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Aeson -> RE: Weapons Balancing (8/18/2014 6:52:23 PM)
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But I have thought about how gun size and energy requirements fit in and really both of these come down to the effect on size and how many guns you can fit on a ship. Higher energy requirements mean more engines -- which adds to the space requirement.
The problem with doing this isn't so much that it's not useful or that you can't have a fraction of a reactor in practice so much as that it makes it more difficult to create and use the spreadsheet. The purpose of the spreadsheet is really only to get an idea of where the weapons probably stand next to one another anyways, which gives you a sense of what you might want to test in game to see if something is out of whack. Beyond that, if you're going to include the size required for the reactor, what about the size required for the life support unit and habitation module required for every X size units of stuff? Or the fuel cells required to have enough fuel for X seconds of combat time? Do I need (or really even want) to make a table for each reactor in the game? There's 17 possible reactors, and while if you do the spreadsheet properly it shouldn't be too difficult to create the others, do you really want to have to compare weapons across 17 different reactor configurations? Should you restrict it to the reactors likely to be used with a given weapon system (e.g. a Pulse Blaster probably won't be used with anything other than a Fission I or a Basic Space Reactor, while a Titan Beam is unlikely to be used with anything less than a Quantum or Fusion Reactor)? How about reactors supporting fractional amounts of weapons? A Quantum Reactor III can support 8.8 Titan Beams by output. Do I round this to 8 Titan Beams or 9 Titan Beams? Do I leave it as-is and compute the size requirements of the setup as if I have 80% of a Titan Beam installed on my ship? Do I add a fraction of a reactor in to cover that last 20% of a Titan Beam?
How about other aspects of the design? Let's say I like my ships to have 20 cruise speed. I know that the speed formula is (total engine thrust)/(total ship size), so I can compute the size of additional thrusters I'd need to add to the minimum required set of components if I include X size units worth of weapons in order to maintain the fleet standard cruise speed; there's a similar formula for turn speed, and so I can do the same thing for maneuvering jets. I also know that I need 3 size units worth of life support and habitation modules for every X units of stuff I put on my ship, and I need 1 energy collector for every Y life support and habitation modules to cover their static requirements while the ship is not moving and inside a system.
In the end, what it really comes down to is that you have to pick a stopping point for what you're including in your spreadsheet. Any spreadsheet that doesn't include a full ship design is going to be flawed to some degree, at least as far as being an accurate picture of how the weapons compare to one another within the game, and any spreadsheet that does include a full ship design is going to be limited in applicability by how similar your designs are to mine or to any other person's designs. The more stuff you include in the spreadsheet, the harder it becomes to make the spreadsheet or use it (do I really want to sort through 17 tables showing weapon DPS per size unit or some other such thing for each weapon, with the difference between each table being the reactor used?). Spreadsheets are a tool, but they aren't the only tool, and they're limited in what they can show you.
Beyond that, the focus of these spreadsheets has mostly been weapon DPS. However, weapon DPS is not the whole picture. Anti-armor performance is to some degree tied to per-shot damage rather than raw DPS (it's also tied to rate of fire and thus to DPS, but DPS isn't the whole picture), nor do the spreadsheets consider the impact of countermeasures and targeting systems, or the inherent targeting bonus of phasers (and the spreadsheets kind of have to ignore this aspect of the game, since at the very least I don't know how to model the game's weapon accuracy since I don't have any idea of what the unmodified hit rates are or how tracking and countermeasures interact or how tracking and the phaser targeting bonus stack, or even if engagement range matters for how often weapons hit; someone else might, of course, but once again that's an additional layer of complexity within the spreadsheet if you decide to include it).
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By the way, can anyone quantify "partially bypasses shields"?
While I'm not certain, I think this is a 20% or so chance for a shot from a railgun to not damage the shields of a ship and instead hit the target's armor (or hull, if no armor is present). Railguns are not particularly good at penetrating armor, but if they do manage to do it, they'll start damaging internal components, which tends to cause the opponent to flee; if you manage to destroy the hyperdrive, then you have trapped the target (at least, unless it has repair systems, in which case you've temporarily trapped the target), and damage to other systems can also be useful for winning an engagement. Causing an enemy ship to flee due to hull damage is not necessarily a good thing, depending on what you're trying to accomplish, but it's also usually not a bad thing. Of course, you also have to consider that if 20% or so of your hits do not affect the shields, you're less able to overcome the shield regeneration, which means that your fleet might be disadvantaged unless the railguns penetrate armor and start taking out shield generators or weapons.
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