Categories Around the Breakpoints: A Weapon Guide

Gratuitous Forum Gratuitous Modding
21

Thanks. It’s a good thing that micro crew doesn’t require power, otherwise I would have to use calculus to find the minimum cost of the power/crew relationship, and will probably confuse everyone in the process.

Edit: Added Hull Bonus that affects damage. Be warned that it is full of numbers and can be confusing at times.

22

I’ve started to use these formulas to assess weapons for my mod. It definetely helps, however i have one comment / clarification :

I use a combination of the very first formula [without any cost adjustement] * and the new one [with total cost of damage]. It actually gives a better undertsanding of the weapon.

The first number tells me how good this weapon is at killing things, regardless of its cost
The second number tells me if this destructive power (or lack of it) comes at a discount or at a premium.

Reasonning :

  1. Cost is important, but let’s way we increase the cost of CL & Plasma & MWM by 33%. They’d probably still be the most used weapons.
  2. That is because a ship costs more than just its weapons. For a slow ship, weapons are roughly 40 to 70% of the cost, but for a fast ship it’s more 30 to 40%
  3. A weapon has therefore a cost of opportunity, which reflects the fact there is a limited number of hardpoints, and that this limited number of hardpoints has to share the cost of the rest of the ship.
  4. This cost of opportunity is impossible to estimate as it varies too much for one design to another.
  5. So as TCoD does not encompass this cost of opportunity, we can acknowledge its existence and impact by assessing a weapon both based on TCoD and based its unaltered killing power.

EDIT :
Forgot my second comment : These formulas only apply to cruiser weapons, isn’t it ? Even the HP cost is probably not applicable to frigates - it’s just too different (shields, speed) to be comparable. Any idea to estimate those ?

* : 85- 0.08 x range. Yeah, it’s rounded, and rounding is evil, sorry for this

23

Not sure. With frigate it’s all about getting that speed up or emp stunlock. The HP only matters when it comes to Tribe.

I will think about how much credits HP are worth on a frigate.

Also, can’t really draw a trend line seeing as the only weapon used are Ion Cannon. Beam and Small beam are only mixed for armor breaking.