Changes to autocannons to incease usefulness (without being the default choice)

[Exultant (OP)]

Hello everyone!

While creating a ground forces calculator to help me plan out a new army based on the quantities of enemies I was facing (and relative tech levels of the NPR), I discovered that auto cannons were always a bad choice to equip on troops, confirming general consensus I've seen on Discord and the forums. Columns L and M sort the weapons by their tonnage efficiency at killing the given chassis/armor combination.

You will need to make a copy of the sheet in order to use the drop downs to follow along with my findings, or play with relative weapon and armor techs.

Findings:

LAC is relatively okay vs. basic infantry and powered armor. It's feeling like where it should be (less efficient vs. lightly armored troops, but better when they're armoring up) but by the time you get to heavy power, it's better to use LAV vs. the troops than LAC. From a strictly fluff point of view, light, rapid fire field guns should be better at attacking them than shoulder mounted AV weaponry.

MAC and HAC, however, are terrible at their intended roles.

MAV weaponry is more efficient at destroying light vehicles than LAC, MAC or HAC, effectively obsoleting them.

Vs. Medium vehicles and all heavier ones, MAV, HAV, SHAV are better than any auto cannon, and LAV is better than all but HAC

Because of this distribution, where dedicated AVs are always a superior choice, and MACs and HACs are bad choices for anti infantry duty, I propose the following changes:


LAC: AP 2, Damage 2, Shots 2, Size 16
MAC: AP 3, Damage 2.5, Shots 2, Size 32
HAC: AP 5, Damage 3, Shots 2, Size 48

I have created these weapons as Test LAC, Test MAC and Test HAC respectively in my calculator. With this set of numbers, ACs are never better than the dedicated weaponry designed to defeat that armor. LAC becomes slightly better than PWI vs. powered-armor infantry, and equal to CAP against Heavy Powered Armor.
Vs. Light vehicles, LAC is still an inferior choice to LAV, but it is punching at its weight class, and not outperformed tonnage-wise compared to MAV and MAC vs. Light Vehicles.

MAC's changes make them better than MAV vs. light vehicles (which makes sense), but only half as effective as MAV vs. medium vehicles, and less effective than HAV; also in line with the weapon type.

HAC is better than MAV vs. light vehicles due to the extra shots (they're both overpenetrating the armor), and better than MAC vs. medium vehicles (they're having an easier time "punching down"). However, HAC is still an inferior choice to MAV vs. mediums

At the Heavy Vehicle tier and all higher tiers, HACs will be an inferior choice to HAV and SHAV, but will beat MAVs due to MAVs being out of their weight class.

With this setup, an ACs is typically the 2nd or 3rd best choice for defeating a given unit. However, there is one place they shine, and that's armored static units.

Currently, due to static emplacements having a worse armor progression than vehicles, bombardment is the best choice for defeating them, since their HP is larger than their armor.

With these changes, LACs are a bit less efficient than LAVs vs Light and Medium Statics, but ACs become on par with bombardment for defeating medium armored statics, and MACs and HACs pull into the lead for defeating heavy armored static defenses (with MACs being a better choice due to HACs overpenetrating).

Please make a copy of the spreadsheet and play around with it and give feedback. I feel as though my changes mean that auto cannons become useful, but since they're never "second best at everything", it never gets to the point where massed auto cannons become meta. Opinions, and suggestions for tweaking the stats of the ACs are more than welcome. One line I haven't explored is bringing their weight and shots back up to default (I gave them 2 shots for 2/3rds the weight).

[Pedroig]

You are using a VERY SPECIFIC definition of efficiency.  CtK is more important than anything else, not weight, and to a lesser extent GSP.  A better/more scalable "Tweak" would be adding a shot versus changing AP and D.  Just looking at other ways;  versus some, like Heavy Static Units, the best units are HB, MAC, and HAC, all have the same CtK, which by the ton efficiency formula makes MAC the best, HAC the worst of the three, but a GSP makes MAC the best HB the worst.

That does not mean AC's are overall lacking, but they tend to be a fairly constant "next best" option for a variety of opponents.  Which means they are the best option to throw against enemies of unknown ability/composition.  And for adding flexibility to any multi-component unit, there are no better choices.

Lanchester's square law shows that it is far better to take out enemy forces to quickly get a snowball effect.  If by throwing three times as much weight per unit means 1/9th of taken casualties, it is a win by every measure.  It is one of the things the spreadsheet (unless it has been updated) doesn't really show, what the enemy can do back.  Also, bombardment weapons are not reliable as a rule (LB being an exception) as a force multiplier since it does not take effect until after breakthrough has been determined.  They also cause quite a bit of collateral damage.  Which when defending one's own colonies it is generally good to minimize. 

So focusing on CtK/tn is a very poor indicator of actual performance.  Expected Kill/Loss ratio is what is most important.

[Exultant (OP)]

First of all, thank you for the reply, and the thought out response!

I am being specific, because this is a discussion strictly about "what gun should I put on my vehicle". Formation compositions to maximize kills and minimize losses are, in themselves, an entirely different discussion because it requires delving into minimizing the damage you take. My argument here is that autocannons are only an RP choice, and have no role where they excel, even "jack of all trades".

Chance to Kill, by itself, is not the most important factor. If the most important thing was chance to kill, the only optimal solution to ground combat would be SHAV weaponry, since it has the highest chance to kill any enemy unit, with the highest penetration and weapons do not have differing chances to hit (just more attempts). You need to maximize the chance to kill per ton, because you transport a specific number of tons, which limits the number of guns you bring. the faster you kill, the less damage you take, and the less total supply you use.

However, you do make a good point about GSP, as GSP does relate to total tonnage you need to transport. I would make the argument that CtK/Ton is a better reflection of the decisions that people make rather than CtK/GSP or even potentially CtK/(ton*GSP), since we are able to keep the vast majority of our logistics outside of the chain of command (transferring elements in as Logistics units are used up) which keeps HQ sizes smaller, which keeps RP costs down for developing the HQs, which also means we have more choices for commanders for our formations.

I did edits to the calculator to compare efficiency as defined as CtK/(ton*GSP), and tweaked the modified ACs to have GSP cost calculated correctly (AP mod*Damage mod*Shots). Note that this did change things slightly. Test LAC has a slightly higher GSP cost, Test MAC has a slightly lower cost, and Test HAC is unaffected. I also added your suggestion of an extra shot with no other modifications to AC penetration and damage. I prefixed these designs with RF for rapid fire. Please access the calculator again and make a new copy if you want to look at the numbers.

The biggest impact of comparing efficiency as CtK/(ton*GSP) seems to be that there's really no difference between the Test ACs vs. regular ACs against infantry, except Test LAC is twice as effective (and above LAV) vs. Infantry Powered Heavy. Using this metric, the RF guns are identical to their normal counterparts, since the extra shot is offset by the extra GSP the gun uses. Due to the way the rules work, you cannot add shots without adding MSP. Also, default autocannons have TERRIBLE GSP efficiency, because they consistently overpenetrate without doing enough damage to anything but infantry.

Vs. Light vehicles, the distribution is still the same, with LAV on top followed by Test LAC. MAC and HAC are down at the bottom - Test MAC is tied for standard LAC vs. light vehicles.

Vs. Medium vehicles I see a distribution I wouldn't prefer. MAV and LAV are more efficient (which is okay) but Test LAC is better than Test MAC is better than Test HAC - ideally it should be MAC on top, but the difference between TLAC and TMAC are less than 4%.

Unfortunately, I'm not happy with the efficiency distribution of the RF AC designs on strictly a per-ton basis:

While RF LAC is now as efficient as PWI vs. any infantry, RF MACs are better than RF LACs vs. Infantry-Heavy.
RF MAC is better vs. Light Vehicles than RF LAC. MAV is better than RF LAC and RF HAC.
Vs. Medium vehicles, RF HAC is less efficient than HAV.
This means there is no use for RF HAC weaponry, as MAV is strictly superior per ton vs. Light, Medium and Heavy vehicles, and RF HAC is very inefficient vs infantry.


Finally, as you say with Lanchester's square law, you don't particularly want to compare by GSP since it may be overall tonnage efficient to win with lower GSP using weapons, but not time-wise, such as with the example that when comparing CtK/(ton*GSP), PWI and PW weaponry is the third and fourth most efficient to kill medium vehicles (when not considering the test ACs) - which is clearly not the case when considering rounds it takes to kill medium vehicles without dedicated AV weaponry.

Thus, my argument for the best way to compare weapons is the highest CtK per ton, to maximize the kills per round and reduce own losses and amount of total GSP used, which reduces total tonnage needed to win.


Kill/Loss ratio depends on the chassis you choose to mount your weapon, and the composition of the OPFOR, which is not what the focus of this topic is supposed to be about - it's intended to make autocannons a reasonable choice.