Repair Rate Stat and Game Ticks per Second

Gratuitous Forum Gratuitous Space Battles
1

As part of a discussion on the merits or not of repair systems, especially on Tribe, I needed to try and work out what Repair Rate on repair modules actually meant. After some fruitless searching around the forum in case someone had already done this, I decided to concoct a test that would let me try and work this out.

I created a design of cruiser to test this. This design would have one weapon, one module of armour, one repair system, and an engine so the ship can get to optimal range.

The weapon needed to have the quailities of a constant amount of damage per hit, and low rate of fire to allow the repair system to repair the damage completely between volleys. Cruiser Missile fitted the bill exactly.

At 1.0 speed, I used a stopwatch to time how long it took for the repair module to completely repair the damage to the armour. For a ship with Tribe armour, this was approximately 4.5 seconds; for Nanobot repair, this was around 6.5 seconds. This gave repair rates of around 6.67 hp/sec and 4.62 hp/sec respectively.

But these numbers bear little relation to the 0.15 and 0.11 values given in-game. This led me to wonder if the value was, in fact, measured in hp/tick. A quick bit of maths suggested, with the unscientifically small amount of data I had, tick frequencies between 41 and 44 a second, a variance I could certainly attribute to my clumsiness with starting / stopping the stopwatch.

So, I’m certainly fairly sure that the Repair Rate stat on repair modules indicates Hit Points per Game Tick. But how many ticks in a second?

Well, 40 is a nice round number, and is only just outside of the range of values my poor quality data suggests. But, I do know that Cliffski is a science fiction geek, and posts on his blog lead me to think he’s of a certain age where one number in that range would have significance.

Therefore, until I’m told otherwise with proof, I’ll hold the belief that the Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe, Everything and The Number of Ticks in a Gratuitous Space Battles Game Second is 42.

2

Very, very good. :slight_smile:

3

I just did a similar test

Instead of 1 speed though I use 0.2, which takes 21 seconds to fully repair

it also has to tick 10 times to repair.

(21*.2)/10 = 0.42

What do you know, it is exactly 0.42 second per tick.

Each tick regenerate 3 Armor, so I am not sure where this 0.15 fits in. So I would assume multiplying the 0.15 by 20.

I also did a similar test with shield

Shield regen rate is 0.2 it’s regen value per tick. So a fast recharge regen 1.6 shields every tick.

4

Well, as I said my test had very rough data :stuck_out_tongue:

I did see 10 visual ticks from impact to repaired using Tribe armour repairer, and it makes me wonder if the game applies repairs every approximately half a second, and calculates how many hit points are repaired in that interval. I’ll try the Nanobot test again and see how many visual ticks there are from impact to repair. Edit: 14 it looks like.

Edit 2: Really should have put a target painter on the challenged ship. The maximum of one missile per launcher in flight means that if a missile misses for whatever reason, it can’t fire again until the missile’s endurance expires.

5

I just try what happens with 2 repairs. What do you know, it doesn’t speed up the repair, it slows down the repair.

Basically only 1 repair can act on a module at a time. And stacking penalty does affect repair rate, as it now requires a little over 11 ticks to repair. I guess it will speed up when multiple modules get damage at the same time.

Also, weapon recharge seem to happen in 0.24 seconds. A cruiser plasma with 3000 firing interval will take roughly 26 tick to fully recharge, or 6.2 seconds.

The howitzer on the other hand, takes 0.8 seconds to fire it’s 6 salvo, or roughly 0.13 per shot.

So I would say DPS = damage/[(firing interval/480) + 0.03], where 0.03 is roughly the time it takes to actually fire after fully reloaded. This unfortunately also means that the howitzer is even weaker than first anticipated.

6

Yep, and IMO that’s the only way stacking could work on the units. It’s the working in parallel thing I’m after when I put multiple repairers on a ship.

I also have a theory that, when deploying armour backed by repairers, it’s best to do it in a 1:1 ratio, but one of the theories I’ve based that position on needs to be tested.

7

I would say that minor efficiency advantage is completely dwarfed by armor resistance. After all the difference is preventing 97% of the damage. Getting armor past 15 or 52 is much more important then keeping repair:armor ratio the same.

8

excuse me but i seem to have gotten lost somewhere in the middle of those numbers…
can you tell me if “armor repairers” are of any actual use? because they have a smaller repair rate per second (atleast in the game stats windows) than the normal repairers,and those fix the armor too
so correct me if im wrong,but there doesnt seem to be any point at all to armor repair modules?

9

At 1x speed

Nano-repair works at 5.25 HP per second
Tribe repair works at 7.14 HP per second

Repair also suffers from stacking penalty.

A cruiser plasma at max range hitting half the time deals roughly 1.2 damage a second.

Without armor, they are obviously useless in large maps where 10 + cruisers focus fire on a single one. They might work on very small maps, but I won’t advocate it.