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taltamir -> RE: Math Says: Don't use the Super Weapons (5/2/2010 7:32:07 PM)
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ORIGINAL: Canute
quote:
Also, I noticed that a ship's firepower is simply the sum of the damage per shot of each weapon it carries... it should be the sum of the damage per second of each weapon, not damage per shot.
Not realy true.
When you got Shiped that can destroy all other Ships at the 1. Salvo it doesnt matter if it got huge reload time.
But beware if all shoots of that Salvo missed the target :-)
And even when at a fight 1 vs many, when you kill 1 enemy instantly it can't do any damage to you anymore, that means you can stay longer against the others.
You will only be able to destroy freighters with with an initial salvo of a superweapon... It takes multiple shots to penetrate the shields of even a single military ship of reasonable size.
besides, if you are looking at initial salvo, then all you are comparing is damage (not DPS, but damage per single hit) /size and damage (not DPS, but single hit) / cost.
for titan beam its 22/6 = 3.7 damage/size
for death ray its 1400/140 = 10 damage/size
the death ray indeed has more initial damage per size unit. 2.7x as much...
Oh, and a thunderbolt MX torpedo does an initial shot damage of 14.4 damage/size unit. (size 5, damage 72 per shot)
that means that 140 space worth of torpedoes does more initial damage than 140 space worth of death ray.
The AI puts 6 shields on a cruiser and 10 on a capital ship (which is way too little)... using top end shields that is 2880 and 4800 shield strength repectively. The top end shields take 2.92 shield components to stop a shot of a single death ray. So a ship with 10 death rays (size 1,400 for the death rays alone) would only be able to penetrade 29.2 shields, oh look, I put 30 shields on all my capital ships (8x30 = 240 space total).
But even the AI designed ships... that cruiser the AI designed has 2880 shields and 560 armor. it will take 3 death rays to penetrate all that in one shot.
Captial ship designed by AI? 4800 shields and 800 armor. It will take exact 4 to strip away all that armor and shields without doing any actual damage, so you actually need 5 death rays to one shot an AI designed capital ship.
Lets not forget the good old space stations with their heavy shielding.
BTW, if the death ray multiplied both damage and cooldown by, say, 10... it would be viable due to initial damage... 14,000 damage but fire only once every 85 seconds. Still, a far from ideal weapon. but it would actually have 1 redeeming factor and be of some use in certain tactics. or if it had very long range, or if it took less space, or any one of other improvements that could be made. The example with 14,000 damage and 85 seconds cooldown actually means that all the numbers about efficiency and DPS I have mentioned stay the same, while initial damage/space ratio goes up by a factor of 10x. which drastically alters its usefulness... of course, in such a case it would have even more damage wastage and handle groups of smaller ships really badly.
When I took the AI designs and removed the super weapon to replace them with plain old torpedoes my ships began slaughtering all that opposed them... they had a massive increase in damage capacity.
You know, I originally compared the death ray to a laser weapon because they are both rays... but if I think about it, lasers have rapid firing rate and no or low damage. Torpedoes are high damage and longer cooldowns... in this manner, deathray could be though of as a bad torpedo... this makes things worse as torpedoes are vastly superior to beam weapons.
As shown above, 140 space gets you one death ray that does 1400 damage per shot... or it gets you 28 torpedoes that do 2016 damage per shot (and with much faster firing rate)
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