Aurora 4x
C# Aurora => C# Mechanics => Topic started by: bean on March 24, 2024, 10:35:48 AM
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I'm a long-time Aurora player, and when C# came out a few years ago, I did a tutorial series (https://www.navalgazing.net/Aurora-Tutorial-Part-1) on my blog Naval Gazing (https://www.navalgazing.net) (which normally talks about naval warfare, particularly battleships). Given the recent changes, I thought I would do a writeup (https://www.navalgazing.net/Aurora-22-Missile-Warfare) of my analysis of missile warfare, and figured it might be interesting to the people here, too.
Missile warfare, described in these (https://www.navalgazing.net/Aurora-Tutorial-Part-7) three (https://www.navalgazing.net/Aurora-Tutorial-Part-8) posts (https://www.navalgazing.net/Aurora-Tutorial-Part-9), used to be pretty simple, almost to the point of being solved. There was a little room for variation, but missile defense was entirely a matter of getting as many damage 1 shots out as possible, normalized for hit rate. Offensive missiles had a bit of flexibility, but even there, options were pretty much limited to tradeoffs between more damage and a lower chance of being shot down. A single hit would take out any missile, so you wanted to keep your missiles small.
So what changes did Steve make, and how do they affect ship design and operations? Well, first, beam point defense was radically changed. Instead of it dealing with each incoming salvo one at a time, allocating the next available weapon to it, the allocation is done entirely ahead of time, before a single shot is fired. This means that some shots will be wasted (I initially misread the patch notes and thought allocation was per-salvo instead of per-missile, although I've looked into this, and the difference it makes is surprisingly small in most cases, see replies for more on this), and a few missiles are likely to leak through, where only CIWS and decoys can counter them.1 The player gets to choose which FCs are allocated first, and how many shots each FC is going to place against a given target. To discourage setting “how many shots” to the maximum, point-defense fire now incurs a failure rate, just like offensive beam fire.2 The result is that the player has to make a lot more decisions about which weapons are going to be set for PD and why. Among other things, it makes a lot less sense to use your offensive beams for defense, as they cost an arm and a leg to fix, and you have to try and balance getting enough hits to stop incoming missiles with not wasting a ton of shots on overkill. In fact, I think it might be nice to have a bit more automation here, as the biggest single variable in how many shots you want to take at each incoming missile is speed, and if you are under attack by multiple types of missiles at the same time (say, AMMs and ASMs) it can be really annoying to switch back and forth regularly.
But that still implies a setup rather like the old one, and there are a couple of other things that Steve threw in to keep life interesting. One is decoys.3 Each decoy is .5 MSP, and looks like the missile to the sensors of an incoming attack. If the ECCM rating of the system is equal to or less than the missile’s ECM rating, then each attack has a 1/(1+decoy number) chance of hitting the missile. Otherwise, it will take out a decoy, making it easier for the next attack to hit. If the ECCM rating is higher, then the decoys become less effective, with the chance of hitting the missile being 1/(1+(decoy number * (1-.2(ECCM-ECM))).4 This obviously throws a great deal of uncertainty into how many shots to allocate (particularly for the first wave of a salvo), and generally makes it a lot easier for an attacker to get missiles through.
The second addition is the laser head. This is a .25 MSP system that allows standoff detonations, but at a cost in warhead strength depending on what technology has been researched. Beam defenses still get to take their shot, but only at the detonation range, which is likely to be significantly farther than the standard range that normal beam defenses are designed to work at. At best, the fire control is far less effective. More likely, this is entirely outside the range of normal beam defenses, and the defender is forced to rely on offensive beams or maybe some dedicated anti-laser head systems. The best I’ve come up with so far is turreted reduced-size 10 cm lasers, although depending on the detonation range you’re dealing with, small high-velocity railguns might also be a viable option. Obviously, unless you’re optimizing against a specific enemy that you know uses laser heads almost exclusively, it still makes sense to keep conventional short-range defenses around, too, because it’s going to be hard to get a lot of shots out of longer-range PD weapons.
OK, but what about AMMs? Don’t those still work reasonably similarly, decoys aside? Well, no. The other big change Steve made was deleting agility, which was used to raise the hit percentage above the standard .1*(own speed/target speed). Now, all missiles have that hit chance unless they’re fitted with terminal guidance, a .25 MSP system that raises your hit percentage based on the researched tech, from a low of +25% to a high of +90%. I think this is a bad system for AMMs, because it’s too big for the benefits it gives you relative to another new introduction, multiple warheads. Now, you can divide your warhead space into multiple smaller sections that attack independently, each of which adds only .1 MSP to the missile. A single additional warhead effectively doubles the effectiveness of the AMM, which is as much as the best terminal guidance can do, and with less volume. This is aided by another change, the fact that warheads below strength 1 are now useful against missiles. A fractional warhead will instantly destroy any missile that is smaller than 20 times its warhead strength, and has a chance of destroying bigger missiles, too. Obviously, picking warhead strength is another area where the player is going to have to make a decision on limited information.
But there’s another system that is very useful for AMMs: Retarget Capability. This is a .5 MSP system which allows a missile that didn’t hit its target the first time to go around and attack again. It’s of somewhat dubious value on ASMs because the beam defenses will get another crack at it, but AMMs don’t have defenses, so it effectively guarantees a hit if it has enough chances. But it’s also big enough that squeezing it into a size-1 missile is probably not feasible. The other thing to keep in mind is that it won’t kill the target if it runs out of fuel first, so it’s probably a good idea to give it a significantly longer range than the fire control you plan to pair it with. Oh, and I checked. If a retarget-equipped AMM has multiple warheads, it will essentially check every warhead independently, and if none of them hit, then it will pass on exploding and keep attacking the next round. If even one of them hits, then it’s going to disappear. Hit chances are likely to be low, so fit multiple warheads. The only real counter to this is decoys (which work against AMMs exactly like they do against beam defenses), but ECCM (a .25 MSP system) is useless unless you have an edge over the enemy’s ECM, so it probably doesn’t make sense to fit your AMMs with it unless you know you’re facing an enemy who uses decoys and who you have an EW edge over.
But what are the implications if you want to use missiles yourself? In a lot of ways, they’re the inverse of what I’ve discussed on the defensive side. Decoys are very powerful, and you should make use of them unless the enemy has a huge edge in electronic warfare (and in that case, you’re probably dead anyway).5 ECCM is almost mandatory, as there’s a new missile jammer which multiplies the chance of a missile hitting by (1-.2*(ECM-ECCM)),6 which rapidly cuts into your hits. Terminal guidance can be quite useful if your accuracy is lower than you’d like and you have a big missile, while retargeting is probably not worth it because you go through PD fire again. I can’t see much use for multiple warheads. Unlike with an AMM, doubling your chance of a hit and halving the strength of a warhead isn’t usually a good trade for ASMs.
And then there’s laser heads, which as discussed above are great for bypassing beam defenses, but particularly early on, you’re losing a ton of damage. (That said, you’re getting the high-penetration laser damage pattern instead of the low-penetration missile one, so it might not be quite as bad as it sounds.) The big question is what to set the detonation range for during missile design. Besides the technology that sets what fraction of normal warhead damage goes into the laser head, there’s another one that sets the focus range. If the warhead goes off within the focus range, then the laser head deals full damage. If it’s further out, damage is multiplied by (focus range/distance), with a cap of twice the racial beam fire control tech range. Obviously there’s no reason to ever set it closer than focus range (detonation range doesn’t make any difference on hit chance), but it might occasionally be useful to set it off further out if necessary to avoid a particular defense system. Oh, and laser heads and multiple warheads are incompatible.
On the whole, I’m very excited for the new missile system. Steve said that his goal was to make big missiles more useful relative to the previous tactic of spamming lots of small ones, and on the whole, I think he’s done a great job of it. Decoys in particular are a significant boon to bigger missiles, enough to make them competitive with smaller missiles, although if you’re wanting to go for maximum defense penetration, then smaller missiles are still the way to go.
1 Or you can try and use shields to absorb the leakers, which I’ve found works quite well. ⇑
2 MATH FOOTNOTE: Because of how probabilities work, you will want to aim for slight overkill. For instance, against a 6-missile salvo with hit probability of .34, shooting 3v1 has a 58% chance of getting a leaker, while 4v1 drops this to 24% and 5v1 down to 7%. Smaller salvoes increase the odds of leakers slightly, as do lower hit probabilities when the product of (Ph*shot number) is held constant. The opposite is generally true, although with small salvoes, low shots can start to overwhelm a high Ph in terms of leaker odds. If you want to investigate this more yourself, the keyword you want is “binominal distribution”, or you can use the Monte Carlo spreadsheet attached below. ⇑
3 It’s worth noting that there are now also decoys for ships. Basically, if enough missiles leak through beam fire, your ship can launch a decoy, which will have a certain size, and absorb incoming missiles in proportion to the ratio between its size and the size of the ship. I’ve only used them a tiny bit, and have not come away particularly impressed with their utility. ⇑
4 I think this equation could use some tweaking. There is no difference between, say, shooting at an ECM 5 missile with an ECCM 5 fire control, and shooting at an ECM 10 missile with no ECCM whatsoever. I get why it doesn’t work like the normal system where an equal-level ECCM completely counters ECM, but it might be nice to have full effectiveness at, say, 2 levels of ECM overmatch instead of at the same level. If nothing else, this setup greatly reduces the incentive to use ECCM on AMMs. ⇑
5 MATH FOOTNOTE: Because decoys go away if the actual missile is killed, the average number of hits required to kill a missile is equal to 1+.5*decoys, assuming that you shoot single shots at it until it dies, then stop. (If this doesn’t make sense, think of it as there being a 50/50 chance that a new decoy will be targeted before the missile or after it.) This is not a perfect assumption for anything other than 1v1 single-warhead AMMs (multi-warhead AMMs all attack the same missile, so there’s a tiny bit of slop there, but it should be pretty close to accurate in that case, too), and it gets rather weird with beams, where allocation is on a per-salvo basis. A Monte Carlo simulation (essentially rolling dice a bunch of times and counting the outcomes) suggests that beam defenses facing a salvo with 6 2-decoy missiles would have at least one leaker about 40% of the time if they fired the 2 hits per missile (assuming 100% hit rate for simplicity) that this math suggests. If they fire 2.5 hits per missile, then this drops to something under 5%. Smaller salvoes seem to have slightly fewer leakers at 2 hits and more at 2.5 hits, while large salvoes show the opposite pattern. There’s a more sophisticated version available here (https://www.navalgazing.net/attach/AuroraMissileMonteCarlo.xlsx) that can accommodate up to 12 missiles per salvo and takes both hit probability and decoys into account. Yellow boxes are inputs, blue are outputs. It runs 1,000 different salvoes and sums the results. Note that “leakers” is the percentage of salvoes that have leakers, not the percentage of leakers. ⇑
6 There are similar systems for beam FC and active sensors, and this is a significant improvement over the old system where you could often completely block the enemy with a much smaller edge, although as usual, I rather wish it wasn’t quite so even. ⇑
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This is a nice-looking writeup! I'd like to comment more fully but I'd need some time to look at the math in more detail.
One comment I do want to throw out there right off the bat, though:
(although allocation is per-salvo instead of per-missile, which makes things somewhat better),
and a few other places where you reference the "salvo" mechanic.
As of 2.2, missile salvos are no longer a relevant mechanic for point defense fire. See Steve's dev post here: (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13090.msg164276#msg164276)
The new point defence system is based on the concept that all point defence fire in the same increment takes place simultaneously, with the exception of CIWS. Therefore all assignment of weapons to targets happens before any combat occurs. This assignment is done at the level of individual shots (not weapons) against individual missiles (not salvos). This is less efficient than the current method, which (very unrealistically) knows the results of every point defence shot before the next one takes place. Under the new mechanics, there is likely to be overkill on some missiles, while others leak through the defences.
Emphasis mine. This means any point defense calculations need to be done on a per-missile, not per-salvo, basis, with all PD shots allocated before any hit% calculations are applied. Again, I need to go over the math here once I have more time to invest, but that factor may motivate some revisions in your calculations.
On the topic of EWar I do have some thoughts but those should go in the suggestions thread.
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This is a nice-looking writeup! I'd like to comment more fully but I'd need some time to look at the math in more detail.
One comment I do want to throw out there right off the bat, though:
(although allocation is per-salvo instead of per-missile, which makes things somewhat better),
and a few other places where you reference the "salvo" mechanic.
As of 2.2, missile salvos are no longer a relevant mechanic for point defense fire. See Steve's dev post here: (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13090.msg164276#msg164276)
The new point defence system is based on the concept that all point defence fire in the same increment takes place simultaneously, with the exception of CIWS. Therefore all assignment of weapons to targets happens before any combat occurs. This assignment is done at the level of individual shots (not weapons) against individual missiles (not salvos). This is less efficient than the current method, which (very unrealistically) knows the results of every point defence shot before the next one takes place. Under the new mechanics, there is likely to be overkill on some missiles, while others leak through the defences.
Emphasis mine. This means any point defense calculations need to be done on a per-missile, not per-salvo, basis, with all PD shots allocated before any hit% calculations are applied. Again, I need to go over the math here once I have more time to invest, but that factor may motivate some revisions in your calculations.
On the topic of EWar I do have some thoughts but those should go in the suggestions thread.
Oops. How did I miss that. Yeah, if that's the case, I'm going to need to throw out all of the math and try this again.
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Piggy backing off the back of this discussion, how would the assignment of "individual shots (not weapons) against individual missiles (not salvos)" interact with multiple projectile weapons, such as Gauss Cannons? Could a 5-projectile shot from a Gauss cannon target up to 5 missiles, or would it be limited to 1?
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Piggy backing off the back of this discussion, how would the assignment of "individual shots (not weapons) against individual missiles (not salvos)" interact with multiple projectile weapons, such as Gauss Cannons? Could a 5-projectile shot from a Gauss cannon target up to 5 missiles, or would it be limited to 1?
It's really clear, not trying to be rude but just pause and read it again.
individual shots (not weapons) against individual missiles (not salvos)
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So I've looked into the math changes due to shooting at individual missiles very briefly (for those playing along at home, this can be done by taking the Monte Carlo spreadsheet and setting salvo size to 1), and in some ways, it changes surprisingly little. I hacked the sheet to give me total leakers if we don't have decoys (with decoys, things get really complicated, so it natively counts only the percentage of salvos with leakers) and relative to doing normal salvos, single-missile engagement has fewer leakers if you're shooting a small number of high-Ph shots (because you can only have 1 leaker per salvo regardless) and more leakers if you're shooting lots of low-Ph shots. It's still broadly in the same band, although I think the net result is that single-missile allocation makes gauss cannons somewhat better than railguns, at least if we're assuming that shots/HS is held constant.
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So I've looked into the math changes due to shooting at individual missiles very briefly (for those playing along at home, this can be done by taking the Monte Carlo spreadsheet and setting salvo size to 1), and in some ways, it changes surprisingly little. I hacked the sheet to give me total leakers if we don't have decoys (with decoys, things get really complicated, so it natively counts only the percentage of salvos with leakers) and relative to doing normal salvos, single-missile engagement has fewer leakers if you're shooting a small number of high-Ph shots (because you can only have 1 leaker per salvo regardless) and more leakers if you're shooting lots of low-Ph shots. It's still broadly in the same band, although I think the net result is that single-missile allocation makes gauss cannons somewhat better than railguns, at least if we're assuming that shots/HS is held constant.
Have you tried it with the Hughes' Salvo model? (especially Armstrong's stochastic version)
For reference:
https://github.com/doolanshire/Combat-Models/tree/master/salvo
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Have you tried it with the Hughes' Salvo model? (especially Armstrong's stochastic version)
For reference:
https://github.com/doolanshire/Combat-Models/tree/master/salvo
That isn't really the right tool for this. I can replicate the bits that matter easily enough in Excel.
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I have done a bit more digging and can confirm that under single-missile allocation, shooting a lot of low Ph attacks is strictly worse than using an equivalent average hits of high Ph attacks. Basically, more shots means higher variance, and because you have no way of capturing the upside of the variance, you just lose on the downside. However, this is only true if there aren't decoys. If there are, it's possible to get at least some of the upside, and the disadvantages of more shots drops dramatically.
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I have done a bit more digging and can confirm that under single-missile allocation, shooting a lot of low Ph attacks is strictly worse than using an equivalent average hits of high Ph attacks. Basically, more shots means higher variance, and because you have no way of capturing the upside of the variance, you just lose on the downside. However, this is only true if there aren't decoys. If there are, it's possible to get at least some of the upside, and the disadvantages of more shots drops dramatically.
so the takeaway is to always use 100 gauss?
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I have done a bit more digging and can confirm that under single-missile allocation, shooting a lot of low Ph attacks is strictly worse than using an equivalent average hits of high Ph attacks. Basically, more shots means higher variance, and because you have no way of capturing the upside of the variance, you just lose on the downside. However, this is only true if there aren't decoys. If there are, it's possible to get at least some of the upside, and the disadvantages of more shots drops dramatically.
so the takeaway is to always use 100 gauss?
Yes. The gain in effectiveness can be pretty surprising. I'm working on a follow-up with more details.
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I have done a bit more digging and can confirm that under single-missile allocation, shooting a lot of low Ph attacks is strictly worse than using an equivalent average hits of high Ph attacks. Basically, more shots means higher variance, and because you have no way of capturing the upside of the variance, you just lose on the downside. However, this is only true if there aren't decoys. If there are, it's possible to get at least some of the upside, and the disadvantages of more shots drops dramatically.
so the takeaway is to always use 100 gauss?
Yes. The gain in effectiveness can be pretty surprising. I'm working on a follow-up with more details.
This is pretty obvious math.... one 100% shot is better than two 50% shots because two shot will occasionally produce overkill and waste shots. You only gain something if you can manage to increase the hit chance of the 50% above 50% so say two shots at 60% will be better than one at 110%. You can't really hit more with one shot as 100% is always a guaranteed shot as much as 110% from a game mechanic perspective.
On the other hand you can gain some weight saving from multiple smaller gauss, so it is not entirely obvious which is better all the time. Putting four full size gauss cannons in one turret can also produce allot of wasted shots as one turret can only fire at one salvo.
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On the other hand you can gain some weight saving from multiple smaller gauss, so it is not entirely obvious which is better all the time. Putting four full size gauss cannons in one turret can also produce allot of wasted shots as one turret can only fire at one salvo.
One turret can engage missiles from multiple salvos. It's now shots against missiles, not weapons against salvos.
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On the other hand you can gain some weight saving from multiple smaller gauss, so it is not entirely obvious which is better all the time. Putting four full size gauss cannons in one turret can also produce allot of wasted shots as one turret can only fire at one salvo.
One turret can engage missiles from multiple salvos. It's now shots against missiles, not weapons against salvos.
Ok... that is changed... I forgot that is now how it works now. That also makes the argument of overkill generally less of an issue. As a few missile impact after PD have fired should be possible to soak with shields without much issues. The saving of weight might then be worth more in some instances unless you can fit huge quad 100% gauss canons on every ship.
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I would also like to comment on terminal guidance which is more efficient to use for ASM rather than AMM missiles, so terminal guidance do have a place in missile design.
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I've written a follow-up to the OP (https://www.navalgazing.net/Aurora-Beam-PD-Allocation):
First, a mea culpa. I misread the patch notes when putting the last post together, and it turns out that allocation is on a per-missile basis, not a per-salvo basis. This had surprisingly little impact on the overall number of leakers to be expected,1 but quickly led me down a rather interesting rabbit hole that conclusively resolved a long-running question.
Figuring out how to most efficiently allocate beam weapons to avoid overkill has long been an issue in Aurora, although often masked in my experience by gross overkill in available PD systems. Back in the VB6 days, each fire control would only target one salvo, so you needed lots of fire controls. For the pre-2.2 C# versions, this was per-weapon/turret, which was better, but still meant that sizing turrets took some thought. The current system gets rid of all that, but also gets rid of the ability to just make sure there are no leakers by having enough systems available, or at least makes that a lot less desirable as a solution.
After the last post went out, I started messing around with models of single-missile engagements, particularly seeing what happened as I investigated the tradeoff between rate of fire and chance to hit, and I got a very clear result. If you, say, replace full-size gauss guns with an equivalent HS of smaller gauss guns, you get worse performance against missiles without decoys. This is because even if the average number of expected hits stays the same, the increase in variability means you’re failing to get even one hit more of the time, while the fact that there’s only one missile means that you can’t capture any overkill.2 This is particularly stark if the initial Ph is high, when the chance of a leaker might triple if you quadruple the number of shots.
Base Ph 0.67
Base Shots 3
Decoys 0
Base Leaks 3.59%
2x Leaks 8.65%
4x Leaks 11.08%
Base Ph 0.34
Base Shots 5
Decoys 0
Base Leaks 12.52%
2x Leaks 15.52%
4x Leaks 16.92%
Base Ph 0.25
Base Shots 10
Decoys 0
Base Leaks 5.63%
2x Leaks 6.92%
4x Leaks 7.57%
But this is all without decoys, and it turns out that decoys, because they offer the chance of capturing some of the overkill, can even the odds quite a bit. That said, even in the limit case, with enough decoys to absorb all of the overkill, the expected leaker percentage is exactly the same as it is for the full-Ph weapon. So even once we include decoys, you’re never going to be worse off with a full-size turreted gauss gun over the alternatives.3
Base Ph 0.67
Base Shots 3
Decoys 2
Base Leaks 33.00%
2x Leaks 37.05%
4x Leaks 38.79%
Base Ph 0.67
Base Shots 5
Decoys 2
Base Leaks 8.42%
2x Leaks 13.81%
4x Leaks 15.97%
The basic conclusion of all this is pretty simple. The way that beam PD allocation is handled now means that it makes sense to prioritize getting the highest reasonable Ph for your weapons, because the higher variance you get when trading Ph for more shots generally works against you and will never benefit you on net. In a lot of ways, the new system has actually made ship design easier. Previously, picking beam PD layout was a matter of figuring out what the best option was to try and minimize overkill without making things too complicated (I suspect that this was a major and overlooked advantage to railgun PD in original C#), whereas now, full-size gauss guns are the way to go if at all possible.
1 It turns out that when I re-ran the numbers, the higher percentage of single-missile saloves with leakers was almost entirely balanced by cases where larger salvoes had multiple leakers, leaving total leaker numbers the same. ⇑
2 If this doesn’t make sense, consider. I give you the option of flipping two quarters, or one quarter with two heads. If I offer to give you a dollar for every head, the two are equivalent in expected value. If I say “I’ll give you a dollar if you get any heads”, then the two-headed coin is clearly better because you get only one dollar for two heads, and have the possibility of zero dollars. ⇑
3 There are some obvious caveats to this, the biggest relevant to railguns being the assumption that the incoming missile is faster that the tracking speed for the gauss turret/FC, so the railgun is .25 the Ph of the gauss gun. If the missile is slower than that, the railgun is going to have an advantage. ⇑
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This is pretty obvious math.... one 100% shot is better than two 50% shots because two shot will occasionally produce overkill and waste shots. You only gain something if you can manage to increase the hit chance of the 50% above 50% so say two shots at 60% will be better than one at 110%. You can't really hit more with one shot as 100% is always a guaranteed shot as much as 110% from a game mechanic perspective.
This isn't actually true under the current mechanics. The two 60% shots will leak 16% of the time, the single 110% won't leak at all.
On the other hand you can gain some weight saving from multiple smaller gauss, so it is not entirely obvious which is better all the time.
That is at most a 6% saving going from single to quad (I just checked at 4x turret mechanism tracking speed), and the benefits from high Ph are striking, as discussed in the follow-up I just posted.
I would also like to comment on terminal guidance which is more efficient to use for ASM rather than AMM missiles, so terminal guidance do have a place in missile design.
Check the eighth paragraph, 3rd sentence from the end.
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This is pretty obvious math.... one 100% shot is better than two 50% shots because two shot will occasionally produce overkill and waste shots. You only gain something if you can manage to increase the hit chance of the 50% above 50% so say two shots at 60% will be better than one at 110%. You can't really hit more with one shot as 100% is always a guaranteed shot as much as 110% from a game mechanic perspective.
This isn't actually true under the current mechanics. The two 60% shots will leak 16% of the time, the single 110% won't leak at all.
On the other hand you can gain some weight saving from multiple smaller gauss, so it is not entirely obvious which is better all the time.
That is at most a 6% saving going from single to quad (I just checked at 4x turret mechanism tracking speed), and the benefits from high Ph are striking, as discussed in the follow-up I just posted.
My point was that in a layered defence where you also include decoys, CIWS and shields it probably is not that much of a major issue as the size of the system actually might matter more as large expensive modules also have more impact on the design choices and maintenance requirements as well as research investment etc...
The current system where you allocate shots first certainly does favour high accuracy weapons over low accuracy that is for sure. I'm just saying it is not the only thing to consider when designing ships.
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My point was that in a layered defence where you also include decoys, CIWS and shields it probably is not that much of a major issue as the size of the system actually might matter more as large expensive modules also have more impact on the design choices and maintenance requirements as well as research investment etc...
The current system where you allocate shots first certainly does favour high accuracy weapons over low accuracy that is for sure. I'm just saying it is not the only thing to consider when designing ships.
I am not saying that there is literally no case where you should use anything other than size 6 gauss guns. I am saying that if you use something else and aren't in an extreme edge case, all of the other components of your defenses are going to have to work harder. How much harder depends on the base Ph you're dealing with, but it's going to be significant in a wide variety of cases. And if a twin or quad turret is too big or expensive, use singles. A lot of my ships do to preserve redundancy. It's a good tradeoff.
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My point was that in a layered defence where you also include decoys, CIWS and shields it probably is not that much of a major issue as the size of the system actually might matter more as large expensive modules also have more impact on the design choices and maintenance requirements as well as research investment etc...
The current system where you allocate shots first certainly does favour high accuracy weapons over low accuracy that is for sure. I'm just saying it is not the only thing to consider when designing ships.
I am not saying that there is literally no case where you should use anything other than size 6 gauss guns. I am saying that if you use something else and aren't in an extreme edge case, all of the other components of your defenses are going to have to work harder. How much harder depends on the base Ph you're dealing with, but it's going to be significant in a wide variety of cases. And if a twin or quad turret is too big or expensive, use singles. A lot of my ships do to preserve redundancy. It's a good tradeoff.
I agree in general terms... but you also need to account for the increased cost for larger more expensive components and more expensive research costs, everything will have a cost for different reasons in different ways. A large quad 100% gauss turret will have a significant impact on maintenance failures for example and overall maintenance cost over time. It is the same issue with large versus smaller engines for example.
Not everything can be calculated with efficiency in combat, it all depends on many different factors.
Therefore you will need to at least acknowledge that there are trade-offs that will show in other ways outside combat that you need to account for as well. Everything will impact the decision of what components you develop and why. In general a quad 100% gauss is always worse than a single due to how the maintenance mechanic works, you will never really save neither cost nor space with a larger turret.
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Therefore you will need to at least acknowledge that there are trade-offs that will show in other ways outside combat that you need to account for as well. Everything will impact the decision of what components you develop and why. In general a quad 100% gauss is always worse than a single due to how the maintenance mechanic works, you will never really save neither cost nor space with a larger turret.
It's worth bearing in mind that four single gauss weapons will fail 4x more often than a quad turret (because each weapon checks for failure, not each shot), so while the quad is more expensive when it fails, it might not be the most expensive over time.
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Therefore you will need to at least acknowledge that there are trade-offs that will show in other ways outside combat that you need to account for as well. Everything will impact the decision of what components you develop and why. In general a quad 100% gauss is always worse than a single due to how the maintenance mechanic works, you will never really save neither cost nor space with a larger turret.
It's worth bearing in mind that four single gauss weapons will fail 4x more often than a quad turret (because each weapon checks for failure, not each shot), so while the quad is more expensive when it fails, it might not be the most expensive over time.
Is it not so that the quad is also four times more expensive when it does fail so the cost would be the same. I suppose it has been changed as before each weapon in the turret was rated separately so a large turret had four times the chance to fail, but I think you changed this a while ago.
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Is it not so that the quad is also four times more expensive when it does fail so the cost would be the same.
I think this was a C# change, but multi-weapon turrets have modest reductions in tonnage to be a bit more cost and size-efficient than an equal number of single-weapon turrets. See here. (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg103323#msg103323) No explicit cost decrease is mentioned but there is a reduction in crew requirement, so the cost is indirectly reduced if nothing else. Possibly the reduced size also affects the armor calculation, I don't know.
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Is it not so that the quad is also four times more expensive when it does fail so the cost would be the same.
I think this was a C# change, but multi-weapon turrets have modest reductions in tonnage to be a bit more cost and size-efficient than an equal number of single-weapon turrets. See here. (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg103323#msg103323) No explicit cost decrease is mentioned but there is a reduction in crew requirement, so the cost is indirectly reduced if nothing else. Possibly the reduced size also affects the armor calculation, I don't know.
When comparing two ships with smaller gauss but more turrets you will save maintenance supplies and need less maintenance facilities for the same maintenance life value. You also need less research and it will be easier to fit turrets into designs as the components are smaller.
A turret with a single weapon will still occupy more space due to decreased crew requirement and that it is smaller but will still require less maintenance supplies over time.
Not sure of smaller turrets will cost more due to failure in combat as even if they fail more often they also are cheaper, so to me it seems as if the cost will be toughly the same.
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1) Let's assume that for the same number of GUNS there will be the same failure rate/cost. So the single/multiple repair cost portion goes out the window over the long term.
2) Less research is a non sequitor, if one is going pure smaller, then there is no "less research" and if one is going for "more advanced" then once again, the research is going to be done regardless. Comparing different tech levels to one another is rather frivolous, especially in hindsight, either one wants/needs a tech or one doesn't, so there is no "research cost savings" ever.
3) Having more weapons means more chances of failure to occur to the ship, but the impact of that failure will be less overall. (Extreme example is if one loses one of four single turrets during an engagement, the leak chance goes up, but is still less than 100%, whereas if a ship loses its only quad turret then the leak chance technically becomes 0% because all missiles will be getting through).
4) Per Bean's numbers, lowering chance to hit, REGARDLESS OF SOURCE of reduction, INCREASES leakers for any given number of shots.
5) Given a layered defense philosophy; this would mean wanting to have the highest hit chances on the innermost layer. So something like having a 50%/75%/100% Ph onion, with 12/8/6 guns all taking up the same effective space (with minor variance for crew) would be a redunancy max kill focused doctrine based upon either relative or absolute displacement usage. (CIWS nor AMM included in this example, both can be used to "tweak" the numbers, but have other considerations as well) Ideally each layer will cover at least one full five second tick of incoming movement.
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2) Less research is a non sequitor, if one is going pure smaller, then there is no "less research" and if one is going for "more advanced" then once again, the research is going to be done regardless. Comparing different tech levels to one another is rather frivolous, especially in hindsight, either one wants/needs a tech or one doesn't, so there is no "research cost savings" ever.
If you use smaller gauss you need less turrets and the gun itself are cheaper to research so you need to research less number of turrets and the turret is less costly to research over the equivalent version. So you will save in research cost.
For example you research the 100% gauss and then one single, twin and quad turret in order to fit into designs properly with different sizes. Or.. you just research a 33% gauss and then a single quad turret. The single quad 33% turret are likely enough to fit into any design in some number to save on both maintenance and research costs.
One example ship I created with 4 100% quad turrets and one with 12 33% quad turrets used 20% (1200 vs 1500 supplies) less supplies and was 200t smaller, less crew and slightly cheaper to build. That is why it is not a straight answer to what is best.
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2) Less research is a non sequitor, if one is going pure smaller, then there is no "less research" and if one is going for "more advanced" then once again, the research is going to be done regardless. Comparing different tech levels to one another is rather frivolous, especially in hindsight, either one wants/needs a tech or one doesn't, so there is no "research cost savings" ever.
If you use smaller gauss you need less turrets and the gun itself are cheaper to research so you need to research less number of turrets and the turret is less costly to research over the equivalent version. So you will save in research cost.
I will grant you that this is technically true, but it's also not that much for the benefit you get. I just ran the numbers, and in a fairly high-tech game (gauss ROF 5/range 5) I would spend less than 2000 RP to deliver a quad 100% gauss from scratch. Extra turrets will be under a thousand each. Oh, and you've spent 134,000 RP in basic research to get to those gauss guns. So the trade here is spending an extra couple thousand RP (maybe 3% of what you've spent on gauss so far in the game) in exchange for 20%+ fewer leakers (or, you know, 60%+ fewer leakers with good FC). Now, the best option I can see for that kind of 20% reduction in (effective) leakers is another level of missile jammer, which is, oh, 80,000 RP. Yeah, I think I'll spend the extra research.
One example ship I created with 4 100% quad turrets and one with 12 33% quad turrets used 20% (1200 vs 1500 supplies) less supplies and was 200t smaller, less crew and slightly cheaper to build. That is why it is not a straight answer to what is best.
Let's say that your FC has a 50% inherent to-hit, and you shoot 4 v 1 at 50% Ph with the basic ship. I get 6.25% leakers. Now, if I shoot 12v1 with the 33% ship, I get 11.22% leakers. You have to shoot something like 15v1 to get the same leaker rate (technically, the slightly-higher 6.49%). To put it another way, if you're bound by the total number of guns and want a constant leaker rate, you need 25% more ships. So the full-size gauss ship needs the same number of supplies, and is cheaper everywhere else. I'll take that one.
(Edited to fix basic math error in my last paragraph.)
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2) Less research is a non sequitor, if one is going pure smaller, then there is no "less research" and if one is going for "more advanced" then once again, the research is going to be done regardless. Comparing different tech levels to one another is rather frivolous, especially in hindsight, either one wants/needs a tech or one doesn't, so there is no "research cost savings" ever.
If you use smaller gauss you need less turrets and the gun itself are cheaper to research so you need to research less number of turrets and the turret is less costly to research over the equivalent version. So you will save in research cost.
I will grant you that this is technically true, but it's also not that much for the benefit you get. I just ran the numbers, and in a fairly high-tech game (gauss ROF 5/range 5) I would spend less than 2000 RP to deliver a quad 100% gauss from scratch. Extra turrets will be under a thousand each. Oh, and you've spent 134,000 RP in basic research to get to those gauss guns. So the trade here is spending an extra couple thousand RP (maybe 3% of what you've spent on gauss so far in the game) in exchange for 20%+ fewer leakers (or, you know, 60%+ fewer leakers with good FC). Now, the best option I can see for that kind of 20% reduction in (effective) leakers is another level of missile jammer, which is, oh, 80,000 RP. Yeah, I think I'll spend the extra research.
One example ship I created with 4 100% quad turrets and one with 12 33% quad turrets used 20% (1200 vs 1500 supplies) less supplies and was 200t smaller, less crew and slightly cheaper to build. That is why it is not a straight answer to what is best.
Let's say that your FC has a 50% inherent to-hit, and you shoot 4 v 1 at 50% Ph with the basic sheet. I get 6.25% leakers. Now, if I shoot 12v1 with the 33% ship, I get 11.22% leakers. You have to shoot something like 16v1 to get the same leaker rate (technically, the slightly-higher 6.49%). To put it another way, if you're bound by the total number of guns and want a constant leaker rate, you need 33% more ships that are (being as generous as possible) 20% cheaper. Hmm. 1.3333*.8=1.06667. Again, better hit rate comes out the winner.
Every little tech points will count, especially earlier on... I spend allot more time in the game at lower tech levels anyway. When you play with rather slow tech progression and restricted scientist labs you can be rather short on Missile/Kinetic scientists. You also likely are using your least skilled scientists to research components and the more skilled ones to research more expensive technologies. That means that the components become relative to other tech more expensive.
I rarely see leaking missiles as much of an issue when shields and decoys are used. If you don't use the shields they are also wasted space. If there are 6 or 10 missiles leaked is not very important when the decoys and shields stop it anyway. If your PD is overwhelmed then it does not really matter much anyway as it is the overkill that produce the leaking difference.
What you save on time from research and on used supplies over time can be quite substantially important.
No point to deny that 100% gauss will produce less leaking missiles, but it does come at a different cost. You also need to judge how much you want your resources spent on shields and decoys to matter as well as supplies and time in research
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Every little tech points will count, especially earlier on... I spend allot more time in the game at lower tech levels anyway. When you play with rather slow tech progression and restricted scientist labs you can be rather short on Missile/Kinetic scientists. You also likely are using your least skilled scientists to research components and the more skilled ones to research more expensive technologies. That means that the components become relative to other tech more expensive.
An RP is an RP. That's how this works. Sure, I'll grant you that the percentage is higher at lower tech, but again, the gains are substantial, and I think make sense by any metric, particularly if you're willing to invest in smaller-than-quad turrets.
I rarely see leaking missiles as much of an issue when shields and decoys are used. If you don't use the shields they are also wasted space. If there are 6 or 10 missiles leaked is not very important when the decoys and shields stop it anyway. If your PD is overwhelmed then it does not really matter much anyway as it is the overkill that produce the leaking difference.
I don't think this is true in the general case, or if it is, it speaks to weakness in the AI. I agree that some number of leakers are a fact of life, and recommend shields to deal with them in the OP. But to a first approximation, all of your inner-ring systems are going to be able to handle a specific number of leakers and anything past that is going to cause problems fast. (Yes, I know that decoys are a little more complicated, but that's a complication I'm ignoring.) Optimizing your beam PD means that you can handle a larger number of incoming missiles without getting overwhelmed. For instance, comparing your two ships, the 100% one will have 48 shots if I assume that the ROF is 3, while the 33% one will have 144. Let's say that you have a squadron of 4 of them, and base Ph is 0.5. If I fire 96 missiles, my math says that the average number of leakers will be 24 for the 100% ships and 32.15 for the 33% ships. For 64 incoming missiles, I get 8 and 12.4, respectively. Both seem like places where you might plausibly find a cliff in response, and the 100% ships could be fine while the 33% ships are taking damage. Sure, it's possible to get around this by being good enough to beat most AI and slightly overpaying, but you are overpaying.
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Every little tech points will count, especially earlier on... I spend allot more time in the game at lower tech levels anyway. When you play with rather slow tech progression and restricted scientist labs you can be rather short on Missile/Kinetic scientists. You also likely are using your least skilled scientists to research components and the more skilled ones to research more expensive technologies. That means that the components become relative to other tech more expensive.
An RP is an RP. That's how this works. Sure, I'll grant you that the percentage is higher at lower tech, but again, the gains are substantial, and I think make sense by any metric, particularly if you're willing to invest in smaller-than-quad turrets.
I rarely see leaking missiles as much of an issue when shields and decoys are used. If you don't use the shields they are also wasted space. If there are 6 or 10 missiles leaked is not very important when the decoys and shields stop it anyway. If your PD is overwhelmed then it does not really matter much anyway as it is the overkill that produce the leaking difference.
I don't think this is true in the general case, or if it is, it speaks to weakness in the AI. I agree that some number of leakers are a fact of life, and recommend shields to deal with them in the OP. But to a first approximation, all of your inner-ring systems are going to be able to handle a specific number of leakers and anything past that is going to cause problems fast. (Yes, I know that decoys are a little more complicated, but that's a complication I'm ignoring.) Optimizing your beam PD means that you can handle a larger number of incoming missiles without getting overwhelmed. For instance, comparing your two ships, the 100% one will have 48 shots if I assume that the ROF is 3, while the 33% one will have 144. Let's say that you have a squadron of 4 of them, and base Ph is 0.5. If I fire 96 missiles, my math says that the average number of leakers will be 24 for the 100% ships and 32.15 for the 33% ships. For 64 incoming missiles, I get 8 and 12.4, respectively. Both seem like places where you might plausibly find a cliff in response, and the 100% ships could be fine while the 33% ships are taking damage. Sure, it's possible to get around this by being good enough to beat most AI and slightly overpaying, but you are overpaying.
I agree that you will get less leaking missiles but you are still ignoring that time, research, design flexibility, maintenance supplies and weight saving is all something you also need to consider over time. Do your ship spend more time in combat or paying maintenance for example. If you have the shields they are useful for defence in beam combat as well as against missiles... so you can rely on them to soak incoming missiles as well as part of the total investment. If you don't use the shields then they are as much dead weight as anything else on the design.
In order to manage this you have a layered defence of AMM, PD, CIWS, Decoys and Shields and you want to balance their use as much as possible when needed.
If you tend to use relatively small ships in large numbers then leaking missiles is more of an issue than if you tend to use bigger and fewer ships for example. Against the AI I rarely actually rely much on PD as protection to begin with (only a minor part) to be honest but that is a completely different discussion. I also tend to favour designs that save cost rather than efficiency as overall long time costs is a worthwhile consideration. This is probably why I accept a larger degree of leaking missiles on my design for reduction in deployment costs. Avoiding being shot at in the first place obviously being the number one priority to start with. But if I'm shot at by the AI I tend to have overwhelming force or being completely outmatched, so then saving cost are much more important. I rarely find myself in situations where I'm evenly matched, such situations should be avoided at all costs.
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I'm confused by the idea of using decoys against small numbers of leaking missiles. Decoys work best against large numbers of missiles and are relatively expensive and difficult to reload. Popping a decoy against just half a dozen warheads seems like a huge waste.
Though I'm also confused by the idea that you'd try to avoid 'overpaying' on warships. You don't have perfect information about the enemy, and you don't want to lose. If you've got an obvious 'I lose' breakpoint like PD collapse, dragging it as far out of the realm of likely outcomes is an obvious priority, surely?
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you are still ignoring that time, research, design flexibility, maintenance supplies and weight saving is all something you also need to consider over time...
Every little tech points will count, especially earlier on... I spend allot more time in the game at lower tech levels anyway. When you play with rather slow tech progression and restricted scientist labs you can be rather short on Missile/Kinetic scientists...
Jorgen, with all due respect, you are barking up the wrong tree here. The formula bean is showing in this thread is universal - the results are the same in every game, the specific details of your campaign/race/ship do not matter. I do not understand why you are arguing so hard against him. Saving a few hundred or even a couple of thousand RP is almost meaningless even in a low-tech game, especially if spending those research points translates to 20%+ improvement in PD efficiency. The mass/MSP savings are also trivial because again, who would choose NOT to get significantly improved PD if the price is few hundred more tons in mass or spending a little more MSP per annum per ship.
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you are still ignoring that time, research, design flexibility, maintenance supplies and weight saving is all something you also need to consider over time...
Every little tech points will count, especially earlier on... I spend allot more time in the game at lower tech levels anyway. When you play with rather slow tech progression and restricted scientist labs you can be rather short on Missile/Kinetic scientists...
Jorgen, with all due respect, you are barking up the wrong tree here. The formula bean is showing in this thread is universal - the results are the same in every game, the specific details of your campaign/race/ship do not matter. I do not understand why you are arguing so hard against him. Saving a few hundred or even a couple of thousand RP is almost meaningless even in a low-tech game, especially if spending those research points translates to 20%+ improvement in PD efficiency. The mass/MSP savings are also trivial because again, who would choose NOT to get significantly improved PD if the price is few hundred more tons in mass or spending a little more MSP per annum per ship.
I do agree that full size gauss are more efficient and will produce less leaking missiles. Whether you value the RP saved or not is up to each and everyone to judge. For me playing with restricted admin and about 20-25% research 500-1000RP cost can sometimes be the difference between developing a component in 2 years instead of 4 years as I tend to use the scientist with low number of labs for developing components while the scientists developing more expensive techs have more labs.
Smaller gauss still allow for a bit more flexibility in design of ships and can also make the designs over time cheaper in maintenance cost while being less efficient in PD capacity.
If I have plenty of good scientist I probably also choose the more expensive option too.
The difference in maintenance cost are mostly about how big the turret is. So in many cases many single gauss turrets likely is better and more economical than using quad turrets especially for full size gauss as the full size gauss turrets are so large and expensive. The single turret will require more space but be considerably cheaper in the long run.
Overall I might agree that smaller gauss need to be rebalanced so they are more worthwhile to develop. Perhaps their to hit should not be linear with the size reduction. So a 33% sized turret hit on 50% for example. This would at least make them more interesting in some cases from an efficiency perspective.