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.
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.
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.
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