Aeson
Posts: 784
Joined: 8/30/2013
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quote:
lol, love these types of threads.
I tend to agree with the sentiment of your post. The threads tend not to really produce anything terribly useful, but are frequently rather amusing.
quote:
Does it take into account the difference in phaser vs armor as opposed to the titan? (I'm guessing not)
Of course it doesn't. If it took into account the effects of armor, I'd have to answer, at minimum, the questions of "how much armor" and "what kind of armor," because if I 'accounted for armor' you really need to know what kind of armor I accounted for. If I were reading it and it said that armor had been accounted for, I'd also want to know how I factored in the armor effects - what distribution did I assume for the number of shots to break the armor? Gaussian? Uniform? Something else? For that matter, once you get into the details of figuring out the impact of armor on weapon DPS per size unit, what about the other aspects of ship design? What relative amounts of shield generators, armor, and other components did I assume? How about shield regeneration? Did I deduct that from the effective DPS of the attacking weapons? (The answer is "no," by the way.) Did I consider the impact on weapon effectiveness due to only about half the Phaser Lances for Phaser (cont.) taking part in the alpha strike? (Again, no.) Have I considered how the game allocates reactor output (e.g. will the game sacrifice cruise speed to fire more of the weapons if I put too many on the ship)? (Once again, no.)
If you want a bit of discussion about how armor factors into things, I would suggest looking into the Guide to Armor thread over in the War Room section of the forum. I would also tend to say that if you have sufficient available research, then you'd be better off using some kind of mixed Titan Beam and Phaser Lance configuration than going purely for one or the other, as the Titan Beam offers superior raw DPS per size unit at all ranges but the Phaser Lance provides superior armor-penetration. Superior raw DPS per size unit means that the Titan Beam is better at bringing down shields and destroying unarmored hulls than the Phaser Lance is, but it pays for it with its lesser armor penetration and its range-dependent performance. Exactly what an 'ideal' mix is would depend greatly on exactly what you're facing; the mix given in the mixed weapon set is just a simple energy balance trying to get an alpha strike that uses all the available stored energy and sustained fire that uses all the available reactor output, rather than some detailed analysis of 'optimal' balances of armor penetration and raw DPS.
quote:
The chart you put up in the shatterforce laser thread is far more interesting, since you calculated DPS/component size which really is the more deciding factor early to midgame.
First, those charts above are DPS per unit size - I just factored in the reactors required to power the weapons. DPS per unit size for the Titan Beam III is something like 3.5 at range 0 and something like 0.84 for the Phaser Lance III if you exclude the reactors. Second, even in the mid-game, you will most likely have enough space to include at least one reactor whose only purpose is to feed the weapons, and more isn't entirely out of the picture. As such, the results in the charts given above are similarly applicable to ship design as the chart given in the Shatterforce Laser thread; these ones just include a little of the overhead that weapons require. Theoretical DPS per size unit when excluding the reactor also doesn't change that much - a HyperFusion Reactor is only 16 size units, which is perhaps 20% of the smaller weapon sets used. The bigger difference is that Titan Beam IIIs and Phaser Lance IIIs are much more 'end-game' weapons than Shatterforce Lasers and Epsilon Torpedoes are, although I would argue that the Shatterforce Laser III, which is what the chart in the Shatterforce Laser thread is for, isn't significantly less end-game than the Phaser Lance III or any form of Titan Beam. In particular, I would generally not pick up Shatterforce Laser IIIs unless I felt a need to upgrade the weapons on existing ships without necessitating a refit, or unless I had nothing more interesting to research (such as some tech which isn't an immediate dead-end).
A more detailed analysis could include the number of fuel cells that you'd add to the design to give a reasonable estimated combat time on station, or you could do a full-blown design analysis with a mandatory base set of components which leaves X space available for weapons and supporting reactors, and currently has Y spare reactor output and Z reactor storage - after all, if you know you're aiming for a size-500 ship, and you know you want 20 cruise speed and 15 deg/s turning rate, you already know most of what you want to put into the ship, even if you haven't realized it yet. The only questions left to answer at that point are "would I rather use weapon set A or weapon set B to fill the X space that my design can give to weapons and supporting reactors, and how do I want to share this leftover space with shields and armor?" Might even only need to answer the question about weapons, if you have target shield and armor values (maybe you like having 1000 shields and 10 armor plates on your size-500 ships, or something like that). Of course, you also only "need" to answer these questions if you're looking for some kind of optimization; throwing whatever you feel like adding on generally works well enough that these kinds of optimization questions do not necessarily need answers.
quote:
The chart you put up in the shatterforce laser thread is far more interesting, since you calculated DPS/component size which really is the more deciding factor early to midgame.
Just be aware that DPS per component size can be deceptive. There's a big difference between a 2 DPS per size unit weapon that costs 5 space and uses 10 energy per shot, and a 2 DPS per size unit weapon that costs 15 space and uses 40 energy per shot, and both are much different from a 2 DPS per size unit weapon that costs 10 space and uses 20 energy per shot, and a lot of that difference comes from how the weapons interact with the reactors. That's not a side of the story that the Shatterforce Laser thread's charts touch upon to any great extent.
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