Hit Rate and Effective DPS vs. Power Efficiency

[Lecic]

rapid-fire weapons are SO MUCH better by the virtue of compensating player's lack of skill to track a moving target!

It's often not even a player's "lack of skill" to track a target. It's often server lag. Did lag cause you to miss with your c/p because the ship suddenly jumped forward because your client was slightly behind? Oh well, there goes 16 seconds of damage, down the drain. Did lag cause you to miss with your c/c? Just readjust and continue doing damage.

Sure, you could have a secondary c/c in case you miss with your c/p, but you'd be getting significantly more damage output if you just dumped all of your damage into a c/c instead of splitting it up.

 

[AtraUnam]

Upon reconsidering the uses of such weapons based on real life I'd like to change my vote; IRL rapid weapons are the weapon of choice for the majority of infantry, slow firing weapons like sniper rifles are generally reserved for one of two situations: either the enemy doesn't know you are there; or the enemy is otherwise unable to shoot you. Furthermore a sniper rifle is usually used with the intention of outright killing the target on the first shot and that is where Starmade seems to fall short. Jamming may provide concealment but there is no way for even a heavily specialized ship to one shot a well built ship of similar mass. Theoretically a high damage missile could do it but those are very easy to spot and shoot down which is rather counter-productive for the purposes of sniping.

 

[Rokiyo]

Upon reconsidering the uses of such weapons based on real life I'd like to change my vote; IRL rapid weapons are the weapon of choice for the majority of infantry, slow firing weapons like sniper rifles are generally reserved for one of two situations: either the enemy doesn't know you are there; or the enemy is otherwise unable to shoot you. Furthermore a sniper rifle is usually used with the intention of outright killing the target on the first shot and that is where Starmade seems to fall short. Jamming may provide concealment but there is no way for even a heavily specialized ship to one shot a well built ship of similar mass. Theoretically a high damage missile could do it but those are very easy to spot and shoot down which is rather counter-productive for the purposes of sniping.

I think it's more that rapid fire weapons are used when the target is hard to hit and extremely fragile.

If you look at armored vehicles and navy vessels, rapid fire weapons are used to shoot small or distant targets like infantry, aircraft, etc who all stop functioning after one or two hits.

Tank cannons, battleship cannon batteries and missiles of all kinds tend to be fired extremely slowly, and they are used for taking down big things like buildings, other tanks and other battleships.

One seeming exception to the rule is the A10 Warthog, but keep in mind the purpose of its main gun is to kill the crew inside a tank, not destroy the tank itself. Even there the intended target is something you only have to graze once to incapacitate.

 

[AtraUnam]

I think it's more that rapid fire weapons are used when the target is hard to hit and extremely fragile.

If you look at armored vehicles and navy vessels, rapid fire weapons are used to shoot small or distant targets like infantry, aircraft, etc who all stop functioning after one or two hits.

Tank cannons, battleship cannon batteries and missiles of all kinds tend to be fired extremely slowly, and they are used for taking down big things like buildings, other tanks and other battleships.

One seeming exception to the rule is the A10 Warthog, but keep in mind the purpose of its main gun is to kill the crew inside a tank, not destroy the tank itself. Even there the intended target is something you only have to graze once to incapacitate.

The main point still stands, currently outside of missiles there is no way to build an effective main battle cannon that can one shot other vessels of equal size.

 

[Rokiyo]

The main point still stands, currently outside of missiles there is no way to build an effective main battle cannon that can one shot other vessels of equal size.

I disagree. Real life battle cannons are not used for one shotting their targets, they are used for punching through armor.

Battleships and tanks do not one shot each other with their main cannons.

 

[AtraUnam]

I disagree. Real life battle cannons are not used for one shotting their targets, they are used for punching through armor.

Battleships and tanks do not one shot each other with their main cannons.

Tanks are designed to survive hits from other tanks, battleships are sunk by crazed men in speed boats full of dynamite; in Starmade a simple miner can easily survive both unless the ship doing the shooting or the kamikaze'ing is already larger than it.

 

[DivineEvil]

Tanks are designed to survive hits from other tanks, battleships are sunk by crazed men in speed boats full of dynamite; in Starmade a simple miner can easily survive both unless the ship doing the shooting or the kamikaze'ing is already larger than it.

Tanks are designed to migitate the weapons from infantry before anything else. It is the fundamental aspect of the design for being able to survive and protect the crew against rifles, machine guns, grenades and missiles to the best ability of that design. Only heavy battle tanks were designed specifically to also fight against other tanks and survive their calibers.

Starmade is different first of all in terms of customization - you're basically making your own Skills bar with abilities, and their damage, range, AoE, effects and Cooldown is all up to you to decide. Pulse weapons are your high-cooldown abilities; they posses the largest damage potential per "cast", which can be trasfered into any effect, and they allow you to use other weapons while on cooldown freely. CCs on the other hand are your basic attacks, that wouldn't allow you to launch those EMP missiles you have, or anything else for that matter, otherwise you'll have to stop holding a LMB.

A ship, that has nothing but a bunch of CC groups is not impressive to me, as it would take just a couple of armor layers on the front of the ship to make them inefficient at reaching any underlying structures. Pulse guns are like APDS; they can make their shots count even trough multi-layer advanced armor with Ahp and Punch defensive.

It's often not even a player's "lack of skill" to track a target. It's often server lag. Did lag cause you to miss with your c/p because the ship suddenly jumped forward because your client was slightly behind? Oh well, there goes 16 seconds of damage, down the drain. Did lag cause you to miss with your c/c? Just readjust and continue doing damage.

Issues with lag are not tied into in-game balance, and are not supposed to be.

 

[Lecic]

Issues with lag are not tied into in-game balance, and are not supposed to be.

The game will always have some sort of server lag. If you think you shouldn't account for that in your balance, you are hilariously wrong.

 

[DivineEvil]

The game will always have some sort of server lag. If you think you shouldn't account for that in your balance, you are hilariously wrong.

No, I'm not wrong. You have no argument to tell me that. Math isn't supposed to solve lag issues. I've been playing a lot of games and I've learned the hard way, that tweaking the balance in consideration to techincal issues is retarded. You'll have to tweak it all the time as SHR improves or data traffic is reduced and in any negative circumstances. It's up to the players to make decisions based on lag and how much it affects their game. Balance and netcode are completely separate aspects and has to be improved as such. No sentient developer would do it as you suggest.

 

[Rokiyo]

I've been doing a bit of testing and research, thought my findings would be relevant here:

While explosive effect on a cannon is indeed awesome, anything over 10% has no additional effect (radius capped at 1) so you can make more room for more cannon & pulse modules.

I'm currently running double-barrelled turrets, consisting of:

• 2 groups of 150 cannon barrels each
• 1 group of 150 damage pulse modules
• 1 group of 30 explosive modules

Each barrel deals 20k total damage, which penetrates 31 blocks deep in a 1-radius cross pattern (5 blocks per layer), with a reload time of 8.5ms. Even this is enough to punch right through an Isanth from end-to-end.

My current line of thinking is to keep my damage per projectile at around the 20k mark, and to adjust the balance of cannons to pulses to get my fire rate as high as possible for that damage level.

The reason I am not using beam modules for my secondary is that even with AI difficulty set to mean, these turrets becoming woefully inaccurate past 2km, and so increasing the range at which Bobby will take pot-shots at enemies is a actually a bad thing (particularly when it is ignoring targets it COULD hit more easily).

 

[Lecic]

anything over 10% has no additional effect (radius capped at 1)

Not exactly. 10% means it only has 10% of the explosive effect, so on smaller weapons, you won't be breaking the blocks fully like if you went to a higher percentage. With much larger guns, though, this is true.

 

[Rokiyo]

Not exactly. 10% means it only has 10% of the explosive effect, so on smaller weapons, you won't be breaking the blocks fully like if you went to a higher percentage. With much larger guns, though, this is true.

Has something changed since these bug reports?

1178: The config values <BeamExplosiveRadius> and <CannonExplosiveRadius> are currently not being used. Default in game value is 1.
Comment given by Schema: "marked with comment that it is not implemented and capped. keeping it for potential use later"
Closed by Lancake

1386: Rejected by Lancake as a duplicate of the above, with the same comment quoted.

T346: Marked as issue affecting current release, bug listed as "offensive explosive effect on cannons and beams stops gaining after 10%"

My belief that the explosive effect does nothing after 10% is based on the above reports and my in-game testing where 10%, 50% and 100% a seemed to have an identical effect on my 20k dmg cannons mentioned above.

 

[Lecic]

Has something changed since these bug reports?

1178: The config values <BeamExplosiveRadius> and <CannonExplosiveRadius> are currently not being used. Default in game value is 1.
Comment given by Schema: "marked with comment that it is not implemented and capped. keeping it for potential use later"
Closed by Lancake

1386: Rejected by Lancake as a duplicate of the above, with the same comment quoted.

T346: Marked as issue affecting current release, bug listed as "offensive explosive effect on cannons and beams stops gaining after 10%"

My belief that the explosive effect does nothing after 10% is based on the above reports and my in-game testing where 10%, 50% and 100% a seemed to have an identical effect on my 20k dmg cannons mentioned above.

Try it with a weaker cannon.

 

[Winterhome]

Has something changed since these bug reports?

1178: The config values <BeamExplosiveRadius> and <CannonExplosiveRadius> are currently not being used. Default in game value is 1.
Comment given by Schema: "marked with comment that it is not implemented and capped. keeping it for potential use later"
Closed by Lancake

1386: Rejected by Lancake as a duplicate of the above, with the same comment quoted.

T346: Marked as issue affecting current release, bug listed as "offensive explosive effect on cannons and beams stops gaining after 10%"

My belief that the explosive effect does nothing after 10% is based on the above reports and my in-game testing where 10%, 50% and 100% a seemed to have an identical effect on my 20k dmg cannons mentioned above.

The percentage of explosive effect on beams/cannons isn't the blast radius
The percentage of explosive effect is the percentage of damage being routed to radius damage instead of primary block damage

 

[Nickizzy]

If you build the alpha weapons right you can do massive amounts of damage. I have built a cannon capible of punching a hole 7 by 7 and 50 deep, into an enemy ship.

And How long does that take to reload, and how big is it, how expensive is it, and how much powercap does it need? Damage is not the only factor in combat.

Small ships will be weak until starmade change to skill based game rather than bigger box based game. We can balanc weapons how we want, but until the core machanics of fighting change, any weapon balanc changes are useles.

How should combat change? Any suggestions anyone?

 

[Spartan-228]

And How long does that take to reload, and how big is it, how expensive is it, and how much powercap does it need? Damage is not the only factor in combat.

How should combat change? Any suggestions anyone?

Well First the powers usage was quit high on that one so I made it a little smaller, the reload was quit nice like three or four seconds. Also combine it with explosive and the high alpha damage spinel mounted cannons are scary.

As for combat changing, it already has. The new thrust system has made it so smaller ships have better acceleration, better speed, and can turn faster than larger ships. This is a massive game changer, as it means smaller ships can literally fly rings around the titans.

 

[nightrune]

This thread is a bit old but after some testing myself. Cc is still the winner, and its pretty lame. Lame as in not fun. I want big beams that bore holes through things. Right now beams are pretty much useless except for delivering effects.

 

[Nickizzy]

the reload was like three or four seconds.

Dang! Can I have the stats on that gun?