Aeson
Posts: 784
Joined: 8/30/2013
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quote:
I'm still trying to figure out exactly how death rays are supposed to be used. They can't seem to hit the broad side of a barn...
In my opinion, Death Rays are sort of a toy or trophy weapon. They look impressive, and when they hit they may even actually be impressive, but unless you're just looking to inflate your empire's firepower rating* they aren't really all that practical.
I'll add that I'm inclined to believe that the Death Ray is as accurate as standard blasters are, though I haven't actually done any tests to confirm that. The problem with Death Ray accuracy is more one of expectations than anything else - it's called a Death Ray, it's rated for 1800 damage per shot when the next-best blaster only manages 29, and it's an ancient superweapon that you cannot normally research, so of course it must be great, right? You're expecting ships to blow up, or at least suffer crippling damage, each time the Death Ray fires (note that this isn't a very reasonable expectation even if the Death Ray hits, particularly against large or advanced ships; I recall doing an armor penetration test with a Death Ray against a shieldless target with 50 Ultra-Dense Armor and only destroyed something like 17 plates with one hit - impressive, yes, but not nearly as good as that 1800 damage per shot might lead you to expect), and every time you see it miss, you're suffering a great deal of disappointment. On top of that, the Death Ray is heavily weighted towards the alpha strike. At only one 1800-damage shot every 8.5 seconds for 140 size invested, missing even a single shot hurts; standard blasters individually fire about four or five times in the time it takes to fire a Death Ray once, and on top of that you can pack somewhere around twenty of the standard blasters into the same space required for a Death Ray even if you add in an extra reactor to power the standard blasters, so in effect a ship armed with standard blasters fires somewhere around one hundred shots for every shot taken by a ship armed with a single Death Ray, if both ships spent about the same total size on weapons. I know which weapon's misses I'm going to notice more, whether or not the weapons have the same expected number of hits in N shots, and it's not the standard blasters.
*Death Rays offer the second-highest amount of firepower for the size invested into weapons of all the weapons in the game, at about 12.9 firepower per size. Super Lasers are the only weapon to surpass this, at about 46.9 firepower per size invested; Derasian Shockwave IIIs come in third at 8.89, followed by Devastator Pulses at 7.05, Derasian Shockwave IIs at 6.67, Shaktur FireStorm IIIs at 5.17, Titan Beam IIIs at 4.83, Impact Assault Blaster IIIs and PulseWave Cannon IIIs at 4.40, Plasma Thunderbolt IIIs at 4.17, Derasian Shockwave Is at 4.11, and Titan Beam IIs at 4.00; everything else, unless I overlooked something, gives less than 4 firepower per size of the weapon.
Unfortunately, rated firepower is a somewhat deceptive number, as far as weapon performance goes; rated DPS per size invested places the Death Ray on par with the midgame Impact Assault Blasters and Shatterforce Lasers, with the endgame Titan Beams outclassing the Death Rays in DPS per unit size over much of the common range band even without upgrades and outranging it once the first upgrade has been developed, and that's before you start worrying about the distribution of expected DPS with a weapon that's so heavily weighted towards the alpha strike - a size-equivalent number of standard blasters will literally fire somewhere around one hundred shots in the same time that it takes a Death Ray to become ready to fire its second, and as a result the standard blasters are significantly more reliable than the Death Rays are, even if they're notionally equally accurate and have similar DPS/size and maximum range.
< Message edited by Aeson -- 7/12/2016 12:02:50 AM >
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RE: How to be successful in hard mode? - 
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