Preface: This post has grown somewhat organically as I went through XML files over the past hour or 2. It moves from a balance discussion to something close to a modding discussion but there is no mod here. If it tests well and there is any demand I could put it up into the mod forum.Found what I would call an oddity in weapons stats (base before mods, could very well be different after). This takes only base weapons, ignoring specials. that's an oversight of course but I'm working on it.
The below post is working off base values without technology bonuses. Multiplicative bonuses will not affect the general message but flat bonuses will if they apply to mass, base damage or production costs. Also note the column "Normalised damage". This is somewhat of an inaccurate yardstick for measurement, it's just a placeholder until I can locate actual figures. What is it? it's the average damage the weapon would do firing at base firing rates as a ship moves at 30 units/per second from maximum range to point blank range. For example, missiles. One shot every 8 seconds at base rate, moving at 320 units per shot, is approx 4 shots from max range to point blank range. Because I'm lazy, and hate excel, and hate how formatting numbers created via formulas still uses hidden decimals and I'm too lazy to force integers in the formulas. For Kinetic, this is one shot every 4 seconds, which is moving at 120 units per shot from 600 units to point blank (or 5 shots).
Base values in the XML files suggest the following:
So basically, if we weight classes as a 1 for poorest and 3 for top, the values are (and damage has a 2x weight)
This also tells me that missiles are a better way to go playing the AI. Also explains the amount of complaints about missile balance. I've re-organised it as follows -
Basically, cost was not related to strength, neither was mass related to strength as missiles were both the cheapest/per damage and the highest damaging/per mass. This effectively means you're not hamstringing yourself by making kinetics if you're running on low production by effectively ending up with ultra-low damage ships. Instead, they're just kind of low damage. Missiles still hit the hardest, but the cost is now appropriate rather than being the cheapest and the hardest hitting, as outlined above.As reference, see screenshot by comparison. Beware, its probably been resized or shrank so click on it to get the full pciture.
Changes I made:
Now I'm off to change the specials and to play test! I could really do with some input RE: Specials, so if you have any suggestions about balance, let me know!
I love it. Perfection. I was thinking of modding something like this in, but nothing on the scope of what you just did. I might even make the mod myself and use your stats for it. This is great.
I was going to say I would have liked a damage increase instead of a weight decrease, because more guns beats defenses faster, and armor is still heavy... but then I remembered that Kinetics still has awful accuracy and range, so it evens out.
You noticed that too, huh? It certainly seems like the AI is smart enough to understand how balance works, because they certainly do love Missiles to death, and the only Kinetics they ever use are either accidental (Carriers and Overlords use kinetics, but that is not their main strength) or Durantium weapons (which are very good, but cost resources).
You know something's not right when even the AI won't use it.
Really good job!
This chart takes into account the rate of fire correct? Paul had mentioned that kinetics are going to make 3 hits per every one of a missile (end game).
What we need to do is take another look at this AFTER 1.1 lands. Paul and others found the range increaser for kinetics is NOT working and will be fixed. Maybe the damage will catch up if the kinetics can fire at the same range as missiles. This would be optimum.
It does, as far as I can tell (See normalised damage column)
By my numbers, even at 1100 range base like missiles they'd still be 20% damage off the pace and still 33% dearer per damage point/round
Just saw an early all-kinetics fleet. Maybe the changes are making them more valuable?
Edit - Terran mixed fleet (Mostly kinetics)
Of course. Endgame Kinetics have an attack of 12, so after 3 hits it's 36 damage. Endgame missiles have a damage of 40, which is still higher, and that frontloaded damage means they have a huge alpha strike capability. Even with a range increaser, Kinetics still have shorter range than missiles (900 vs 1100) and low accuracy (-30% compared to missiles).
I don't think that's needed at all. Even with the range increase, Kinetics as they are now are still horrible unless you use Durantium weapons, and the range increaser itself costs Durantium.
Edit: Found a relevant quote
Two things about Kinetic weapons:
They're super cheap and they have twice the rate of fire.
At the moment, it seems to be 2 hits for kinetic vs missile, it seems the rate of fire stats I can find are 4 units for kinetic, 5 for beam and 8 for missile. Has this changed or can anyone point to the relevant XML?
Kinetics have a Rapid Reload module that increases its Rate of Fire by 50% but reduces accuracy by 15%. What this actually does is reduce its refire cooldown by 50%, which effectively doubles its RoF, reducing it from 4 to 2.
Thing is, Missiles have a module that does the exact same thing (doubles RoF), and while it costs Antimatter, just one of these modules works for an entire fleet. It also stacks with the -25% missile cooldown mod, which doesn't cost Antimatter, so missiles can have the exact same RoF as Kinetics with Rapid Reload, and all you need is a carrier or something with an antimatter mod.
You can also reduce missile cooldown with technology, which would make their rate of fire with all of the above increases five times faster than Kinetics with Rapid Reload.
The devs have unfairly stacked the deck against Kinetics because Durantium is easy to get, but when everything you need just to keep up costs durantium, kinetics don't have an edge, they just have more hoops to jump through.
Ah yes I see where you're coming from. In all honesty, the bonuses shouldn't change much. If anything, their damage would certainly go up but the corresponding accuracy penalty would counter it. Interesting.
Forgive me if I've misunderstood, but the amount of damage a weapon can do as a ship closes on a stationary target from max range seems like a rather strange yardstick to base changes to weapon balance on?
Such an approach will heavily favour long range weapons over short range ones - your value for missiles is how much damage they deal in 32 seconds, while your value for kinetics is how much damage they do in 20 seconds.
I'd suggest it might be fairer to assume that combat starts at missile range, that the target is a ship that's closing at the same speed (so 60 units/sec closing speed if you assume 30 units/sec base ship speed), and that once a ship gets in range of the target, it stays in range. Then either calculate how much total damage the weapon will inflict in a given period of time (maybe 30 or 60 seconds) or how long it takes the weapon to deal a given amount of damage.
Again, my apologies if I've misunderstood anything.
I'd suggest it might be fairer to assume that combat starts at missile range, that the target is a ship that's closing at the same speed (so 60 units/sec closing speed if you assume 30 units/sec base ship speed), and that once a ship get in range of the target, it stays in range. Then either calculate how much total damage the weapon will inflict in a given period of time (maybe 30 or 60 seconds) or how long it takes the weapon to deal a given amount of damage.
Used 30 seconds as a base (all weapons) but you're right, it could skew. So I've rechecked at your suggestions and used 40 seconds and 80 seconds. See below. Ironically it turns out my rebalancing has done a good job over expected damage @ 80 seconds (if I have my base numbers right), but highlights that beams are still overpowered (if somewhat toned down from before, but somewhat offset by cost).
Note I changed beam damage slightly to adjust for the outcome - reduced phasor and doomray damage output.
This leaves Kinetics lagging behind missiles by about 20% damage at 40s and slightly less (probably around the 16% mark) at 80s, but the production cost reduction @ 100space is incredibly significant - being somewhere around 1/3. Comparable beams come in smack in the middle - Singularity costs 250 production for 5 (100 mass), Phasor costs 500 production for 5 (100 mass) and Nightmare Torpedos weigh in at 780 production for 100 mass with the above numbers.
** Edit: Re-buffed missile damage slightly to offset production costs.
Also, I fixed the integers. Was just being lazy (No excuse there considering i was actively teaching an excel course last year!)
I'm not much of a number cruncher myself, I enjoy casual play, big, and slow. I'm not looking to crush and like a bit of organic flow to my game. I don't push for perfect optimization so my question is this:
As a casual player, on normal difficulty. Does this break the game?
Am I severely hamstringing myself by not following the numbers, or overall will I still have mostly favorable outcomes just playing lightheartedly? I understand the issue at hand, but not sure about its affect of my Insane sized galaxy with normal difficulty and a dozen AI out there.
Not if you're playing smart. Using kinetics at the moment is incredibly space inefficient, but if your opponents have stacked shields & PD, it's still a good choice. They do improve the further up the tree you go, too, at least.
No, it doesn't. It just narrows down the best choices early on. With the right tech and support systems you can overcome most of the handicap compared to other weapon classes.
The big thing this analysis doesn't take into account is defenses.
We know that defenses have attrition (they weaken over the course of a battle) but we are not yet sure by what method. Ie...is it with every shot, based on the damage of the shot, etc.
Theoretically a fast attacking kinetic weapon might drain armor faster than missiles drain PD. Further, armor is actually very heavy itself, so its harder to get large amounts of it.
The ultimate test is to compare a Missile/Armor ship against a Kinetic/PD ship.
Love it.
And I also agree that the calculations have to take into account defenses. But I like the proper differentiation for mass/damage/cost.
Ideally I would like to re-adjust defence cost/mass to balance out against weapons, with armor being small & cheap, shields being average sized and kind of cheap, and PD being the largest and most expensive (Because lets face it, PD is basically miniaturized weapons systems).
I'm all for reballancing, but i see it other way - Armor must be the heaviest (it's armor, remember?, and this armor must protect from objects that travel insanely fast) and cheapest so even if Mass Drivers doesn't cause too much damage, protecting from them will be costly. Shields must have average size\cost and PD must have high cost but small size.
If done so, Mass Driver become useful because putting real protection against them is very costly (in mass terms), Lasers would be rather universal and protecting against missiles would be effective but time-consuming due high cost.
It seems the kinetic weapons (at least) have been rebalanced in 1.01 (not had a chance to check myself yet - pesky work).
Yes, they have a mass of 18 now. The Durantium-versions, however, remain unchanged.
I'm at work too but I'd love to see the numbers. I suspect that's at best a 15-20% normalised value increase
This. I think most of us (myself included) have been staring at the DPS ratings of the weapons and saying "Kinetics suck!" But I certainly have never looked at the comparison of "How easy is it to defend from these weapons?" Your comment on armor being very heavy is likely a good one. That being said, dev just made kinetics weigh half as much so we can pack twice as many of them in our ships, and this makes me think they really did suck as much as we thought they did.
Can anyone confirm new values for kinetic masses from Railgun upwards?
I'd generally like to point that in terms of general concepts and their orders of magnitude, I don't find "cost" of ship weapons or defenses to be a meaningful factor.
If balancing is done around weapon attributes (or attibutes of defenses against them), then I think "cost" should be weighted low.
Completely agree, effectiveness is a much more important factor than cost right now.
All the values are 18 now, from start to finish, except Durantium guns, which are unchanged.
So my values for Singularity match the new patch exactly. Interesting, eh? I was clearly on to something. Otherwise they're still a little underpowered IMO.Will have to get a crack at it tonight, had a crippling headache last night and didn't get near my PC
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