All Weapon Stats in Actual Values Test Results (Stage 1 – Shield DPS)

[StarLightBreaker]

I think the game is deliberately imprecise to allow for FD to tweak things, and to encourage players to get actual experience.


I just crossed 1 billion spent on outfitting...and getting first hand experience with nearly everything is why. It's a massive pain, but I wouldn't trade that experience for anything.

Well said. I have to admit that it's a great fun for me to find the testing methodology, execute the testing and analyze the results.

Though somewhat academic it should be noted again that WEP capacitor doesn't power the weapons, it powers the weapon cooling system. Thus weapons like medium pulse lasers expend WEP faster than medium multi-cannon, despite having lower power plant energy use. This is important when actually fitting weapons to a ship and being able to power them all simultaneously, independent of how much fire time you get from them.


I'm sure you realize this, but not everyone does.

Thanks for clarifying this.

Good to have this confirmed.

Yes we went back and verified after seeing your comment in the other post.

Any plans to test damage drop off on energy weapons?


It seems quite severe to me and though I haven't done any formal testing, the difference between 1km and 3km on most lasers seems to be in the ballpark of 200-400%. I can land hits at 3km, but it's rarely worth doing.

Maybe. I now always try to get into 1.5km range to get effective weapon damage. But I guess in some occasion keeping a distance may be a good fighting strategy.

Missiles and torpedoes are hull and subsystem breakers. Assessing them purely from a shield damage perspective is overlooking most of their role. This info is good to know, but poor shield damage doesn't automatically imply they need a fix.

From energy release at contact standpoint, explosive weapons shouldn't be that bad. Other weapons all have pretty decent hull and shield damage when they are better at one or the other, but explosives are so bad at shield that if you only equip missiles or torpedoes, and enemy has shield, you will never have a chance to win.

 

[Rankaze]

Another aside, I wonder if FDev have actually plotted this stuff themselves or if they just fiddled with the figures till they looked about right

From what i have seen in other games, i would bet on the latter. Game designers usually seem to aim for "close" and then when the players start doing stuff like this, rebalancing tends to occur.

 

[StarLightBreaker]

It's actually keeping track of total historic energy for 1 thru 120 seconds over 120 cells in a sheet, then using DPE to multiply up the damage. Works nicely for symmetric setups like 2xC3F Burst on the Vulture but I can't come up with an easy way to deal with variable loadouts as it's hard to know which weapon would steal the power first.

Right, I don't think we can tell or test easily which weapon will take priority when out of energy. Sometimes I wish I could set that priority in game like the modules as well.

As an aside, I've realised that up to 20 seconds firing the C3 F Burst is the general winner (minor early start lead for the beam). It's a shame the gimballed burst isn't differentiated like that.

However in the Gimballed world of your chart, C3G Pulse is similar or better than C3G Burst over time, and C3G Beam is just so pathetic...

 

[Derath]

Just felt like mentioning that it isn't as simple as DPS until empty then DPE afterwards, as if you fight in a way that your capacitor gets frequent chances to recharge its completely different.

The weapon systems actually one of the best i've seen, its in depth and well thought out the balance between weps is mostly superb, lots of good for burst, good for dps, good for versatility but not OP. To tell you the truth other than the turrets or gimbals that don't fit the curve i wouldn't rebalance anything except missiles.

 

[Imrus76]

Excellent article, also very interesting.
+1

 

[Dejay]

I will add a DPE chart to OP with the data I collected. Some kinetic weapons were using too few energy and I didn't get enough time to collect all of them.

But high DPE doesn't always means better, and we can't leave out the time element completely. There are also considerations of how much time you can lock on target, how the target will use Shield Cell Banks, and so on. Like you said looking at both DPS and DPE together should be helpful to make decisions.

Maybe a better way to chart this would be "burst DPS" and "sustained DPS" where a typical weapon energy recharge rate is factored in and for kinetic weapons the reload time.

As an aside, I've realised that up to 20 seconds firing the C3 F Burst is the general winner (minor early start lead for the beam). It's a shame the gimballed burst isn't differentiated like that.

Yeah that's a really good way at looking at it. Burst is definitely the winner over the beam after just 8 seconds!

And about the comparison for different ships, I guess I'd mostly be interested to compare the "laser banks" of a python vs vulture vs clipper vs fer-de-lance. Charts like this would really be great for ed shipyard.

PS: Sorry for insulting the beauty of your wonderful chart

 

[Chrisfs]

Wonderful work.

 

[Aimeryan]

The Vulture charts that were posted use both of the same weapon only.

Another well-known setup is the Beam+Cannon. In this setup the single Beam becomes strong sustained damage for a single weapon; roughly equal over time to the sustained of the dual Beam setup due to having the same DPE (at least in theory). Note that the amount of time before the single Beam catches up to the WEP energy used by the dual Beam setup (and therefore the same amount of damage) is not at the same point the single Beam WEP capacitor empties; it is a lot earlier.

Replacing the Beam with a Pulse here isn't worth it; the amount of time until the WEP capacitor drains from the use of the single Beam (it is a fair bit more than twice that of the dual Beam) is more than enough time to take down pretty much any (at least non-player) shield - using a Pulse would just do this slower.

The advantage of using the single Beam is that you get the other slot for something else; in this case a Cannon. The idea here is that the Hull DPS (and DPE, although I have no doubt that the Cannon has very high DPE on the hull since it uses hardly any energy at all) should be a lot better than either the dual Beam or the dual Pulse - that is what the Cannon is meant to be good at, right? Indeed, the single Beam is likely to be as strong in hull DPS and DPE as the dual Beam, for any ship it matters on, due to the WEP capacitor having ran out for the dual Beam by the time it gets to the hull - so the Cannon has to be addition damage (assuming you don't miss...).

On the other hand, Pulse seems to be quite strong against hull (or at least subsystems). I am wondering if they might be too good at this, where by dual Pulse might have an equal or even greater sustained (when reloading is taken into account) DPS on the hull compared to that of a Beam+Cannon. The WEP capacitor of the dual Pulse setup will only empty a little faster than that of the single Beam; I imagine once the WEP capacitor is empty the Beam+Cannon would definitely put out more DPS than the dual Pulse. However, when there is still WEP capacitor energy left...?

Can't wait to see the hull DPS and DPE figures. Don't suppose you could do DPE for the non-energy weapons* (the ones with ammo) on the shield as well?

*[Technically, I think only the Cannon, Fragment Cannon, and Multi-Cannon are full kinetic - the rest of the weapons that use ammo are partially thermal and kinetic, especially the PA, so perhaps non-thermic is not quite the right word to use - I prefer energy weapons and non-energy weapons to differentiate between the two (officially I think the energy weapons would be referred to as Directed Energy Weapons, or DEWs), although non-ammo and ammo weapons works too].

 

[Peuwi]

Wow, thx for this great test !

Here is my analysis :
(it's not 100% straight math compliant, it's actually hurting me, but I would need mounth of study to know how to provide a good calculation of it, and probably hours for ppl to get it right. BTW, it's good enough to give an idea)

Weapon size factor :
small : 1
medium : 1.69 (+69% /small)
large : 2.45 (+45% /medium)
Huge : 2.94 (+20%/large)

Mount type factor :
Fix : 1 (+25% / gimballed)
Gimballed : 0.8
Turret : 0.4 (-50% / gimballed)

Weapon type factor :
Beam : 147%
Burst : 112%
Pulse : 100%
Plasma Accelerator : 85%
Rail Gun : 159%
Fragment Canon : 70%
Cannon : 47%
Multi Canon : 42%
Dumbfire Missile : 16%
Seeker Missile : 5%
(here is an example of straight or not calculation : I didnt compared "rail gun F1" with "pulse F1", but the whole "rail gun" to "pulse" family, thus, including G3 pulse dps)

Since we have laser energy consumption, a special analysis for lasers :
(and since laser family is almost complete with all mount/all size, I made a 1to1 compare, so results differ a bit)
DSP Efficiency
Beam 1,41 1,00
Burst 1,13 1,27
Pulse 1,00 1,39

	DSP	Efficiency
Fix	1,28	1,25
Gimballed	1,00	1,00
Turret	0,50	0,93

 

[Peuwi]

Erf, we cannot edit.
Too bad.

I forgot to say :
efficiency (for laser) does not depends on weapon size for shield hitting. This will complete what's said in first post : do not care about hitting with large or small weapon, both works the same (on shield)
(Efficiency : damage per MJ. Probably more important than peak dps if you want to provide maximum dps for a long period of time)

Sorry for my english.

 

[Morbad]

The C2 Railgun has almost the same DPS as the C4 Plasma Accelerator. And the Railgun it is an intstant hit weapon. I guess there really is not much point in running a PA at the moment..

The medium railgun also has less than 1/3rd the ammo, has a one second charge/delay, and doesn't inflict any splash damage.

Railguns are much better against CMDRs, but against big AI ships, there is a good argument for the huge PA.

* C3 beams are 25% better if fixed instead of gimballed. C3 burst are 35% better, while C3 pulse are only 17% better.

Burst gimbals/turrets likely suffer the most because they have the most to gain from auto-targeting mounts. Burst lasers, especially the large ones, cycle slowly and thus have a large miss penalty. Pulse and beam do not have this. Pulse cycle quite quickly and beams can be enaged/disengaged at will.

Would have thought a size 4 plasma accelerator would do more damage than a size 3 beam, its certainly harder to hit with, but I suppose the hull damage is very different, this is only looking at the shield damage.

A Huge PA can destroy an A8 power plant on an Anaconda in two shots. It takes considerably longer to do this with a large beam.

The PA is essentially a better (slightly more damage, noticeably better muzzle velocity, better armor penetration) cannon that can also damage shields if it needs to, but they aren't intended as shield strippers.

 

[StarLightBreaker]

Weapon Shield DPE chart added to the OP.



Besides laser weapons, there is also data for thermic-kinetic weapons.

Looking at the numbers here... It seems there might be some magic number behind?

 

[Aimeryan]

Awesome. By the way, did you not do Cannons because the energy use is so minor?

There does seem to be some probably-not-coincidental numbers in there.

 

[Smoon]

if you were to put all your tests and graphs into a book with notes, overall findings, etc I would throw a couple of bucks at you.

 

[Poseidal]

Very interesting that every type of laser in each class has the same damage per energy (I.e. all fixed pulse, all gimbaled pulse and so on)

 

[Moriarte]

The PA is essentially a better (slightly more damage, noticeably better muzzle velocity, better armor penetration) cannon that can also damage shields if it needs to, but they aren't intended as shield strippers.

Why not? In a set up with (say) gimballed pulses and plasma, there is a serious alpha involved when applying both simultaneously only to chip away sub-systems with gimbals after the shield is down. I think that while PA is actually intended for sub-system damaging, it's out of the question when fighting commanders, hence the next best use is stripping shields for a fear factor.

 

[soma]

Very interesting that every type of laser in each class has the same damage per energy (I.e. all fixed pulse, all gimbaled pulse and so on)

True, thats an interesting observation.

Also, it is interesting to note that the C3 Turreted Pulse (which I said before has pathetic DPS), actually has a pretty decent damage per energy score (same range as the fixed C2 Beam and Gimballed C3 Burst Laser). With the current turret mechanic it is pretty easy to ensure continous hits with the pulse turrets, so in longer fights the C3 Pulse Turret might not be as bad as I initially assumed.

 

[Morholt]

Thanks for testing this so thoroughly. hat tip

 

[faluc]

Most excellent work, big thanks to both of you!

 

[Aimeryan]

True, thats an interesting observation.

Also, it is interesting to note that the C3 Turreted Pulse (which I said before has pathetic DPS), actually has a pretty decent damage per energy score (same range as the fixed C2 Beam and Gimballed C3 Burst Laser). With the current turret mechanic it is pretty easy to ensure continous hits with the pulse turrets, so in longer fights the C3 Pulse Turret might not be as bad as I initially assumed.

I had some thoughts along similar lines, however, turret accuracy becomes awful after a few seconds if it keeps firing. Actually, can only confirm that for Beam turrets; maybe Pulse turrets are different.