Aeson
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Joined: 8/30/2013
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quote:
I also would like to understand why these ships are blowing up so quickly. I thought armor would absorb the first hits of a shield bypass and protect internal components. These missile ships were equipped with 10 armor components (100 armor protection). So what's happening here and which component damage results in ship destruction -- the reactor?
If you want to understand why the target vessel dies so quickly, I would recommend swapping the sides - have the enemy ship be the railgun ship, and have your own vessel be the missile ship. Set both to point blank and never retreat in the designs, and they'll engage in a way that approximates the best-case scenario for a railgun vessel. Now you can watch how quickly the ship's armor breaks and how often a shot gets through the shields. As far as I know, there is no special damage bonus provided for hitting certain components, although destroying certain components has greater effect than destroying others - for example, destroying a reactor reduces the combat effectiveness of a ship by making it less able to power its guns, engines, and shields; destroying a command center, if I'm not mistaken, will disable a ship entirely regardless of what else has been lost unless there is another command center on the ship.
As for why railguns drop out of favor as the game progresses, I would suggest taking a look at the Guide to Armour thread (http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3600917) and then taking a look at armor through the various stages of the game. To make a long story short, the chance a weapon has to break armor is dependent on its ability to overcome the reactive rating of the armor. The reactive rating is essentially an additive debuff to the per-shot damage, with the magnitude of the debuff modified by the weapon's anti-armor effectiveness; afterwards, the chance to break the armor is dependent upon the weapon's damage at the time of impact.
If I've done my math right, the percentage per-shot chance for various types of railguns to break an armor plate are given below:
LRG. RG.1 RG.2 RG.3 RG.4 HRG1 HRG2 HRG3 MRG1 MRG2
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S.A. 10.0 20.0 30.0 30.0 40.0 60.0 70.0 90.0 100. 100.
E.A. 1.25 1.50 1.75 1.75 2.00 11.1 16.7 27.8 44.4 61.1
R.A. 0.71 0.86 1.00 1.00 1.14 1.43 1.57 1.86 10.0 20.0
UDA. 0.50 0.60 0.70 0.70 0.80 1.00 1.10 1.30 1.60 1.90
LRG stands for Long-Range Gun, RG for Railgun, HRG for Heavy Railgun, MRG for Massive Railgun, S.A. for Standard Armor, E.A. for Enhanced Armor, R.A. for Reactive Armor, and UDA for Ultra-Dense Armor, while the numbers after the abbreviation represent the stage of the weapon (so an RG.1 is the first unlocked railgun, whereas an RG.4 is the final upgrade of the railgun). The numbers given are the percentage chance for a hit by the weapon to penetrate and destroy the armor plate, calculated to the best of my ability given my understanding of the formulas in the Guide to Armour thread. As you can see, even the upgraded Massive Railgun is absolutely pitiful against end-game armor, and even the Long-Range Gun has a decent chance to break standard armor. Armor upgrades cripple railgun effectiveness as the game progresses, and this is one of the reasons why it is recommended that you stay away from these; blasters at extreme range may have worse chances of penetrating armor, but up close they'll perform far better. All railguns are additionally hampered by their lackluster range, which is the least of any other weapon in the game, and by the late-game this becomes fairly crippling - even phasers and blasters, the other two short-range weapons, have ~50% greater range throughout the game, and while this is reasonably acceptable early on (the 190 range of a Maxos Blaster I isn't a considerable advantage over the 120 range of a Railgun I), it's much less so in the late game when that translates to a difference of ~200 range units. You need a relatively greater advantage to close a ~200 range gap than you need to close a ~70 range gap, particularly since the DPS has gone up.
On top of this, railguns actually lose damage density as you go up the tech tree; a Massive Railgun offers only 0.32 (0.38 if upgraded) DPS per size unit dedicated to Massive Railguns, compared to a Railgun's 0.86 DPS per size unit as introduced (though the Massive Railgun has two significant advantages over the basic Railgun, namely greatly improved - but still rather short - range and significantly enhanced anti-armor performance), the Maxos Blaster I's 0.56 DPS per size unit at 150 range, or the Titan Beam II's 0.71 DPS per size unit at 450 range. So in addition to having a range shortcoming that gets progressively worse as the game advances and suffering severely against armor, they also fall behind on firepower density. Railguns are fairly exceptional weapons in the early stages of the game. They're not so hot once decent armor comes into play, and they really start losing out when weapon power and ranges start heading towards end-game levels. Beyond that, while at long range blasters will likely perform similarly poorly against armor as railguns do, mid-game and later blasters generally have higher rates of fire than equivalent-tech railguns, and in a situation where both weapons are dependent on a low-chance critical hit to break the armor, the rate of fire is a significant factor in which weapon is better.
(It's a bit harder to make a chart like this for blasters and torpedoes, as for these weapons the chance to break the armor is dependent on the range to the target. It can be done, but I'm not going to put up a chart like the one I gave for railguns as it's too much work to type up, and I don't feel like uploading a spreadsheet currently. If you would like to compare railgun anti-armor performance to the anti-armor performance of other weapons, I'd suggest reading through the Guide to Armour and working up a spreadsheet. Another thing that you can do is to compute the average number of shots required to obtain a certain chance of breaking the armor; the formula for this is
y = (ln(1 - x))/(ln(1 - n))
where y is the number of shots, x is the desired chance to break the armor, and n is the per-shot chance to break the armor; ln(a) is whatever your preferred logarithm happens to be.)
< Message edited by Aeson -- 8/31/2014 9:34:02 AM >
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Study of Railgun Chance to Bypass Shields - 
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