Ship weapons and damage

[Raltiir]

So looking through the pdf manual and checking the website, I found statistics for how much damage each weapon does and how many weapons each ship has.  so pulling the data together, I did some math which resulted in a couple of odd observations.  All weapon damage is over a 4 second period as provided by most weapons on http://thrawnsrevenge.com/features/weapons  and I recalculated missile weapons to be on that same 4 second interval.  I then pulled shield and hull data out of the xml files.

A victory star destroyer I has a shield strength of 3185 and the same for its hull value.  including missiles, it does 945 damage in the four second period (EDIT: used the number for proton torpedoes instead of concussion missiles so the damage is actually 945 instead of the 830 I originally listed).  600 of that damage is from turbolasers.
A victory star destroyer II has the same shield and hull strength,  and with its ion cannons firing on shields does 660 damage but since ion cannons cant cause hull damage, it only does 460 damage when firing on an unshielded target.  So according to this, the VSDI is always stronger than a VSDII and is also 400 credits cheaper.  Why would anyone build a VSD II?  Also worth noting that the description in the manual says a VSDII lost concussion missiles in exchange for more turbolasers but it actually does less turbolaser damage than the original model, with only 460 damage from turbo lasers. 

Just for fun, I also compared the crimson command VSDII's stats.  It had the same hull and shield strength as the other two, but had higher damage, doing 960 damage to shields, but only 560 to hull. 

Since almost all ships I have looked at have the same shield and hull strength, you can average the damage done to shields and to hull and use that to calculate how long it takes to kill most ships,  if so averaged the VSDII does 560, the crimson command VSDII does 760, and since the VSDI doesnt have ion cannons, it still does 830. 
Am I missing something, or is the VSDI not only stronger than the VSDII but also the build limited crimson command VSDII?

Also, for the power to weapons ability, do all ships get their shields drained or only imperial style ones, I have used Chaff's and some other empire of the hand ships with the ability and not noticed any effect on their shields.

[Corey]

It sort of depends. It technically has higher DPS than the VSDII, but that doesn't take into account that all of that damage is still just going into one hardpoint. One full salvo from any of the VSDs is usually enough to destroy any individual target, and then they have to retarget on their next salvo. For the VSDII that happens much sooner with all of its weapons. It takes 4x as long for the VSDI to do the same thing. So while the theoretical damage per salvo and per second is higher, in practical applications the only time I can think of where the VSDI actually outdamages the VSDII would be if you're attacking the shields on an SSD, or attacking a capital shipyard. We have to do some returning on that front for Ascendancy, though, because of the lack of hardpoints so we may make similar changes in ICW, though unless I'm wrong it's more for clarity's sake than any real power shift.


Also, looking at the coding, the EotH ships have the exact same drawbacks to PTW as the Remnant does. It's a reduction to shield regeneration though, not a drain, so you wouldn't notice it unless they were being attacked or were missing shields already, which may have been the difference you saw.

[Raltiir]

I can test and demonstrate the shield drain by starting an art of war game with EoTH and dropping one of the starting chaffs and and VSDIIs into a fleet and running them into an enemy system.  having both ships hit their power to weapons ability causes them both to lose shields, the chaff only seems to drop by about 10% of it shields but the VSDII loses what looks like 60% of its shields.  If it is a regeneration rate reduction in the code, maybe the regeneration is going negative and the EoTH ships just have a higher base rate of shield regen?

One other place the VSDI does more damage than the VSDII and even the crimson command one is against corvettes, against a shield less corvette the VSDI can kill it in one 4 second salvo, a VSDII and crimson VSDII take two salvos.  The most extreme example I can find is the sacheen, with 800 health and shields, it takes two salvos for a VSDI, 4 salvos for a VSDII and 3 salvos for a crimson VSDII. 

This might not matter as much though as I noticed that the VSDI doesn't have the power to weapons ability so there is an advantage to the VSDII.

While you're here, on the weapons page, it says ion cannons do damage to systems and I read somewhere on the forums that the ground defense ion cannon prevents a ship from entering hyperspace, do the regular ship mounted ion cannons have an effect other than damaging shields?


EDIT:
Also, only 230 of the damage a VSDI was doing every 4 seconds was from the concussion missile, 600 was still turbolasers so it might not beat the crimson VSDII on average damage (760 average between shields and hull but only 560 on straight hull), but it actually has more turbolaser damage than either of the other victory star destroyer models.  It also has the major advantage of being able to shoot at fighters pretty well thanks to the conc missiles.  On  the other hand, even against shields the VSDI still does 43% more damage per second than the VSDII.
with the relatively short duration on power to weapons, I am pretty sure that a VSDI will heavily out damage a VSDII over the course of a battle.  and it only does slightly less to shields than the crimson VSDII, so while it is in no way a game breaking issue, it does for me beg the question as to why have the build limit for crimson VSDIIs.

EDIT 2:
Concussion missile are listed on the weapons page as 18 damage per missile, I used 12 which is actually the damage for proton torpedos, so the correct damage figure for the VSDI is 945 damage with 600 from turbolasers and 345 from the concussion missiles.

[Vulcanus]

Some notes:
Most weapon hardpoints don't actually fire in 4 second intervals but rather 3-4s + 0.2x number of pulses.

Ion cannons drain energy from ships, but most ships have large enough reserves of energy for it not to be a factor. Energy is used to fire weapons and shield refresh.

Corvettes are generally not a good testing ground, because some of them have corvette-type shields instead of the more common frigate shields.

I believe I have ALL of the accurate ship damage values vs. frigate shields (the most common shield/armor type encountered) stashed somewhere, will post some of them here later if you want.

EDIT: The ship damage values I have are actually raw values rather than vs. frigate shields, but most values have been updated to correspond with Balance & Flavor hardpoint changes. Around 50% is still valid for ICW.

[Slornie]

Also worth noting that the description in the manual says a VSDII lost concussion missiles in exchange for more turbolasers but it actually does less turbolaser damage than the original model, with only 460 damage from turbo lasers.

Just a quick note on this point: a lot of the descriptive content in the manual is based on canon information and does not necessarily have any bearing on unit stats in the mod.  If canon determines that a ship has x weapons or x squadrons we do try to match that, but not necessarily everything follows through in that manner.  We are, however, constrained by the inconsistency of canon as much as we are empowered by it.

So in this instance (VSD2) Wookieepedia states that it had more guns in place of the VSD1's missile launchers.   That fact does actually cross over into the mod, in that the VSD2 has 60 turbolasers and 20 ion cannons vs the VSD1's 50 turbolasers (and gazillion concussion missile launchers).  It just so happens that VSD1 turbolasers have ended up as stronger variants (e.g. dual and quads).  Whether there's an argument for those VSD2 turbolaser being the same class as the VSD1 ones, I don't know - it didn't occur to us at the time of rebalancing the space units before v2.0 release.

As much as anything this also comes down to the rather arbitrary choice of damage values for projectiles, to which there is no clear answer either.  Maybe concussion missiles shouldn't be quite so high on the damage scale (particularly when we apparently use the same projectile for capital ship and fighter units).  Maybe they should be treated as assault concs (and switch out the fighters to a lesser variant) which would mean reducing the VSD's armament to 20 launchers from the current load of 72.

Just for fun, I also compared the crimson command VSDII's stats.  It had the same hull and shield strength as the other two, but had higher damage, doing 960 damage to shields, but only 560 to hull. 

Try comparing the Crimson Command VSD against the ISD1 and ISD2 and see where that gets you!

While you're here, on the weapons page, it says ion cannons do damage to systems and I read somewhere on the forums that the ground defense ion cannon prevents a ship from entering hyperspace, do the regular ship mounted ion cannons have an effect other than damaging shields?

Again, this bit of text is a mix of game and canon content.  Depleting the shields is game, and system damage is largely confined to canon explanation/description.  As Vulcanus says above, ion cannons do technically reduce the available energy pool of ships in the mod but most ships have huge energy reserves so this shouldn't have much of an impact*.  The planetary ion cannon uses a different projectile which also applies a fixed "stun" effect to hit units so they can't fire/move/etc for a set period of time (currently 30 seconds).  Although this could be added to the normal ion cannon projectile, I think we'd all get very bored very quickly of losing control of our ships every time they get hit by even a single ion bolt for even a single second!

*Energy is actually a feature Petroglyph built into the game and then decided to not use before release because there's no way of communicating it to the player (e.g. if your ship stops firing/moving because its out of energy you can't tell that that's the reason so people will just get confused/angry).  The idea was to have a fixed energy pool and a corresponding recharge rate.  Every projectile fired would use up ship energy, restoring shields after being hit would use energy, and being hit by ion cannons would also drain a portion of energy (either in conjunction with draining shields, or only after shields were down - I'm not sure which).

[Corey]

The TL;DR is basically that we're mostly happy with where the VSDII is, and that the VSDI will probably be getting a few nerfs in some departments coming up.

[Raltiir]

as you requested so you shall receive here is the analysis of all the ships I had compared including actual damage values and a modified value which shows damage and health by population point cost so that ships with varying population points can be compared.  I have not done every ship, I mostly focused on Imperial and EoTH, but I read somewhere that the nebula was supposed to be really strong so I included it too.

ship class   hull/shield daamage  population    health and shields             damage/population             hull and shields / population
acendancy    780/910              pop 3         5330/5330 hp/shields           260/303                       1776/1776
phalenx      1620                 pop 5         8000/8000 hp/shields           324                           1600/1600               
syndic       575/887              pop 4         6210/6210 hp/shields           143/221                       1552/1552
budirch      400                  pop 3         2500/2500 hp/shields           133                           833/833
chaff        364.8/924.8          pop 3         3900/3900 hp/shields           121/308                       1300/1300


praetor     1020/1860             pop 9         11700/11700 hp/shields         113/206                       1300/1300         

isd  I      430/1030              pop 4         5000/5000 hp/shields           107/257                       1250/1250
isd  II     679/939               pop 4         5000/5200 hp/shields           169/234                       1250/1300
vsd  I      945                   pop 3         3185/3185 hp/shields           315                           1061/1061
vsd  II     460/660               pop 3         3185/3185 hp/shields           153/220                       1061/1061
tector      858/1482              pop 4         8030/8030 hp/shields           214/370                       2007/2007
katana drd  350/550               pop 2         2310/2310                      175/275                       1155/1155
ssd         6530/8530             pop 15        40310/40310 hp/shields         435/568                       2687/2687
ccvsd       560/960               pop 3         3185/3185 hp/shields           186/320                       1061/1061 


nebula      634/834               pop 5         5110/5110 hp/shields           126/166                       1022/1022
viscount    6690/8690             pop 18        40310/45310 hp/shields         371/482                       2239/2517
  

I wont swear the table is 100% accurate, I caught a couple of mistakes I had made but there might be more, all the same, it should be accurate for the data I used. 

As you requested you can see the data for the crimson VSDII VSDI and the ISDI and ISD2, to compare I will put a single one against a structure with n hard points, 5000 health and 5000 shields, since I am not sure if the shield refresh rate occurs on a per second interval I will for now ignore shield regeneration.  I will also avoid using power to weapons as I am unsure of the exact multiplier and also the duration.  the unitized columns are the values as calculated for a one population point ship with the same damage efficiency as the ship in the row, this is done to ease the comparison since ships costing three and four population points are being compared in it.

ship            seconds before hitting hull    total destruction time           unitized seconds before  hull    unitized destruction time
ISD I           19.41 seconds                   64.32 seconds                   77.64 seconds                    257.28 seconds
ISD II          21.30 seconds                   48.05 seconds                   85.2  seconds                    192.2  seconds        
VSD I           21.16 seconds                   42.33 seconds                   63.48 seconds                    126.99 seconds
crimson VSD II  20.83 seconds                   53.38 seconds                   62.49 seconds                    160.14 seconds  

 

just in case it is unclear, the lower number is better in every column.
Now, if we just compare the first and third columns, there is not as big a disparity and since as was pointed out, in most cases a single volley will destroy a hard point, the times in the second and fourth columns might not matter as much, though it will help you decide what ships to drop in against the large shipyard you are trying to blow up with your hit and fade. 

can ships switch targets mid salvo? I  thought they could, since to speed up the destruction of capital ships and stations I would have my ship switch targets before a hard point was destroyed so that the projectiles still in the air would kill the hard point while I fired at a different one. 

Based on this analysis, ignoring super ships which are very very efficient (excluding the praetor anyway)  the most efficient ships I tested are the Tector, the Ascendancy, and the Phalanx class ships since they have a combination of high health and damage per population point.  The VSDI is also a very efficient ship damage wise, but its health is lackluster.  This analysis does not take into account star fighter complement, which I believe makes the Tector go down a lot and most of the other efficient ships go down at least a little, but depending on whether we are going by total squadron count or max simultaneous deploys,   the Ascendancy might actually go up in efficiency since it can have 4 squadrons deployed at once, though that is also the number it can carry.

[Vulcanus]

Just a quick question, do your base your damage values on actual hardpoint files?  Because they don't quite match up with my own. Also, are those shield damage values for frigate or capital type shields? Could also be a mistake on my part as I've used a damage/1 second as a unit rather than 4 seconds.

Shields refresh once every three seconds.

[Thuellai]

Personally I use VSDIIs for their superior speed + PtW (and if you don't think that's significant, watch what some dreadnoughts can do to an ISD if the numbers are right)

VSDs ARE pretty good, though - those conc missiles are brutal when I'm playing NR.  Hardest fight I've had so far was an IR fleet with 8 ISDs, 3 ISD2s, and something like 16 VSDs.  I definitely feel like they could be brought down a little bit - their turbolaser batteries should be identical to those on a VSD2.  It doesn't make much sense for the up-armed VSD2 to have weaker turbolasers than the VSD.

[Raltiir]

I pulled my damage values from the manual and the damage list for weapons by type, if the manual and the actual in-game files differ than my numbers will be incorrect, but yes I am using 4 second intervals, so that could also account for the difference in my numbers and yours.  I also rounded down to the nearest integer value for damage except on the chaff which for whatever reason I didn't round. 
I also don't know the difference between capital ship shields and frigate shields, if you could enlighten me as to what makes them different I would be grateful. 

As for my view that power to weapons in not enough to overcome the damage difference, I could be wrong, and with the crimson VSDIIs it probably is, but with the regular VSDIIs their damage is so much lower that I have a hard time imagining a temporary buff makes up for it.  In a lot of cases, I try to avoid power to weapons on remnant ships unless their shields are down because of the shield loss I mentioned in my earlier posts, but I love it on EoTH ships.

As an added note, thanks everyone who has taken the time to answer one of my questions about the mechanics I didn't fully understand.

[Vulcanus]

Difference between capital ship and frigate shields can be found in ICW manual damage modifiers chart. The main difference is in turbolaser/megamaser damage modifier, which is 2.0 vs. frigate shields and 0.75 vs. capital shields. Several corvette units also have corvette type shields. Also, several space units have "star destroyer" armor instead of standard ship armour, which gives them extra protection from laser/maser weaponry.

If you used the manual to calculate damage values, they will be incorrect. MOST turbo/mega hardpoints have a recharge time of 3.0-4.0 seconds (average of 3.5). In addition you have to account for the number hardpoint pulses. For example, a 10/1 turbolaser hardpoint will take 3.5 + 10x0.2 = 5.5 seconds per salvo for a 9.1/s raw damage value.

[Raltiir]

I was accounting for the number of pulses at least as listed in the manual since it lists that number.  It doesn't list the recharge times though so I was using the 4 second standard mentioned on the weapon page.

If you know it off the top of your head, which xml files would I find the recharge times in?

so does the recharge time not start until the last pulse is fired?  In that case my damage values will be off, as I was assuming 4 seconds after the first pulse was when the recharge time finished for a 4 second recharge time.  I realize my assumption makes little sense from a practical view, but from a game balance perspective, the math to check unit balance was easier, so I think that was why I made that assumption.  To put the assumption I had been using in more detail,  I assumed that a 10/1 turbolaser battery would fire its 10 pulses, but the recharge time would be on a per pulse basis, which would result in a shot ever .2 second for 1.8 seconds (first shot at 0 seconds) folowed by a 2.2 second pause (in the 4 second recharge time, using the average recharge time you quoted, it would be a 1.7 second pause).  after the pause, the process would be repeated. 

Being that the 4 second interval is not the standard recharge time, and the number of pulses is a factor in the time between salvos,  the numbers I calculated will be incorrect, so if you manage to find your damage values, I would like to see them to correct my conclusions to see if some of the ships I was discounting are better than I thought.

[Corey]

The recharge times listed in the manual are usually the max, but most have a one second variance between min and max. For conc missiles, it's 14-15 seconds, for most ships it's 3-4 seconds for Turbos/Ions. Some ships (Battle Dragon) are higher, some are lower. The values are in Hardpoints_XXXXX.xml

[Vulcanus]

Here are damage values for some of the ICW ships. All values are raw values without modifiers /second. I've omitted any ships that were heavily modified for Balance & Flavor.
Ships that have slightly different, but overall 95% similar values to original ICW ships marked with *.
Torpedo and conc missile values mostly not included due to different hardpoint mechanics.

Imperial Remnant:

Eclipse:
Turbo 491
Heavy Turbo 402
Ion 182

Executor:
Turbo 491
Heavy Turbo 638
Ion 364
Conc Missile 42

Praetor:
Heavy Turbo 117
Quad Turbo 133
Heavy Ion 232

Sovereign:
Turbo 309
Heavy Turbo 402
Ion 182

ImpStar:
Turbo 55
Dual Heavy 19
Quad Heavy 14
Ion 109

ImpStar II:
Turbo 63
Octuple 82
Heavy Turbo 10
Heavy Ion 47

Dominator:*
Turbo 31
Dual Heavy 14
Ion 44

Tector:
Heavy Turbo 50
Dual Heavy Turbo 133
Dual Heavy Ion 140

Dreadnaught:
Turbo 33
Dual Turbo 36
(Katana Ion 45)

MTC:
Medium Turbo 15

Strike Cruiser:
Turbo 36
Ion 22

VicStar:*
Dual Turbo 73
Quad Turbo 44
Conc Missile 74

VicStar II:*
Turbo 36
Dual Heavy 58
Ion 36

Crimson Command Vic:*
Turbo 55
Dual Heavy 58
Ion 73

Acclamator:
Turbo 5
Quad Turbo 51
Torpedo*

Carrack:
Heavy Turbo 14
Ion 44

Escort Carrier:
Dual Laser 11
Conc Missile*

Immobilizer:
Quad Laser 44

Lancer:
Quad Laser 160

Vindicator:
Medium Turbo 16
Quad Turbo 36
Ion 22

Not included:
Venator

[Vulcanus]

EotH:

Ascendancy:
Dual Heavy Maser 58
Quad Heavy Maser 116
Heavy Ion 29

Phalanx:
Dual Mega 77
Dual Heavy 100
Quad Heavy 149
Rhazer Missile 15

Syndic:*
Megamaser 33
Dual Mega 67
Quad Mega 60
Heavy Ion 66

Budirech:
Megamaser 26
Dual Mega 26
Quad Mega 37

Chaf:
Dual Mega 48
Dual Ion 85
Proton Torp*
Rhazer Missile*

Nuruodo:
Megamaser 15
Quad Mega 46

Warlord:
Dual Mega 31
Proton Torp 15

Auriette:
Megamaser 24
Quad Maser Cannon 10

Decimator:
Dual Mega 17
Ion 22

Kariek:
Megamaser 9
Dual Mega 17
Dual Maser Cannon 10

Vigilance:
Maser Cannon 15
Conc Missile 14

Not included:
Asdroni


Pentastar Alignment:

Lucrehulk:
Turbolaser 35
Laser Cannon 38

Not included: Enforcer, IPV, Munificent

[Raltiir]

Thanks for getting me those numbers so quickly. 

Assuming I am interpreting this correctly, the VSDI is even better relative to the VSDII and the crimson VSDII, the syndic is actually really good instead of the meh it was by my numbers, and the ascendancy is still more powerful than an ISD I or II , but not by as much.  The Tector is just as strong as I thought, and ISDs are a lot stronger than my numbers suggested. 

Thanks again for your help.

[Corey]

We've had a spreadsheet with a considerable amount of stats, including damage per salvo and per second values for each weapon type for a few versions now. I think its values are still somewhere near the release of 2.1 but may be a little outdated. It's also all calculated on the minimum damage from the four second cooldown. I could potentially post that if people were interested, but again, the values are a little out of date.

Considering the number of variables which can't always be taken into account when theorycrafting, such as firing arcs and ranges on different weapons, as well as fighters, I've always found a good way to test/compare direct capabilities is to set up a map in the map editor with just one instance (or more if you want to test other things) of the ships you're trying to test and playing a few rounds out with that.

[jordanthejq12]

I'm game to see those charts of yours. Everyone, it seems, has their own numbers, but as you said, Corey, don't forget the firing arcs (as a side note, the MC40's are horrible), health, ranges, carrying capacity, etc. If some type of overall statistical chart were to be compiled, it would be very nice, I think.

[Slornie]

Yeah, hopefully this discussion shows that it's not quite so simple to work out exactly how strong/weak a ship is/should be for the mod.  I think when we did the space balancing before 2.0 (including creation of the spreadsheet Corey mentioned) it was largely done by Corey, Zer and myself working through the units and trying to achieve some level of consistency and standardise things (hence the common 3-4 second recharges and 0.2 seconds between pulses). Obviously it's not perfect (and the VSD1 is a clear example of where we may have overlooked things), but I think in general terms it works quite well.

If we were to go through it all again now I think the main thing I would look at is whether there's a better way to code the pulses/recharges for hardpoints.  Maybe defining a time period within which all of the non-warhead weapons should be fired (e.g. 10 seconds) and then setting the recharge rates to match (e.g. a hardpoint representing 10 turbolasers would be coded as 1 pulse per salvo with a 1 second recharge, one representing 2 turbolasers would be 1 pulse with a five second recharge).  This would also reduce wastage from ships continuing to pound dead hardpoints until the end of the salvo but could easily have some other equally unanticipated or negative consequences.

can ships switch targets mid salvo? I  thought they could, since to speed up the destruction of capital ships and stations I would have my ship switch targets before a hard point was destroyed so that the projectiles still in the air would kill the hard point while I fired at a different one. 

You can manually force a ship to change targets mid-salvo (as you describe) but I don't think they will do so automatically.   I'm also not sure how/when hardpoint opportunity fire is triggered (or even if we use that in ICW).

[Thuellai]

Yeah, things like firing arcs and mobility do a lot to balance, say, the MC80 against the ImpStar - An ISD is beefier in almost every respect, but the MC80 is fast enough that it can often dash past and put all of its guns into the rear of an ISD from a position of relative safety, with PtS patching the costs of such a maneuver.