A discussion on balance between alpha and DPS weapons

[Jaaskinal]

For a while I felt like I should make this post in suggestions. Originally it was going to discuss how alpha weapons consistently outperform DPS weapons, (and how they're OP and plox nerf) but I feel like I need to be better educated on the topic before I can discuss it.

Just some basics off the bat. When I talk about DPS, I mean 'damage per second,' but when I say DPS weapon, I really just mean high rate of fire weapons that focus more on DPS. The same can be said about alpha where alpha just refers to the initial damage dealt by a weapon ignoring reload, when I say alpha weapon, I mean a very low rate of fire weapon.

Now on to the meat of this discussion, alpha weapons outperform DPS weapons against shields.

This is a graph of the damage a 1/1 Cannon/cannon system would cause if it landed every shot.

(This is actually a graph of the step function, but what'd you know, when you have 1000 steps in 100 units, it looks a bit like a line ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)​

And this is a graph of the damage a 1/1 Beam/pulse system would cause if it landed every shot.

​

Looks pretty normal, right? The cannon's damage rises slowly and consistently while the beam does all of its damage upfront, reloads, and then dumps its damage again much later. It's interesting when we overlap them though.

​

The beams system always puts out the same or higher damage the cannon does. Why is that? Well, all weapons in the game have the same DPS…sort of. They all have the same DPS when they've reloaded. Every time the beam fires, and reloads, it does 1,000 damage over 50 seconds, 20 DPS. Every time the cannon fires, and reloads, it does 2 damage over .1 seconds, 20 DPS. Even though all weapons have the same DPS, alpha weapons have a higher damage over time because of how they use their damage.

Back before I thought about this more, I thought this was OP, and you can clearly see why. Alpha weapons should win every fight. Why isn't this the case though? There's one balancing factor that makes alpha a poor choice against ships*. The exponential decay in system damage and the risk of over-penetration destroys alpha weapons abilities to effectively and efficiently take down ships health. Lots of low damage, high rate of fire projectiles cut through systems like butter.

TL;DR; alpha OP on shields, DPS OP on hull, refrain from using one in the others job unless you have a reason, it doesn't work so well. In addition to that, causing bigger sways in damage is better.

Slight side note, this doesn't actually really change much, the best case scenario with beam/pulse is that you gain 50 seconds of hull breaking. That's not even guarenteed, to get the most out of it you'd have to purposely get your alpha damage to barely finish their shields off.

Side note side note, if you want to look and interact with graphs like this, go to https://www.desmos.com/calculator and type in 'y=(alpha damage of weapon)ceil(ROF of the weapon (10/1 for cannon/cannon at 100%, 1/50 for beam/pulse at 100%))x'

*I don't view aim as an issue for a few reasons.
1) I chose beams because beams are hitscan. If I put my cursor on you and click I win.
2) I have seen people miss with cannons for minutes at a time. Cannons are not the easiest thing in the world to aim when people are accelerating and changing speeds through 3d space.
3) You can't really balance aim beyond ROF, hitscanning, lockon and projectile speed. Cannons aren't about to get hitscanning or lockon anytime soon, but beam/cannon's already hitscan. Cannons ROF is already good enough, and the projectile speed should be good enough (might need a bit of a buff...maybe.) but it still doesn't compare to the derpy accuracy of beams when used correctly.

 

[NuclearFun]

One big negative of alpha weapons is the additional power capacity that is needed to actually fire a shot (that issue is of course dependent on ship and weapon size).

 

[Edymnion]

One big negative of alpha weapons is the additional power capacity that is needed to actually fire a shot (that issue is of course dependent on ship and weapon size).

Yup, an alpha weapon costs an arm and a leg to fire, relegating them to larger ships that can afford to be carrying tens of millions of power capacity, where a much smaller ship could carry the DPS version of the same weapon quite easily.

This also ends up lending itself well to having DPS weapons as turrets, and alpha strikers as ship mounted weapons. Both have the same DPS overall, but the lower constant power drain of the DPS turrets is far easier to manage compared to the massive power drain of launching an alpha strike.

So each system has what it's best at, and you're going to do best if you have a good balance of weapons instead of trying to go all one or the other. A pure DPS ship is going to take forever to kill something, while an alpha striker is completely screwed if the target survives the opening salvo and now has 30 seconds to a minute of pure retaliation time.

Heck, thats why when I build missile turrets these days I automatically build in some cannon/cannon backups so that they can keep contributing to the fight during those long reloads.

 

[Winterhome]

What I've pretty much determined is that an alpha damage assassin ship is great, but alpha damage for endurance based fleet ships is not quite as good.

If you can one hit kill someone's shields, then you've made some sacrifices in other areas to be able to support the power capacity - though power capacity is a lot easier to fit onto a ship than the regen required to stably fire a similarly enormous DPS cannon, even with docked reactors.

For instance, a 1.5 million block ship could potentially put out 100 million alpha damage in one go, at the cost of needing 500 million power storage - which, in terms of raw blocks, is 500,000 unconnected power capacitors - much, much less if they're all connected with the group bonus. That's a LOT of blocks you need to find room for. But at the same time, you're potentially one hit killing the shields of a non-tank ship at around 2mil blocks, and if the builder is a moron, up to 6mil blocks.

A DPS based ship cannot do that. But the assassin ship can only do it once, for comparison, before it's more or less spent and it cannot use any other alpha based weapons for another several minutes due to the difficulty in making a non-doomcube ship with regen, capacity, and an absolutely monstrous alpha gun.

...so burst DPS.



Now, another thing to take into consideration - the 10% Shield Recharge rate when under fire.
Alpha damage ships can get away with only having 5% to 7% of a ship's recharge rate in effective DPS, as long as they're able to alpha derp its shields down past the stage where they can no longer keep up with its regeneration.

 

[Jaaskinal]

On the subject of power, it's a very valid arguement against alpha weapons when you have limited space. Power is extremely cheap in relation to the weapons and shields that it supports though. Power is also funny, because while you get a bonus on small ships with regen, and your bonus gets to be a smaller and smaller portion of the ships power with larger ships, power capacity grows exponentially. Alpha also requires the same amount of power DPS weapons do over time, similar to the damage graph. In my example with the 1/1 cannon, each block requires 10 energy per .1 seconds, 100 e/s. The beam requires 5000 e over 50 seconds, 100 e/s. To be power stable, DPS and alpha weapons just need the same power regeneration requirements as each other. Capacity however is a large burden to alpha weapon ships size.

 

[amimai]

Or you can build your pulse death ray in a giant waffleboard formation and chew through a 100x100x100 section oh hull in a single shot

Course this assumes you are using a massive 600x250x150 behemoths as your boat.

But what you are discussing is bordering on obsurdity because of the size of dedicated weapons/capacitors involved.

 

[Keptick]

Alpha: Excellent vs shields. Sucks VS blocks.
Constant: Moderate VS shields, good VS blocks

Balance? Looks like it. Just because one is better against a certain form of defense doesn't make it OP. If you split your weapons in two to have alpha and constant damage then half of it is unused for part of the fight.

People often confuse OPness with niche roles, not the same thing at all.

 

[Winterhome]

Alpha: Excellent vs shields. Sucks VS blocks.
Constant: Moderate VS shields, good VS blocks

Balance? Looks like it. Just because one is better against a certain form of defense doesn't make it OP. If you split your weapons in two to have alpha and constant damage then half of it is unused for part of the fight.

Seriously... variety and flavor are a thing... Do not confuse niche roles with OPness.

I wouldn't say alpha is OP, and I don't know if Jaas is either. We were talking about it in private, and she pretty much said up front that it's only better for shields and that it's shit for blocks :P


There's a fun bit of meta play going around, though, based around the idea of alpha damage vs. regen and mixing alpha guns with DPS guns.

I'm personally of the belief that if you're using an alpha gun, your DPS hull buster is going to be inferior to a DPS hull buster you would use with a DPS based ship. If it's NOT inferior, then you're running on negative power and praying your capacity holds out long enough to get the kill. If, by some bizarre voodoo you manage to have the regen to power both an enormous alpha gun and an enormous hull busting DPS gun, then your ship is lacking in other areas that will also get you killed.
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Or you can build your pulse death ray in a giant waffleboard formation and chew through a 100x100x100 section oh hull in a single shot

Course this assumes you are using a massive 600x250x150 behemoths as your boat.

But what you are discussing is bordering on obsurdity because of the size of dedicated weapons/capacitors involved.

have you seen the ships that people fly around lately?

 

[Keptick]

Or you can build your pulse death ray in a giant waffleboard formation and chew through a 100x100x100 section oh hull in a single shot

Course this assumes you are using a massive 600x250x150 behemoths as your boat.

But what you are discussing is bordering on obsurdity because of the size of dedicated weapons/capacitors involved.

And have a 1000% power cost penalty? Yea, not going to work our that great.

 

[Winterhome]

The only alpha damage based anti-hull weapon that even comes close to being good is a missile weapon, and that's specifically because missile damage distribution towards blocks does not diminish across the damage dealt nearly as much.

You keep adding damage to the shot, that crater is going to keep getting bigger. Not so with cannons and beams - they have diminishing returns on their penetration.

Missiles, of course, have their own problems to contend with - notably, point defense and impact position block density. If your 200,000,000 damage missile-pulse-explosive hits a greeble floating 20 meters in the air, then 80% of your damage is going into space or more.

edit: Oh, and missile-missile. Swarmers are okay as armor stripping, but I've been finding more and more often these days that swarm missiles don't actually hit anything important on the first few salvos - generally just armor blocks, shield capacitors, and capital reactor bricks. People are learning about missile penetration depth, it seems.

 

[amimai]

And have a 1000% power cost penalty? Yea, not going to work our that great.

most of my ships have a silicon heart made out of weapon computers
logic controlled firing is so easy to set up, and is necessary for waffle boards in any case

have you seen the ships that people fly around lately?

no, my poor computers weak heart would give out.
but i was leaning more along the lines of "ships of equal size" kind of statement, i doubt its space efficient to have weapons that require 10x their size in capacitors in equal engagments

 

[Jaaskinal]

most of my ships have a silicon heart made out of weapon computers
logic controlled firing is so easy to set up, and is necessary for waffle boards in any case

As a person who loves logic and is around people who love combat, no, no they really don't.
You can set up every weapon with logic, we've proven it by making clocks fast enough to use cannon/cannon effectively, but they don't work. Logic fired weapons are linked to the hull of the ship, and the player has no effect on their aim with their camera/cursor. The only effective logic fired weapon is missile/missile, and if you're in a 'fleet' it's useless. Turrets can use waffle boards with their AI, so can fixed guns, but you have limited control over them and they're pretty derpy.

 

[amimai]

its not like you will miss your opponent with your waffleboard cannon when his ship is half a sector in size...

The alternative is to just have like 100 separate turrets for a hilarious broadside effect using n^3 module beam/pulse turret cubes bolted into the hull

But I'm not going to argue for the viability of hull mount capital ship guns, large turrets>guns on anything larger then a fighter simply because those 500m+ boats can't manoeuvre.

Also any gun doing over 10000 damage a shot will over penetrate most things

 

[Lecic]

its not like you will miss your opponent with your waffleboard cannon when his ship is half a sector in size...

Default sector size is 5km. Most people aren't building 2.5km ships. Are you playing on an outdated config?

 

[Jaaskinal]

its not like you will miss your opponent with your waffleboard cannon when his ship is half a sector in size...

The alternative is to just have like 100 separate turrets for a hilarious broadside effect using n^3 module beam/pulse turret cubes bolted into the hull

But I'm not going to argue for the viability of hull mount capital ship guns, large turrets>guns on anything larger then a fighter simply because those 500m+ boats can't manoeuvre.

Also any gun doing over 10000 damage a shot will over penetrate most things

 

[Matt_Bradock]

With these sector sizes, even hitting with hitscan weapons can prove to be really troublesome. Like, REALLY. Ever tried to even FIND a ship that's 5 kilometers from you? You don't see it, maybe a few pixels if it's a 10K+ mass frigate, and maybe even something vaguely resembling different than a star in the background if it's a 100K+ mass capital. Maybe. If it moves, you'd better be FaZe clan 360 n05c0p3 snipar mashtur to hit it with cannons, and pixel hunter extraordinaire to find the green blip in order to hit it with beams. And that is, if you can aim properly.
If you try a spinal-mounted logic waffleboard at that distance, well... I've got bad news for you in terms of your chances to hit anything other than vacuum.

With these sector sizes, aim means a whole damn lot. Even when talking about capital-on-capital combat.
BVR (Beyond Visual Range) capability is something that's currently becoming the mainstream development in real-life aircraft too. In StarMade, that means beam support weapons mounted on turrets and missile/beam setups on turrets and/or the main ship. Which are, alpha weapons (maybe except cannon/beam, 3 seconds reload time isn't that taxing)
If you want to DPS them down, you have to get close enough to have a good enough chance of actually landing those shots and dish out your deeps.
Which will mean that if they have a range advantage, you'll have to endure or avoid incoming fire somehow until you can actually start returning it.
Which is, I guess, what's a good thrust/mass ratio, shielding, and a radar jammer's for.

 

[Jaaskinal]

~snip~

At that range, some things even become unreliable with AI accuracy. Missile/beam is the easiest one to argue against with the increased accuracy of PD. (I don't wholeheartedly like the arguement, because you can distract PD pretty easily if you have a fast clock and you know how.) Cannon/beam and Beam/beam both suffer a bit from AI accuracy. The default of 10 (don't want to make an example with it exactly, but scale >_>) just means that a shot will miss a 1m^3 block at 10m 1% time. 10m^3 at 100m and 100m^3 at 1000m. Even with an AI accuracy of 1000, an engagement at 5km will miss a 50m^3 1% of the time. That wouldn't be so bad, but since you have AI aiming at random system blocks, having shots that can go more than fifty meters off-target is not great.
TBH, if you decrease your FOV to ridiculously low amounts you can make long-range engagements slightly easier on yourself.
Pixel hunting still sucks though.

 

[Matt_Bradock]

Hell you can overload PD even with just a few small turrets spamming 1 block missile-1 block cannon setups by the dozen. No need for sophisticated rapid pulsers.

 

[amimai]

Wait I don't get what you are discussing...

If you are arguing about fights at 3km+ it's missiles, that is your only real option.

DPS v ALPHA only matters in fighting that has already closed to spitting distance. That's the only distance where direct fire works at.

hell i would advocate that it would be smarter to use towed/external mounted missile pods with your main ship rather then waste internal space on missile systems.

Just drag a 1k mass AI controlled missile/beam/explosive disposable skeleton ship that has just power/capacitors into battle and drop them off to provide missile fire support, then go in with your main boat with the beams and cannons to Swiss cheese anything that survives.

my working assumption is that you are discussing the best way to get killing power/mass when fighting close quarters, if its not please tell me...

 

[Winterhome]

my working assumption is that you are discussing the best way to get killing power/mass when fighting close quarters, if its not please tell me...

No, we're talking about the reality of combat with ships over 100,000 blocks in servers.

I personally am able to reliably hit targets at 2-3km with machineguns, but any further than that and they're able to maneuver faster than my shots' travel time, resulting in increasingly large miss ratios.

With waffleboards you also have the problem of penetration of armor. A BIG problem. I've been finding that I need to dramatically downsize the number of outputs and make the outputs much larger to even get through peoples' armor in the first place.

Incidentally, beams are trash against anything using standard or advanced armor - don't use them unless they're exclusively for shield killing, mate.