Beam weapon dropoff

[Ulzgoroth (OP)]

So I thought I knew how damage dropoff with range worked.

Then I looked at it properly and it turns out I had no idea. It looks constant up to one range increment followed by something like exponential decay in the neighborhood of 2^(-range/range factor) down to 1 at max range? At least for lasers. I know particle beams are constant damage at range. But are carronades and railguns the same decay as lasers, or something else?

[nuclearslurpee]

Beam weapon damage falls off according to the factor (Range / Range_Modifier), capped by the maximum damage of the weapon of course. If you're unclear what the range modifier is, it is the value which is multiplied by the weapon damage to obtain the maximum range - for lasers this is the wavelength tech, for railguns this is the launch speed tech, for both of these the progression is in increments of 10,000 while for plasmas it is fixed at 10,000.

Consider a 15 cm laser (max 6 damage) with NUV wavelength (range modifier 30,000). At a range of 30,000 km or less, it will deal the full 6 damage. At a range of 60,000 km the damage will fall off to 3. At 90,000 km the damage is 2, and at the maximum range the damage is the minimum value of 1 (I don't remember how rounding works for the intermediate values).

[Ulzgoroth (OP)]

Yes, that it falls off "according to" that factor is the perfectly obvious part. The not obvious part is how it falls off according to the factor. (My previous, quite wrong, impression was that it fell off by subtracting the aforementioned factor from the max damage.)

It looks like the answer might be damage = floor(initial damage / min(1, range/range_modifier))

That fits the first few data points of a 53-damage laser pretty well, and also the apparent profile of a 3-damage laser and a 6-damage carronade.


If that's right, it makes the benefits of increased rand modifiers pretty simple - so long as the new range modifier doesn't exceed the range to target, damage is effectively multiplied by the modifier. Which fits quite nicely with the pricing, too.