Questions regarding Alpha Damage

[bricox01]

I had a question regarding damage from alpha strike weapons.

If an alpha strike hits for, say, 500K, doesn't most of that get wasted on the small number of blocks it actually hits?

Based on discussions I've seen on the forums, it would seem that you only need enough to guarantee breaking advanced armour and everything else is wasted (except vs shields).

Can someone with a better understanding of the system please clear this up?

 

[Non]

If by alpha you mean 1 group beam/beam or cannon/beam setups, then yes, they are only really useful for shield damage and should have ion effect with a percentage somewhere in the high 90s that still allows it to break through several layers of armor.

But if its multiple groups or missile alpha, then they can do good block damage. Your 500k damage in single group beam/beam form would drill one small hole through the enemy ship, but if you made it a bunch of groups or put it in missile form it would distribute that 500k over a greater number of blocks.

 

[bricox01]

So, going with a mix of cannons and beams, what secondaries and effects are going to be the most expedient once the target's shields are down?

I tend to put my guns on my turrets and then handle missiles personally. I'm a pretty horrid shot in the game.

 

[Panpiper]

Each 'bullet' should do 4000 damage if the weapon's target is intended to be player piloted ships. (4000 is what you need to crack advanced armor that has been fully reinforced with effects.) You can get away with 2000 per bullet if the turret is meant to engage mostly drones (drones can't use effects). If your weapon system is doing 8000 per bullet, break it into two barrels that each do 4000. The best effect for tertiaires is punch, as it will eat through the armor HP fastest. For cannon secondaries, in my opinion it is either beam for longer range, slow firing, or cannon for short range rapid fire. Cannon/beam weapons can be quite small and still get to the 4000 damage threshold, but they only fire one such bullet every four seconds (you can put more than one in a turret, consider putting in lots of them). Cannon/cannon weapons would need 4000 blocks (in the current system) to get each bullet doing 4000 damage, but it would do that ten times a second.

Beams were broken for so long, I have for all intents ignored them. They are useful for a beam/beam/ion or beam/pulse/ion gun meant to strip shields. However they are mostly for people who intend to 'start' a fight, as their range is not great.

 

[Dire Venom]

Some good anwsers already. I'll just add that missiles are by far the quickest way to de-block a large ship.
Large nukes with 50+m range require a significant ammount of damage to vapourise everything within it's max sphere of influence, and testing vs large dummy test blocks can help to understand this a lot. Especialy if your hitting a whole bunch of armour blocks with passive.
Decent Missile-Cannons set ups can also tear ships (stationary or slow) apart far more effectivly than a comparable cannon set up.

Missiles are also the only weapon that can effectivly use large ammounts of damage per projectile to mass-deconstruct hull/systems, and thus high alpha.
Shooting a bunch of holes straight through a target is a lot less effective than just blowing a big chunk of it off. Unfortuantly Beams and pulses have very limmited use currently, due to their firing mechanics (pulse needs to be redone and beams are limited by tick rate and other factors)

 

[Non]

Beams were broken for so long, I have for all intents ignored them. They are useful for a beam/beam/ion or beam/pulse/ion gun meant to strip shields. However they are mostly for people who intend to 'start' a fight, as their range is not great.

Poor choice to ignore them. They do still have some issues when it comes to sector boundaries if I remember correctly. They are useful for more than just beam/beam and beam/pulse (I have never used beam/pulse because it is not long range and has very high power consumption, and therefore not very useful), as beam/cannon is as good as/ if not better than cannon/cannon in practice (in theory c/c would be better because more projectiles per second, but b/c is much easier to score hits with). And lastly, beam/beam has great range.

 

[Panpiper]

And lastly, beam/beam has great range.

"Great range" is a subjective statement. Beam/beam has half the range of cannon/beam and one third the range of missile/beam. If you are fighting a ship that has a higher thrust to weight ratio and the fight starts outside of your range, you are completely screwed.

My own ships tend to be either completely optimized for missile/beam duels with a very high thrust to mass ratio to keep the distance, or cannon/beam with an even higher thrust to mass ratio (as I may need to close the range on missile/beam ships that are trying to keep the range). The only way a beam armed ship is going to be able to range on me is if they started the fight within that range, and even then, if they are not high thrust themselves, I am going to be opening up the range fast.

I am not a fan of beams, for reasons.
[doublepost=1508418981,1508418414][/doublepost]Missiles are a game unto themselves. Having just one or a few missiles is almost entirely useless as point defense turrets can easily handle a few such missiles. If you intend to use missiles offensively, you want to have large numbers of them so as to swamp the ability of point defense to shoot them down. Damage dealing missiles should do roughly 400K damage. More than that and you are usually just adding damage to already destroyed blocks. In addition to those damage dealing missiles however, you also want a substantial number of decoy missiles (1/1 block only).

The exception to all this is perhaps a cannon armed ship having just one missile/pulse/explosive missile, that can be hull fired. If one's cannons have already stripped a ship of it's point defense turrets, you can close in for the kill to finish it off with one big nuke.

 

[Non]

Beam/beam has half the range of cannon/beam

Yeah, I looked this up almost immediately after I finished my previous response, and was a little surprised. However, I seriously question your ability to effectively engage at these greater distances (assuming 10 km sectors or larger), unless you are relying entirely on turrets. And if you really do need to manage your ranges this much to be effective, then your ships are probably

mostly for people who intend to 'start' a fight

Ok, on to missiles, the two effects that are decent for missiles are piercing and explosive, explosive missiles should be about as large as you are willing to make them, up to the point where they can clear the entire radius. Size for piercing missiles is relatively arbitrary but don't make them too big. And the only secondary that is really all that good for missiles is beam (when building the array for damage), though I have never used missile/pulse, but its speed is very low, which significantly limits what it can be expected to do.

 

[AtraUnam]

This is very rough but generally for every 10 fold inrease in damage you only break 3 times as many blocks. This of course means alpha damage is simply a terrible idea in practice, as for damage per projectile (dpp) Panpiper is correct in his statement that you generally shouldn't go over 4000 dpp (except for missiles of course).

Spoiler: Damage chart

Damage to break advanced armor has gone down slightly since the making of this chart but its generally accurate.

 

[Panpiper]

I seriously question your ability to effectively engage at these greater distances (assuming 10 km sectors or larger), unless you are relying entirely on turrets.

I do in fact largely rely on turrets. The only pilot fired weapon I will have on board usually is a PD cannon/cannon array (in addition to a 'lot' of PD turrets). Any ship I build that does not rely on turrets tends to be sufficiently small, that I am building it to be an AI piloted ship. It is rare for me to build a ship less than around 100K mass, and at that size, you 'need' to rely on turrets. Even on the rare occasion I build something like a miner that is not intended as a battleminer (which would mass ~100K), it's armament will typically be turrets to more easily engage pirates.

I do NOT build ships designed to 'start' fights. If I did, I would be building a very different, point blank sort of ship, that would 'only' be good at killing ships at virtually zero range. 'That' ship would have mostly pilot fired weaponry, except for numerous tiny missile/cannon turrets with which to overload a ship's point defense. It would have a beam/pulse/ion cannon to insta-drop a shield, and a few missile/pulse/explosive missiles. It would start the fight literally right on top of the ship to be attacked. It would also be completely useless for anything else.

Oh, and that attacker ship would be nearly useless against the kind of ship I typically fly, believe it or not. There are defenses versus such tactics. I would however need to be aware of the ship in order to effectively defend against it. If it caught me asleep at the wheel, I would probably be toast, assuming the nukes could both take down my shield 'and' gut my ship with the first shot. If they can't, they aren't getting a second shot, they'll be dead before the nukes recharge. (The ion beam by the way would be useless.)

 

[Non]

Well, I see your point, I still disagree with your methodology, but in any case we have, between our mostly conflicting opinions, effectively answered the question originally posed in the thread, and because of that I don't see much reason to continue.

I apologize for not addressing this sooner

I tend to put my guns on my turrets and then handle missiles personally. I'm a pretty horrid shot in the game.

you should really put your missiles on turrets to get rid of lock time, assuming you are using missile/beam.

 

[kulbolen]

b/b has better effective range than c/b.

 

[Calhoun]

What Veilith said. Neither you or your turrets are going to hit anything at long range with C/B.

 

[Dire Venom]

Has anyone drawn up charts for AI accuracy at various ranges:? Does this change per weapon (excluding missiles)?

 

[bricox01]

you should really put your missiles on turrets to get rid of lock time, assuming you are using missile/beam.

The two reasons I don't are energy management and to give me something to do besides sit and watch.

Thanks all for the advice.

 

[Scypio]

Has anyone drawn up charts for AI accuracy at various ranges:? Does this change per weapon (excluding missiles)?

This depends a lot on the settings of the server you are on, the lag and the speed of the target as well as the target itself. That can't be done.

 

[Dire Venom]

This depends a lot on the settings of the server you are on, the lag and the speed of the target as well as the target itself. That can't be done.

From experiance then, I'm sure some players would at least have an idea how effective their turrets are at various ranges XD
It can't just be all blind guessing right:?

 

[Non]

To my knowledge, missile turrets are pretty much always going to be about the same kind of accuracy, but it really is pretty impossible to make any strong statements about turret accuracy beyond that.

In general, if a server has good ai accuracy setting my beam turrets are relatively reliable out to their max range.

 

[Scypio]

From experiance then, I'm sure some players would at least have an idea how effective their turrets are at various ranges XD
It can't just be all blind guessing right:?

Not blind, but from experience you know. If you don't have this experience then you can try it pretty easily on a solo world. Basically the AI will be accurate as long as you'll be in it's accuracy range, the range of the weapon, also if the target is big enough from the AI core and doesn't fly too fast. That is a lot of "if". And theses parameters varies too much to do a chart like that.

You'll have to try and guess yourself, the good thing is, it doesn't need much time and advanced thoughts to get used to it.

 

[Dire Venom]

Not blind, but from experience you know. If you don't have this experience then you can try it pretty easily on a solo world. Basically the AI will be accurate as long as you'll be in it's accuracy range, the range of the weapon, also if the target is big enough from the AI core and doesn't fly too fast. That is a lot of "if". And theses parameters varies too much to do a chart like that.

You'll have to try and guess yourself, the good thing is, it doesn't need much time and advanced thoughts to get used to it.

Just having watched some of the pvp matches, a lot of players seem to circle at high speed, rendering most turrets useless and hardly taking any damage while the slower opponent just gets pumpled. If it is just cannons affected by high speed targets, would at least beams be more viable:? They also seemed to get a suprising ammount of use