Main weapon system?

[rotor911]

I'm trying to decide which defensive system (deflector, defense screen..) I should research if any. Problem is that, obviously, I can't research all of them. If I already knew my opponent, problem would be simple : he went into gauss guns, let's research deflectors but when I'll meet my first opponent, it'll be probably to late to begin research on a defensive system (what value would have mk 1 deflectors when you already have mk 3 force shields). So I'm wondering if there's a galaxy "trend" which would make my choice easier. If more than 70 % of the empires invest heavily into laser, it makes sense to have armor coating. And I'm curious too hence this poll..

 

Please note that :

 

- I did not include "missiles drones fighters and torpedoes" in the poll on purpose. I assume that everyone will research them under one form or another.

 

- It's clearly an area where trading/cooperation between empires is invaluable.

 

- I was limited to 10 answers so, please, gravitonic and sonic weapons users, check "other"

[LenLorek]

... and why should we tell you (and everyone else, including potential hostiles) what we are researching? Or should we deliberately mislead?

 

Anyway, we are a friendly race of space-faring bushes, and cannot imagine why anyone would want to research weaponry!

 

Empire 4710

The Bush Administration

A friendly race of space-faring bushes

 

PS Did I mention that we're friendly?

[rotor911]

The poll is anonymous, ain't it?

[Lord Uriel]

rotor911,

 

While some secrets are worth keeping for strategic purposes, I'll willingly share the weapon of choice for my empires (3). Each has developed the Ultimate Spitwad of Destruction device. This device has no known defense and users have reported complete annihilation of their foes.

While I suggest you yourself research this valuable tech, it may not be within your means.

Prerequisistes: Advanced Luck, MK X WIN LOTTO, MK $$ BRIBE GM.

 

<--- Evil laugh.

 

 

Lord Uriel

 

(still laughing)

[ShadowKitsune]

Rotor911,

 

Even if you have Mk III Force Fields, Mk I Deflectors are useful. It's a question of "stacking" your defenses.

 

Armor increases the integrity of your ship.

Force Fields "absorb" a certain amount of damage.

Specific defenses, such as Deflectors, reduce the damage of certain weapon types.

 

The better specific defenses you have, such as Deflectors, the less damage the Force Fields have to absorb. The better Force Fields you have, the less damage your Armor has to take. The better Armor you have, the tougher your ships are, which means they can take more punishment and keep fighting.

 

FWIW,

-SK

[Locklyn]

I've been wondering...tougher armor means your ships last longer yes, but they're still damaged and supposedly this means the ship fights at lesser effeciency but this is in no way reported in the battle report today so who knows if this is actually the fact?

 

 

/Locklyn

[ShadowKitsune]

It depends on how the system calculates "damage", I would think. If your ship, the Gremloid Defender had the following:

 

8 Engines [125 SI ea]

1 Transwarp Drive [125000 SI]

10 Force Field Generators [100 SI ea]

10 CIDS [100 SI ea]

1 Mk X Uberblaster [2000 SI]

987 Units (Unobtanium) Armor [10000 SI ea]

 

for a Structural Integrity of 10,000,000.

 

The Engines would be 0.01% of the Total SI.

The Force Fields would be 0.01% of the Total SI.

The CIDS would be 0.01% of the Total SI.

The Uberblaster would be 0.02% of the Total SI.

The Transwarp Drive would be 1.25% of the Total SI.

The Armor would be 98.7% of the Total SI.

 

If each 'point' of damage that penetrates the Force Fields and the CIDS destroys 1 point of structural integrity, each system needs to be reduced to 0% SI in order to be destroyed (or at least non-functional) and each round of combat recalculates the odds of hitting a particular system based on the total integrity of the ship. The Gremloid Defender would have to take 9,740,000 points of damage before the odds of taking out something other than armor becomes better than 50%. That's a LOT of damage.

 

Of course, if the combat module uses a complete different method of doing damage, who knows?

 

-SK

[Clan Elder 'Keen]

It depends on how the system calculates "damage", I would think.  If your ship, the Gremloid Defender had the following:

 

8 Engines [125 SI ea]

1 Transwarp Drive [125000 SI]

10 Force Field Generators [100 SI ea]

10 CIDS [100 SI ea]

1 Mk X Uberblaster [2000 SI]

987 Units (Unobtanium) Armor [10000 SI ea]

 

for a Structural Integrity of 10,000,000.

 

The Engines would be 0.01% of the Total SI.

The Force Fields would be 0.01% of the Total SI.

The CIDS would be 0.01% of the Total SI.

The Uberblaster would be 0.02% of the Total SI.

The Transwarp Drive would be 1.25% of the Total SI.

The Armor would be 98.7% of the Total SI.

 

If each 'point' of damage that penetrates the Force Fields and the CIDS destroys 1 point of structural integrity, each system needs to be reduced to 0% SI in order to be destroyed (or at least non-functional) and each round of combat recalculates the odds of hitting a particular system based on the total integrity of the ship.  The Gremloid Defender would have to take 9,740,000 points of damage before the odds of taking out something other than armor becomes better than 50%.  That's a LOT of damage. 

 

Of course, if the combat module uses a complete different method of doing damage, who knows? 

 

-SK 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

My assumption has always been that it is a straight % reduction based on current integrity divided by max integrity. So if your ship is 50% damaged you have 50% max AP and 50% max fuel capacity.

[ShadowKitsune]

Clan Elder,

 

That would definitely make for a quicker combat calculation. If you're 50% damaged, you have 50% effectiveness across the board. <shrug> Of course, that begs the question:

 

Does a 50% damaged Jump Drive ...

a. still function with a larger Warp Bubble (sinces its half as effective);

b. still function with the original sized Warp Bubble; or

c. not function at all?

 

With the follow up question of, how damaged do Jump Drives need to be before they're non-functional?

 

Ponderous,

-SK

[Locklyn]

Well since Pete seems to have completely stopped giving any answers here on the boards and his email responses are scarce we might well never know

 

/Locklyn

[ShadowKitsune]

Try to put a happy spin on it. Maybe he is slaving away in the bit mines fixing all of the other things you ... err ... mentioned (yeah, that's a good euphamism) were malfunctioning, absent or otherwise acting in a way contradictory to the documentation or board statements by RTG.

 

-SK

 

PS - I find that Russ is much more responsive to e-mails. The downside is that his baby is Victory! and therefore, he has to prod Pete to get the answer sometimes.

[Kurassier]

My weapon of choice is called The Mug. No Mk X, no Type X, just The Mug The number I use of course, depends on the size of the alien...

[ali-t-akua]

My weapon of choice is called The Mug. No Mk X, no Type X, just The Mug    The number I use of course, depends on the size of the alien...      

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Can you confirm that sequence for that weapon branch are The Shotglass followed by the Goblet and that after the MUG, you can research The Spinal Tap?

[EternusIV]

Well, I only have 2 types of weapons past 3rd generation stuff for my main empire due to focusing on industry. Not sure which to choose for poll

 

Great points made here.

 

I'm not sure how many of you have worked closely with the defensive systems and how they work, but here is a quick breakdown for new people (all info taken directly from the examples in the newest Naval Combat document.)

General Info on Defensive Systems

Defensive systems apply BEFORE shields are taken into effect and operate as a divider, ie: if I shoot you with 1,000 of Spitwad damage and your Spitwad Repel I's have a divider of 1.25, the actual damage will be (1,000/1.25) 800 BEFORE it hits the shields.

 

Little Numbers and the Divider

How do you calculate the divider? First thing you have to do is steal the value of what I'll call the "coating multiplier" for your defensive systems from battle reports as ANZs do not contain their information. If you read the example in the new document, the Type A Black Sphere Generator has a "coating multiplier" of 250,000....this is just its internal rating specific to that system. When you see a battle report, you'll see little numbers like ".212" etc listed next to different weapon categories. These are the actual Divider values minus 1. In fact the the only way you can calculate the "coating multiplier" is by reversing the numbers from the formula before!

 

Coating Multiplier:

 

[(Little number listed in battle report) * Tonnage] / # of Defensive Systems

 

So if you see "Tachyon: .212" listed after a ship design within a battle report, that means that your divider against incoming tachyon weapons systems is 1.212.

 

To calculate the divider, the formula is:

[(Coating Multiplier * Number of Defensive Systems) / Tonnage] + 1

 

There are more holisitic defensive systems out there that protect several types of damage all at once. These prove invaluable as long as you build lots of them in comparison to the tonnage of your ship.

 

Having a ship with a "little of each" (as many us experimented with early on) is pretty much a waste.

An Example

 

Lets build a ship called the "Gimp Gnat" with 10,000 Reflective Coating, an Engine, a Jump Dive, 2,000 Fuel Tankage, and 100 10cm Autocannons.

 

1) Tonnage works out thus: 10,000 for the coating(1 ton each), 100 for Engine(100 tons each), 100 for JD(100 tons each), 10,000 for the 10cm Autocannons (100 tons each) and 2,000 for the Fuel Tankage (1 ton each)

 

2) Total Tonnage: 22,200

 

3) There is no armor involved, so the integrity is simply the total tonnage of the ship minus the tonnage for fuel tanks....20,200

 

4) The 10cm Autocannons have a firepower of 100 each in the projectile type.

 

5) Reflective Coating defends against coherent beams.

 

6) The Maneuverability of the ship is calculated using the same formula for AP: (number of engines*thrust rating)/tonnage...in this case, (1*300)/22,200=0.014

 

A battle with this ship would reveal a block of information that looks very close to this:

 

AUXH Gimp Gnat (Whatever Class - 22,200) [integrity: 20,200] [shields: 0] (Green, Timid)

100 10cm Autocannon, 1 Mk I Nuclear Jump Drive, 1 Mk I Nuclear Jump Drive, 2,000 Fuel Tankage, 10,000 Reflective Armor Coating

Projectile: 10,000

Maneuverability: 0.014, Reflective Coating: 2.252

 

Ok the little numbers I'm referring to are:

Maneuverability: 0.014, Reflective Coating: 2.252

 

If someone fires coherent weapons (Lasers) at this design, the divider will be 3.252 (always add one before determining the divider.) Thus if 1,000 coherent beam fire comes in, only 307.5 of the damage will get through! (1,000/3.252)

 

So why is the Relective Coating value in the report 2.252?

 

[(Little number listed in battle report) * Tonnage] / # of Defensive Systems = 5 for a "coating multiplier"

 

Notice that almost 50% of the ship was devoted to defensive systems....hence the relatively large divider and reduction of incoming firepower.

 

Here si one thing to observe: suppose the incoming firepower were instead 100,000 in coherent beam strength. 30,750 damage would still get through! Well, so much for coating The gimp gnat is toasted! (30,750 > 20,200 Integrity = )

 

 

The Importance of Espionage

Your best options for espionage include working closely with neighbors to share battle information and sending out picket ships that engage the enemy and assess the type of weapons and defenses the forward fleets have. An expendible scout ship sacrificing itself for the value of tactical information is priceless.

 

ACTUAL espionage is still a mystery to me, so...

 

Anyway hope that information helped and I apologize if it was redundant for most of you.

 

And yes the Mk X Mug is devastating

[Locklyn]

Try to put a happy spin on it. Maybe he is slaving away in the bit mines fixing all of the other things you ... err ... mentioned (yeah, that's a good euphamism) were malfunctioning, absent or otherwise acting in a way contradictory to the documentation or board statements by RTG.

 

Yes, I tried that in an email to both Pete and Russ last week where our alliance was worried over the fact that alot of us had outstanding email questions going two or even three turns back with turn related questions, either bugs, problems or "Huh, it shouldn't be doing that" issues and that we were worried that one has to call Pete to actually get answers which all players can't or won't and surely shouldn't have to either. Also we were worried over the increasing number of techs found to be not working at higher levels and a general concern over the tech database, ie can you be sure that all paths open up when you reach the critical levels or is it a gamble if it is working or not, like with cloaked ships not working at all, only way to have that detected is to have been spotted, hope you weren't planning on using those cloaks for actually espionage!? A fat tanker with no sensors will spot a cloaked ship right now.

 

I also expressed a hope that the lack of response on the boards and emails were indications of work on the problems and various documents like the rulebook and the naval combat document since there is right now no feedback at all on the boards on what is going on with the game or its future.

 

I am still waiting for an answer to the email...

 

Cheers

/Locklyn