completely, means that the ship had 1000 base armor. Thus the yellow numbers, with the excess going to hull, and thus the red numbers. Since the damage done is damage * hit str / (hit str + armor), noting that the 1) the hit strength is doubled and 2) the damage to armor (but not hull) is doubled since mines do HE damage, we can back out the original damage:

TA + MS elite: 1400 armor + 1404 red -> 2520 HE damage, or around a 26% bonus. This doesn't quite fit the (1 + 15% + 10%) = 1.25x damage if TA and MS added their bonuses (which would have resulted in 1383 hull damage), but doesn't quite fit the 1*1.15*1.10 = 1.265x damage if TA and MS multiplied their damage bonuses (which would have resulted in 1413 hull damage. Instead, it's somewhere in between. I suspect it's actually that TA and MS multiplies their damage bonuses together though based on some quick testing of my own.

MS elite: 1400 armor + 1086 red -> 2194 HE damage, or around a 9.7% increase in damage. Not sure why it's slightly off from MS's stated damage bonus of 10% (which would've given 1092 hull damage).

nil: 1400 armor + 898 red -> 2000 HE damage (which is what mines are supposed to do)

Support Doctrine: 1400 armor + 673 red -> 2000 HE damage, but the hull damage was reduced by 25% due to SD providing Damage Control.

So yeah there's a bit of error (which can come from a number of sources, such as CR of the ship, or if the fleet had Tactical Drills, etc.), but overall it looks like mines are affected by the Target Analysis and the Missile Spec elite damage bonuses, which is good to know.

In fact, doing some quick testing, it seems like the damage bonus from Target Analysis is actually multiplicative, while the others are additive. So TA is actually better than other damage bonuses. In other words, the damage for mines seems to be:

2000 HE damage * (1 + 10% if 100% CR + 5% if Tactical Drills + 10% if Missile Spec) * (1 + Target Analysis bonus based on hull size)

For example, at 100% CR, with TD, MS, and TA, with 1250 armor, I'm seeing 1750 armor damage and 1209 hull damage. This works out to the above perfectly, when considering that 100% CR means 10% less incoming damage, so the shot ends up doing 2000 * (1 + 0.1 CR + 0.05 TD + 0.1 MS) * (1 + 0.15 TA) * (1 - 0.1 CR) = 2587.5 base HE damage. Note that the final term is because since this is at 100% CR, the ship also takes 10% less damage, which in this case is coded as the incoming shot has 10% less damage (which also means 10% less hit strength).

[PotatoFarmer1]

Wow thanks for the comment @Vanishilar!

You have a much deeper knowledge of the game than I do! Despite how this whole thread went on my part I am actually not a min-maxer type player.

I initially was simply wondering why my AI officer seemed to be performing much stronger than my own officer. As it turns out it was not the explosion radius as I initially suspected but simply the lethality of the mine that was so much higher.

In fact, doing some quick testing, it seems like the damage bonus from Target Analysis is actually multiplicative, while the others are additive. So TA is actually better than other damage bonuses. In other words, the damage for mines seems to be:

2000 HE damage * (1 + 10% if 100% CR + 5% if Tactical Drills + 10% if Missile Spec) * (1 + Target Analysis bonus based on hull size)

In all of my tests the CR of the ship was exactly the same since I did them all at the same time in the same pause state, all I was trying to calculate was the comparative difference between the options.
The thing is because I am running a no combat skill main character I would have even had 15% less CR than this pilot anyways since I think he had combat endurance as well, and on top of both missile spec and target analysis. My initial suspicion was proven right though not in the way I initially thought.

Still it's good to know this little detail and it has shown me a clear picture of what pilot skills to prioritize on my next playthrough when I am leveling them with a Doom in mind!

[Daynen]

Jayzus.  Like mines NEEDED more damage...