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Make weapon tooltips accurate and consistent


vehementi
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I am told that all of this is expected behaviour so I should suggest a change 😉

 

  • Railguns do not do their listed damage. The listed damage assumes 4 blocks of penetration and really does only 25% of the listed damage (per block pierced, if any). So if a railgun hits a shield or hull or thin part of the ship, it'll only do 1/4 of the damage you would expect by looking at the tooltip. The listed damage of railguns should be updated to reflect the actual damage per block. With the dropoff after the 4th block, a railgun will never even do 1.25x the listed damage, which is extremely different from what the tooltip and intuition suggest
  • "Triple" etc. weapons actually do 3x their listed damage per hit (not DPS), but only on certain weapons say "500x3" as the damage, while others just say "500" but do 1500 in fact. So you actually don't know the alpha strike damage of a railgun, lightning gun, etc. without double checking the math based on DPS, ROF, and cooldown. The "x3" part should be made consistent (either always include "x3" or always use the total instead)
  • Weapons that use batteries list their burst DPS (ignoring cooldown) as their DPS while other weapons with cooldown do factor in the cooldown (railguns, cannons, pulse guns, bursting chainguns, ...), making a comparison across weapons require extra math. (Laser sustain DPS is lower than the listed DPS by a factor of like 60%, but you can't even use that as a rule of thumb as you have to double check whether its cooldown time has a modifier)

edit: I trusted someone on discord about the railgun dropoff (each block after the 4th does 80% the previous) -- it's actually 50% the previous so the most damage a railgun can ever do is 125% of the listed damage if it pierces an unlimited number of blocks (or, practically, after 8-9)

Edited by vehementi
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Yes, this really needs another pass. Especially with the introduction of 2.0 captain commands and their very trusting use of sheet dps, these kinds of disparities make for weird dynamics with weapons you keep "just for simulation," weapons you actually use, and weapons that look good and you just throw away.

And good luck to anyone who isn't completely nerding out on the specifics and just equipping the thing at the top of dps/slot sort.

Another piece to add to this: it looks like energy recharge on a weapon does *not* factor into listed DPS, while heat cooldown *does.* Given how a lot of energy-based weapons end up with long recharge cycles, this makes for a horrible disparity between listed and observed DPS. Worst example of this is burst-fire plasma guns, which will often do less than 25% of their listed damage over fire cycles.

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"Wow, a railgun with 33k damage, so good!
... wait, why does it only do 7.6k damage?! The tooltip says much more! Well, in that case the weapon is pretty bad."

image.png.31050812ae52fc9358bc55f8e5882fc1.png

That should not happen. Not even the ingame encyclopedia explains this mechanic, it only says a bit about penetrating hull and not being as effective against armor - which is only true if the railgun can penetrate multiple different hull blocks. Shooting at one massive hull block does the same damage as shooting against armor or shields.

The (at maximum) 25% more damage when hitting many blocks in a line is nice, but not really worth losing 75% damage to shields, single blocks and armor. The Hull Penetration stat value is also pretty meaningless. Doesn't really matter if it's 4, 8 or even 200. 

To be honest, I don't know how to fix that. Sadly I can't think of any easy change that would correct this problem. Maybe make railguns always do at least 70% ship damage with no armor, even when only hitting a single hull block / shields. Each additionally penetrated block raises the damage by 10% (additive) up to the Hull penetration value. High hull penetration value and many hull blocks in a line = big damage. Armor blocks stop the penetration and receive less damage, for example 50%. This would result in much closer damage values, and not doing 4 times as much, but it would also buff railguns much. Nerfing the base damage of railguns would be needed, for example 60% of current values.

Even if mechanically nothing is changed, at least write in the encyclopedia how railguns work. Currently there's no way of finding this out without extensive testing - and hoping there's no other weird mechanic which screws the damage values for some other special cases. 

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18 hours ago, vehementi said:

"Triple" etc. weapons actually do 3x their listed damage per hit (not DPS), but only on certain weapons say "500x3" as the damage, while others just say "500" but do 1500 in fact. So you actually don't know the alpha strike damage of a railgun, lightning gun, etc. without double checking the math based on DPS, ROF, and cooldown. The "x3" part should be made consistent (either always include "x3" or always use the total instead)

I think you may be confusing two different things in here.

Turrets that show an “x#” with the damage are actually shooting that many rounds per firing cycle from 1 barrel… kind of shotgun style.  Internally these are multishot turrets.

Turrets that have a visible number of barrels are simply multi-weapon turrets.  Damage/fire rate is proportionately reduced for continuous beam/all other weapons so that they all maintain the same dps.  These can work in one of two ways: 1) one barrel fires at a time in sequence, or 2) they can get a simultaneous property that allows all barrels to fire linked (at same time) and a proportionate refire delay so they still have the same dps.

And it’s possible for a turret to get all 3 of these (multiweapon, simultaneous shooting, and multishot) at the same time.

 

That said, the devs used to have these all better listed on the tooltips.  At some point they removed the text for simultaneous shooting all together.  So, either way, yeah, tooltips need an overhaul and be more accurate.

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50 minutes ago, FuryoftheStars said:

I think you may be confusing two different things in here.

Turrets that show an “x#” with the damage are actually shooting that many rounds per firing cycle from 1 barrel… kind of shotgun style.  Internally these are multishot turrets.

Turrets that have a visible number of barrels are simply multi-weapon turrets.  Damage/fire rate is proportionately reduced for continuous beam/all other weapons so that they all maintain the same dps.  These can work in one of two ways: 1) one barrel fires at a time in sequence, or 2) they can get a simultaneous property that allows all barrels to fire linked (at same time) and a proportionate refire delay so they still have the same dps.

And it’s possible for a turret to get all 3 of these (multiweapon, simultaneous shooting, and multishot) at the same time.

 

That said, the devs used to have these all better listed on the tooltips.  At some point they removed the text for simultaneous shooting all together.  So, either way, yeah, tooltips need an overhaul and be more accurate.

I'm not confusing anything, I'm aware of all of that. There are weapons that, in fact, DO do 3x the damage, that do not have "3x". So a gun will say: 3000 dps, 1000 damage per shot, 1 ROF. Actually, it is firing 3 shots at once (3 railgun rays, which could hit different facets of the ship). It incorrectly does not say "1000x3 damage" or "3000 damage"

 

unknown.png

 

If you do the math yourself on the DPS:

DPS = damage * ROF * uptime

supposed damage = 857

ROF = 0.19

uptime = 25.9/(25.9+11.60) = 69%

857 * 0.19 * 0.69 = 112 dps, exactly 1/3 of 335. We can conclude after doing all this math that this weapon is doing 856.9x3 damage, not 856.9 damage (and easily verify by shooting something and knowing how railgun damage works).

Edited by vehementi
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1 hour ago, vehementi said:

There are weapons that, in fact, DO do 3x the damage, that do not have "3x".

Are you finding other weapon types than railguns that are showing this?  This may be something specific about them with their attempts at showing a damage figure that includes block pen.

 

edit: btw, don’t get me wrong, I agree that there are issues and inconsistencies with the tooltips and have upvoted your thread.  It’s just that unless they’ve very recently changed something, multiweapon turrets in and of themselves aren’t one of them.  They’re just a cosmetic feature (kind of).  Over my time playing this game, I’ve created a couple different mods that specifically remove the “cosmeticness” of this.

Edited by FuryoftheStars
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