New FM Prizes - Cadmium Armor analysis

The Death From Below raid is over, and we have a new Forsaken Mission cycle and a new Campaign to try.  (Sorry guys, Dragon Strike stuff will have to wait for a later article)

Kixeye has changed the Forsaken Mission a bit - it is now easier to do the repeat run through because:

• The three day timer is reset when you reset for the second run
• Points for the second run are now the same as the first

Although I could previously do Elite tier twice coin-free, that meant that I was doing nothing in BP besides the Forsaken Mission for that three day period.  The timer reset allows players a bit more flexibility in their BP activities.  However, this change does not help the players that couldn't reach a particular tier at all.

Another change is that the number of prizes in the first three tiers has gone up quite a bit.  This might help players who are newer and trying to acquire tech, but only if those prizes are good.  I went through each tier and tried to determine how good the prizes were on each tier. For Tiers 1 & 2 I tried to "adjust" my rating based on how useful those prizes were for early players.  I'm sure some of you will disagree with my ratings, but I'm just trying to provide a rough idea.

Forsaken Mission Prize Ratings:








I suppose it really isn't a surprise that I find the higher tier items more useful.  Some things worth pointing out: 

• Why is Radiation Suppressor on both Tier 2 & Tier 3?
• Fusion Chargers are nice, but I like Interception System much better.
• When I made these pictures, I thought that the larger Cadmium armors might have been useful.  I did the analysis below... and I should have made all the Cadmium red.
• Tier 3 has a lot of really useful stuff, particularly the D53-D, Speed System 4, Reflective Coat 3, Pyroclast Turret, and Reaver Bulkhead.  A new player should be trying to get Tier 3 ASAP.
• Tier 2 also has useful stuff for the newer player.  Just about everything that I marked green, except Firebat 2, is a high priority for a new player.

So the real question is - do we like all the extra items in the Forsaken Mission?  I have mixed feelings.  Many key items are in there, and hopefully will stay in there.  But a player's chances of getting the thing they want is lower because of the chaff.  It has been suggested that players be allowed to choose their prize, or be able to pay Uranium/Gold for a re-roll.  With more items in each tier, that suggestion looks better and better.  If charging Uranium for a re-roll, a reasonable pricing (in my opinion) would be to make each re-roll cost the amount of Uranium awarded in that tier.  

So let's look more in depth at the new prizes... you'll see that I already rated the Stealth Attack System 4 and the Gargoyle Depth Charge as Green, and the Cadmium Armor as Red/Yellow:

Stealth Attack System 4:


This special is equal to Concussion Warhead 3 and Nautilus Battery 3 combined into a single special slot.  This is exactly what I was hoping for when this item was teased in the October WIP.  The pleasant surprise on SAS 4 is that the build time for the special is just under 10 hours, where most combo specials can be 1.5 - 2 day builds.  Use of this special on subs is pretty much a benefit in all situations, except for a few considerations:

• The retrofit of SAS is with Concussive Systems, but Nautilus Battery is in Stealth Systems.  If you have already retrofit Stealth Systems but not Concussive, then you will also have to complete the other retrofit in order to match your previous cloaking time.  Concussive is a "moderate" uranium cost for retrofit (4k/12k/24k), compared to Steath (8k/24k/48k).
• The Concussive Damage bonus won't be so helpful if you are using Styx torpedos, since those do most of their damage as Corrosive. Otherwise, even if you are up against your weight limit, it will be worth it to use fewer torpedos to be able to add this special.
• Don't use a Cloak Time special on Ghostcrawlers.
• Strike Warheads does have a higher concussive damage bonus, but much more build time.  You won't be able to combine SAS 4 with Strike Warheads.

Gargoyle Depth Charge 2:

This is an improvement on the original Gargoyle Depth Charge turret, giving more range, more damage, and quicker reload.

This damage chart is a little bit of a spoiler, since I also included the Draconian Coaxial turret prize from Dragon Strike Elite.  The expected damage output from a Gargoyle 2 is twice that of a Gargoyle 1 (or a Pyroclastic Turret).  However, the short range when compared to a Pyroclast means that you probably want to keep those Pyroclasts as the basis of your front line defense, and only use Gargoyles where you want to provide sub defense (and don't forget your spotter).

Cadmium Armor:

Just as an aside, how is Cadmium Armor easier AND quicker to repair?  I understand how it is quicker, but does the repair button grow larger so it is easier to press?

Anyway, this armor was promised as a way to improve our repair times, and the short story on this armor is that armor points that are provided by Cadmium take half time to repair (2 points per second instead of 1 point per second).  However, that improved repair time is averaged over the total ship repair time, so you are never repairing damage twice as fast (even if you use 100% cadmium armor, your ship has built-in armor points). 

In Battle Pirates, you can't ever really tell if something is good on its own - you have to compare it against the alternatives.  In this case, the usual alternative to Cadmium armor would be Draconian Zynthonite Armor.  Evade armor is the popular alternative. 

On the forums, Doyen already worked out a comparison of a ship with Cadmium vs. a ship with all Evade.  His thread isn't openable for some mysterious reason... but I'll reproduce his analysis here: 

"A ship with 7000 base armor and 4 armor slots, using 4 armor plates with 750 armor each. (10000 total armor points) One has Evade armor for +28% Evade, the other has Cadmium." 

Other than a change in how I account for the stacking of the evade armor resulting in a slightly different evade number, the first two columns of the table below are the cases from Doyen's analysis.  I included other cases where I thought the Cadmium might be more beneficial, combining large Cadmium armors with small evade armors. 

And yes, the cases where I combined Cadmium Delta with D2-E result in slightly reduced repair times, but at a cost of additional weight & ship build time.  I'm going to take a closer look, but use my real Proto-Hunter build (still 7000 ship armor & 4 armor slots), include my actual retrofits, and look at whether it is worth modifying:

Baseline Ship (4xD2-E):

74.1% Evade, 63% Penetrative Defense, 5192 tons, 10,000 armor 14d 18h 42m build time

Revised Ship (2x D2-E, 2xCad-D):

68.6% Evade, 63.0% Penetrative Defense, 6039 tons, 13,000 armor 16d 19h 58m build time 

(I ignored assault deflection since we didn't choose a specific weapon type)

Nope!  Nope nope nope!  Why would I incur that extra build time & extra weight?

Since my Evade armor is at R15, it is more valuable than it was in the initial baseline analysis.  Also, when you are talking about just a couple percent benefit, rounding can be a big deal. My initial cut used the 69% Evade number shown in the in-game stat window, and I calculated a 1% benefit (the 68.6% came from Huggy's).  But even a 1% repair time benefit would not be worth the additional 2+ days of build time and extra 847 tons of weight.  I'm certainly not going to burn 2+ days of refit time and allocate weight that could be used for weapons to get a slim (at best) repair benefit or (even) more likely longer repairs.  

Also - note that the fact that the incoming damage is penetrative doesn't make a difference.  Revising the penetrative resist to zero does not change the percentage difference in repairs.  This means I don't have to do another analysis for incoming Charon Torps, where some damage is Concussive, and some damage is Corrosive... Evade works against all of it.

Just for fun, I also tried a Mercury R5 with 3 Siege Missiles, and compared adding Cadmium Alpha armor against 3xD2-E (as a build for a low level player).  The Cadmium builds added 2%, 4%, and 5% more expected repair time (respectively) with 1, 2, and 3 pieces of Cadmium Alpha armor.

The case where Cadmium might do better is against splash or fire pool damage, since your Evade armor won't help you avoid that damage.  But I would say that splash & firepools are mostly specific to the Reavers, and even against Reaver targets a large percentage of the incoming damage is still aimed.  But if insist on wanting to load up against that type of incoming damage, then armor that resists the incoming damage type will do better than Cadmium, for the same reasons Evade did best against aimed damage.

So is Cadmium Armor a Hoax?  Well.... I'm not going to use it.  I would also say that someone who states "Using Cadmium Armor will reduce your ships' repair times" will be incorrect.  Send them to this article.  And no, I'm not going to do a specific analysis for your ship... do your own.

So here's the last question - did the designers just choose a 50% damage reduction because it seemed like it might be a pretty good benefit?  Or did they do some kind of analysis that showed (what I did) that the armor was basically a wash?

Two possible suggestions on how to improve Cadmium:

1. Make it so that the Cadmium takes damage first and repairs last.  Ships that are lightly damaged (for less damage than their cadmium armor points) would then repair at double speed.

or

2. Make the Cadmium repair time reduction much larger. 80% to 95% should do it, but I don't have numbers to back that up.

Death from Below - One Day In

One thing I didn't say in my pre-raid article that I was thinking about: I was really hoping that the Scourge ships have the same statistics that they did in the Caustic Warfare campaign (reduced from the Ascension Raid).

They don't.

The day before the raid, Kixeye pushed a game update that modified many of the weapon reload times for Scourge weaponry.  This is detailed here:  http://www.thedarkalliance.org/forum/threads/654-2015-October-14th-Update

I'll update the tables I posted a few articles ago, so you can see all the changes:
(orange is updates from Ascension to Caustic Warfare, red is updates from Caustic Warfare to Death from Below)

No ship updates.



Here's all the updates - most of the weapons have had their reload time reduced, and the accuracy of the Charon has been increased to overcome evade.  The next chart shows the effect of those changes to the weapon DPS output (CW refers to Caustic Warfare & DFB refers to Death From Below).


The 150% increase in Charon Torp damage means that those weapons are putting out 2.5x more damage.  Those are mounted on Viperfish, which is why those little buggers seem much more deadly than before.  Typhon is on many different Scourge ships, and the Manticore is on Stonefish.

So what does this really mean?  It seems like the corrosive is hurting a lot more than it did last time.  I suspect the reason is that the quicker fire rate of the Scourge weapons is resulting in the Corrosive damage stacking up more quickly.

Well Kixeye doesn't have to keep all the ships the same for every campaign/raid, but when they tweak stuff behind the scenes like this, it is tough for players to plan.  They didn't have to make the event as hard as they did.  

Remember that there is no resistance against corrosive damage.  The only way to reduce it is to not get hit in the first place.  Use evade.  I'll come back to this...

The Fleet:
I have been using the Prototype Hunter / 3 Rhino / Aegis fleet I showed in my "Prepping for Death From Below" article, and I generally like it.  My plan going in was to use the Hunter as a tank and run the rest as zombies.  However, I am not running them "full zombie" .. with the Aegis, I am tending to keep the ships a bit closer together than I was with my Frostburn/Rhino/Mast fleet I threw together for Ascension, so my support ships are taking a little bit more damage.  I'm still not repairing them fully, but trying to keep them with some health so they are more than one hit away from death.

Campaigns:
With that fleet, I have run Siege Campaign once with no crew for about 16 coins repair (plus 10 more after completing), and then I put on a Grease Monkeys crew and ran through it 4 times for 10 coins each (repairing my Hunter for 2 coins after each fight).  I also did an Elite campaign under that same Grease Monkeys crew.  I found that the Elite didn't complete any faster than a Siege campaign because I had to hit it 4 times.  Elite cost me about twice as much as the Siege.  A player using a "balanced" fleet instead of a tank/support setup might have a better result in Elite.

Some players are reporting success with zombie fleets and even subs (in Elite, Siege, and Strike).  Zombie / instant fleets will take quite a bit of persistence - I like Mastodons or Rhinos best for Zombies since they can all spread out & support each other.   Against subs, Goblin Sharks have a 77 thermal range and Daggertooths have 90.  Obviously you'll need to plan your target choice... but if you have a surface fleet that is moderately effective, using a (zombie?) sub fleet to focus on the Viperfish, then using a surface fleet to finish the target could be a good strategy.

This video shows Nighthawks with Styx doing quite well in the first three phases of Siege: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39T84KTpN7w&feature=youtu.be  In fact, even though he was detected by the Daggertooths, they didn't have anything that would damage him underwater so he was able to beat those too.

I think with the additional corrosive damage incoming, my favorite (non-Legendary) Rogue Crew for this raid will be Sea Serpents.  24% more evade will result in 24% less aimed damage, and that includes the sources of corrosive.

One more interesting (and related) point is that I didn't get stunned all that often.  It might be a better plan to use just a Guidance Scrambler (or Reflective Coat) special instead of the Agility System on fast fleets in order to maximize evade, which would help me much more often than the very rare occasion I was stunned.  I watched some of PriceIsWrong's Twitch video from the start of the raid - his ships have an Evade Upgrade instead of an Armor special to maximize Evade even more.

Besides the changes in Scourge weapon statistics, the actual layout of the fights is just about the same as Ascension in terms of numbers of ships and their layout (the order of Siege 2 & 3 are switched).  The Siege Campaign was worth a total of 3.65 million points for completion. See the "Ascension - One Day In" article for a rundown of the ships in each campaign encounter... I'm pretty sure it's still accurate.

World Map Targets:
I also tried one of each world map target - the Level 55 target had 6 Viperfish and 5 Goblin Sharks in it and paid about 275k points.  Although that is a much higher number than last time (was 40.5k points) that is still more ships and fewer points than the first encounter of the Siege campaign (4 Vipers, 1 Goblin for 300k points)... so if you are even thinking about hitting map targets, you might as well hit the campaign instead.  Those might be "Strike-difficulty" Scourge ships in the 55, but I took about the same overall damage as I did for the first Siege mission.

The Level 35 map target paid 5443 points for hitting 4 Viperfish and 2 Goblin Sharks (with reduced difficulty than the ones we see in Siege).  Lower level players should get more points from that.

More prizes have been added:
Kixeye has added in the limited components that were previously available from the Reaver Holdouts, then were going to be (but were not) available from the Drac Armadas to the "Tier 6" Limited Prize list.  There is a limit of 15 redemptions for each of these new components, and the ones you may have earned already should not count towards that.  It seems that they are making an effort to increase the prize list, but I still think they did not address the fundamental weakness of having no "stepping stone" prizes.  I'll go through these with the same red/yellow/green as the others:

Compound Armor D6-A (750k Limit 15): Since I like D5-X so much, this one was bound to be my favorite of these new limited components.  Good all around resistance without too much weight or build time penalty.

Agility System IV (1M): As I said earlier in this article, I am not quite as impressed with the utility of Agility System against the Scourge as I thought I would be. The build on this one is really long.

Fallout Armor IV (750k): I said it last time, the only hull I like Fallout with is the SCX.  I would like Fallout Armor better if it had Ballistic Resist instead of Explosive.

Gale Defense 1/2/3 (250k/500k/750k): These are a definite improvement from the Hailstorm anti-mortars, but with today's fast fleets, anti-mortar isn't a must-have (fleets to auto high-level strongholds excepted).  If you go for these, the smaller ones are more weight-efficient. 

Changes during the raid:
On the previous post, I said that one of the things I would be looking for during the raid would be "no changes mid-raid".  Well so far Kixeye has:

- Added the Wendigo to the prize list (OK, that was pre-raid start)
- Added the limited Reaver Holdout components to the prize list
- Reset the limited redeems of Scattergun & Tokens
- Changed the unbubble time on Vanguards (was Saturday & Sunday at 9 AM PDT, is Friday at 1pm PDT; Saturday at 9am PDT; and Sunday at 3pm PDT)
- Added Dredge fleet availability 

These changes all seem to be in the players' favor, but they really end up favoring some players over others (creating unfairness).  For example, players who chose to wait on redeeming tokens will not be able to redeem as many tokens as players who redeemed them early.  Players who planned to be ready for Vanguards at certain times just had their plans upended.

Kixeye... plan better and quit shifting the playing field on us.  You're being overly responsive to the point of just being twitchy.  We all need to calm down.

A few more thoughts on the prizes:
On the Kixeye forums in response to my last post, LostGuardian posted a Tiger Shark build using Assault Torpedo B, which worked out to an (approximate) 11 day build per sub.  That is actually a lot more reasonable than the 20+ day build time, and although you will miss the longer range of the Scourge Torpedos against those targets with Thermal range in the high 70s... a B Torp Tiger Shark might be effective against a lot of enemies - it will certainly deal out a lot of damage.

Also... don't rush into a Tiger Shark build.  Remember that Stealth Attack System 4 has been announced as a prize in the next round of Forsaken Missions.  I expect it will be on the Elite Tier. It is possible that the combo special will match the Battery 3 submerge bonus and give a good concussive damage bonus too, making SAS 4 the new special to use on subs instead of Nautilus Battery.

Many players have been asking me whether they should take the Buzzard.  First of all, because of its high salvo, the Buzzard will not be very effective against Scourge targets.  If you are thinking about it for general use, I still like the "new breed" of missiles better - their DPS/hton is around double the Buzzard.  Many players overlook the D53-D Disrupter missile, which has been available in the Forsaken Mission Tier 3.  Although the Harrier is lighter & builds faster, and the Blade hits much harder, the Disrupter is a good option for players who don't have either of those alternatives, and I recommend that missile over the Buzzard in most situations.

I took a second look at the Scattergun since I understand corrosive damage better.  If each of the 5 "pellets" does a full corrosive stack, and potentially does it to multiple targets, then you could expect that weapon to do a lot of damage.  I still don't think I can really run math on it, but I expect its damage output against a single target to be similar to a Charon torpedo.  A hull with Assault DPS (like a Tiger Shark) will really boost this weapon's initial punch since it has such a long reload.  (Someone in my alliance tried it and says he really likes it.)

Don't forget about the option of doing campaigns (at half repair) to catch up if you can't do the raid.  Going after the Mercury, V2-H, V2-C and SCX hulls are all good choices.


And some last parting shots, hopefully leaving some corrosive damage...

The new graphic design on the prize window is awful.... downright confusing for many.

Apparently, you tried to fix the leaderboards, since they are working better than in the previous few raids.  Did nobody really notice that they weren't showing the bonus points?

Good luck in the raid pirates... who knows what is coming next?