New Forsaken Mission Items - Bypass Chaingun and more Turret Armor

I almost titled this one "... and more Crappy Turret Armor".

I am not appreciating the new items this week - the last batch of three new items has only been in the Forsaken Mission for two weeks.  And I don't have the D104-S yet.  Which is really good.  I'l have the new launcher comparison out this weekend.

The Negotiator Mortar also came and went from the lower tiers pretty quickly... so there is that, but at least the Impulse Launcher U stayed in Tier 3 - if you don't have any Launchers yet, that is a big step up from almost any other weapon you are likely to have available.

So this week we have a new and improved Chaingun (in tiers 2 - 4), and two more flavors of Turret Armor (both in Tier 4).

Zynthonite Reinforcements D4-X, D4-R

To go along with the previously introduced D4-M Turret Armor, we have similar armors that differ only in the type of damage resistance given.  D4-X adds explosive resistance and D4-R adds radioactive resistance. Otherwise they have the same statistcs as the D4-M I previously analyzed here.

My conclusion for these doesn't change... I think these are only useful if you stack two of them on a Level 5 turret, and even so... maybe not great, since that will use a lot of power & limit your weapon options.  In general, stick with DU3.

Bypass Chaingun

We have been given a new and improved chaingun.  You might not mount it on your own ships right away, but I have a hunch that we might be seeing some of these floating around somewhere in a week or so....

The new guns have improvements in radioactive damage, reload time, range, and ballistic armor bypass, but you pay for it with more weight and build time.

I'll compare it to the old Chainguns, Assault Cannon Z, and Torrent Missile 3

	Bypass Chaingun 1 with HB3	Chaingun 1 with HB3	Bypass Chaingun 2 with HB3	Chaingun 2 with HB3	Bypass Chaingun 3 with HB3	Chaingun 3 with HB3	Assault Cannon X with HB3	Torrent Missile 3 w/SFB3
Max Range	75.0	70.5	75.0	70.5	75.0	70.5	67.5	80.6
Damage	1572	1572	2620	2620	4134	4134	150	1914
Bldg Damage	1572	1572	2620	2620	4134	4134	225	1914
Bonus Damage	786	550	1310	916	2,067	1446	37	669
Salvo	30	30	30	30	30	30	2	16
Reload Time	7.5	12.0	7.5	12.0	7.5	12.0	1.5	12.5
Accuracy	70%	70%	70%	70%	70%	70%	100%	90%
Weight +Special (Shipyard 2)	474	317	714	634	1,075	950	320	665
Bonus Armor	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Fleet DPS	124.1	83.4	206.8	139.1	326.4	219.4	110.0	150.0
Fleet DPS/hton	26.2	26.3	29.0	21.9	30.4	23.1	34.4	22.5
Building DPS	177.3	119.2	295.5	198.7	466.2	313.5	154.1	166.6
Building DPS/hton	37.4	37.6	41.4	31.4	43.4	33.0	48.2	25.0
Build Time (w Off)	7h4m	6h33m	12h33m	10h28m	20h55m	17h26m	20h50m	17h26m
Ballistic Bypass	25%	0%	27%	0%	30%	0%	0%	0%

Damage per weight is improved over the previous chainguns, except for the Level 1 weapon.  These numbers are run against a target with no resistances, so the Bypass will give some advantage against real targets.  From these charts, you can see that the higher level guns are more efficient and also don't have an increased build time (per weight).  So if using the new chainguns, it is better to use the larger versions and leave slots open.  Compared to the Assault Cannon Z, these are slightly less weight-efficient, but since they are heavier, Chainguns can make better use of total fleet weight. Chainguns will also build faster per ton.  Compared to Torrents, they have slightly less range, but make up for it with more damage.

One thing to think about for these weapons - although the reload time has vastly improved to 7.5 seconds, there is also the time it will take to fire the 30 shots in the salvo, which is 5.8 seconds (0.2 seconds between shots).  No reload bonuses will affect that time, so bonuses from rank & specials will have diminishing returns.  I don't like these weapons enough to do the math, but I could imagine that at high rank, the normal chainguns could end up with more DPS/ton than the bypass versions (since they are lighter).  I'll add these to the DPS calculator and you can figure it out for yourself.

The improved range of these guns is a big consideration too.  Although missiles, even Torrent Missiles, have more range than the Bypass Chaingun, some hulls will give an additional range bonus beyond the 50% range bonus possible through Hardened Barrel 3.  

On hulls with a 10% range bonus (Stingray, Vindicator, BCX, Jug), HB3 gives a range of 80, and with 20% range bonus (Zoe's Stingray, SCX, Dread R5,  ...) the range can get up to 85, which is comparable to many missiles.  On a Goliath, Rampart, or SCX R5 the range can get up to 95, which will outrange Launchers and almost match UAVs.  Previously only Thud Cannons (which just aren't big enough to matter) could get ranges like that.

I don't think these weapons are good enough to rescue ballistics from obscurity.  But I think some players who have SCX R5 might really enjoy them, and players who still rely on ballistics for base defense will see some improvement with these.

In the longer term, I'm thinking about what was done with missiles recently... we saw the Assault Missile Z and the Achilles Missile B, both of which were OK but had serious flaws, before we got the Siege Missile Z.  The Bypass Chaingun's major flaw is its long time to fire its salvo... If Kixeye's attention is turning back to ballistics, we might see some other improved ballistic weapons coming soon.

Plate Armor, Minimum Damage, and Half Damage

In the last article, I went after the "S" part of DPS (damage per second). In this article, I'm going to go after the D.

For the information in this thread, I'm going to mostly refer to Kixeye forum posts.  Organizing & reproducing the data here just gets a bit ugly.  I'll try to build up information so that it makes sense as I go through this article.

The key testing thread was put together by forum user Hwasung here:  https://www.kixeye.com/forum/discussion/519525/p1

Thankfully, the first entry has been kept up to date with answers.

HALF DAMAGE
I find this a weird topic.... apparently from the beginning of the game, weapons have done half of their listed damage.  Some years ago, Kixeye tried to fix this by cutting the listed damage on each weapon's blueprint in half.  Players lost their minds.  Kixeye put it back.  Weapons do half their listed damage.

I'm trying to find a solid reference of this whole story, but I can't.  Most long-time forum denizens just take this as fact.
One example is here: https://www.kixeye.com/forum/discussion/497633/
The Kixeye response in the testing thread I linked at the top of this article also makes reference to half damage.

Since we are used to seeing this, I have always done, and will continue to compute DPS based on the blueprint numbers.  But for those of you who have used the Survival Time Calculator & tried to translate it into reality... it was wrong... by at least that factor of 2.

ORDER OF REDUCTION/RESISTANCE FROM PLATE ARMORS
This was consistently a point of confusion among players, but I kept going back to a FAQ on the Kixeye forums:

Original Plate FAQ from forum post: https://www.kixeye.com/forum/discussion/417458
Which gets applied first: Resistance or Reduction?
Resistances are calculated first, then Reduction. So if you have 50% Resistance and 20 Reduction, you will reduce 250 incoming damage to 105 ((250 * 50%) – 20).

And then there was...

Newer Kixeye FAQ: https://helpcenter.kixeye.com/hc/en-us/articles/202084568-How-does-Forsaken-Plate-Armor-work-

Forsaken Plate Armor flatly reduces damage from the corresponding damage type per projectile. This damage reduction bonus occurs before any %-based damage reduction bonuses are applied. Each projectile in a salvo will be reduced by that amount. 

So that says reduction, then resistance... which is the opposite of what was originally published.  To re-run the case from the original forum FAQ, 250 incoming damage with 50% resistance and 20 reduction would not result in 105 damage, but instead would result in (250 - 20) * 50% = 115 damage.

The testing thread uses the information as originally posted in the forums - % Resistances then Plate Reduction.  With the modified plate reduction (as shown below & confirmed by Kix), all the data hangs together & makes sense.

AMOUNT OF PLATE REDUCTION
We have an actual post from Kixeye in the testing thread:
https://www.kixeye.com/forum/discussion/519525

From the post:
Here are the actual damage reductions being given by the Compound Plate armors:

Armor                            Ballistic Reduction    Penetrative Reduction    Explosive Reduction
Compound Plate II:               1.188234                      2.07                          2.667126
Compound Plate III:              1.675836                      2.92                          3.761604
Compound Plate IV:               2.163438                      3.77                          4.856082

x2 for the in game display value:

Armor                            Ballistic Reduction    Penetrative Reduction    Explosive Reduction
Compound Plate II:               2.376468                      4.14                          5.334252
Compound Plate III:              3.351672                      5.84                          7.523208
Compound Plate IV:               4.326876                      7.54                          9.712164

It looks as if the client is flooring the values before multiplying them by two to create the display values you see in the game right now. This has the potential in the case of these rather small values, where a difference of one has a large impact, to result in a fairly inaccurate displayed stat.

So to summarize for Compound Plate 4 (in units of weapon damage):

	Displayed Reduction	Actual Reduction
CP4 Ballistic	-4	-4.33
CP4 Penetrative	-6	-7.54
CP4 Explosive	-8	-9.71

This also applies to the weapon specific plates, but those values were not made available.  Based on this information - those displayed values could also be off by 1 - 2 damage points per plate, which could add up even more as you stack plates.

MINIMUM DAMAGE:
The plate armor can never decrease the damage done to zero - Kixeye implemented a minimum damage per shot, which they chose not to share with us.  But bp-information pulled some data:  

http://bp-information.blogspot.com/2014/11/hailstorm-raid-prelim-info.html
(see the comments below the link)

Pass Through Ballistic: 5.89
Pass Through Penetrative: 7.31
Pass Through Explosive: 9:01

The kicker - those numbers apply AFTER half damage (described above) - so those numbers are related to armor points, not damage points.  The other weird thing... if there is no plate armor, then the minimum damage values do not apply.  This was all confirmed in the testing thread shown at the top of this article.

DESCRIPTION OF THE TESTING:

Testing was done by forum user Hwasung, and documented in this thread: https://www.kixeye.com/forum/discussion/519525

The following weapons were used:
- Cutlass 1: 92 damage
- Cutlass 4:  668 damage
- Hornet UAVs: 6 x 66 damage

The following defensive ships were used for various cases:
- 0% penetrative resistance
- 50% penetrative resistance 
- 54% penetrative resistance
- 94.4% penetrative resistance (Savage Kodiak was involved)
- 0% penetrative resistance, 1 x Compound Plate 4 (-6 penetrative reduction) 

- 0% penetrative resistance, 2 x Compound Plate 4 (-6 x 2 penetrative reduction) 

- 50% penetrative resistance, 2 x Compound Plate 4 (-6 x 2 penetrative reduction) 

- 45% penetrative resistance, -67 penetrative reduction

The following damage model was confirmed (by damage type):

With Plate:
Actual Damage per hit = 
MAX OF: [(Blueprint Damage*(1-% resist) - Blueprint Reduction)/2] OR [Minimum Damage]

No Plate:
Actual Damage per hit = 
Blueprint Damage*(1-% resist) / 2

Blueprint Damage: Weapon damage per hit, read from blueprint (divided by salvo if not 1)
% Resist: The total resistance of the target against the damage type.
Blueprint Reduction: Total plate protection against the damage type. Plate armor blueprint subject to errors as described above.
Minimum Damage: The minimum actual damage of the damage type that plate will allow to pass through, no matter how much reduction/resist is applied.

The weirdest effect of this damage model is that if you have a very high resistance, adding plate protection could result in higher damage taken because the minimum passthrough damage would kick in.

HORNET DEFENSE:

HORNETS! HORNETS!  (I don't know why that song is titled that... it's not about hornets.)

To wrap this up, I'm going to look at how to use resistance and plate to defend against Hornet UAV damage, to get a feel for how much plate is "enough".

Using displayed numbers - Hornets do 66 penetrative damage per strike, and the minimum penetrative plate passthrough is 14.62.  I also want to cover the cases where UAV damage is boosted, since many people use Atlas/Harlock Carriers and UAV Powercells to give up to 80% damage boost.


EDIT: I don't think I described this chart very well... this chart below shows how much plate reduction you can add and have it still be effective for varying damage amounts and for varying resistance amounts.  The bottom line shows the resistance percentage (for that damage amount and type) where any plate added will have the opposite effect on damage. 

	No Damage Boost	80% Damage boost
Hornet Damage per hit	66.0	118.8
Max reduction, 0% Resist	-51.4	-104.2
Max reduction, 20% Resist	-38.2	-80.4
Max reduction, 50% Resist	-18.4	-44.8
Max reduction, 80% Resist	0.0	-9.1
Resist % for no plate	77.85%	87.69%

With Compound 4 giving -7.5 (display) damage per plate, and Penetrative 3 giving -14 (or maybe up to -16), you can see that plate reductions may still have a place in your Hornet defense strategy until missile resistance gets near the point where it hits the min damage passthrough.  But if you go over the resistance threshold, then plate does no good at all, and may even hurt you.

EDIT: I don't think I described this chart very well... this chart below shows how much damage reduction you would get (when being hit by unboosted Hornets) from adding a piece of M armor (10% more missile resistance) versus adding a piece of Penetrative Plate 3.  Notice that you are always cutting the missile damage by another 10% when you add a piece of M armor.

	Damage per Hit (DpH)	DpH after adding another M Armor	DpH after adding another Pen Plate 3	M armor Benefit	Pen Plate Benefit
0% Resist	66.0	59.4	52.0	6.6	14.0
20% Resist	52.8	47.5	38.8	5.3	14.0
50% Resist	33.0	29.7	19.0	3.3	14.0
80% Resist	13.2	11.9	14.6	1.3	-1.4

CONCLUSION:
Damage calculation is a weird thing.  I used to dismiss "Kixeye Math" as "people just aren't good at math".  But this stuff is weird and non-intuitive to me.... and I'm good at math. 

Overall, the effect of truncating the decimal then doubling for display will make the plate armors MORE effective than the blueprint shows... unless you hit the minimum damage values, then plate isn't effective at all.  If deciding whether to add Plate or Defense armor, the plate helps more when your resistance is higher... until it doesn't.

Since it is ready, I'm going to release the update to the Survival Time Calculator.  It includes the changes to rank and reload damage, as well as the half damage incorporated into the survival time, and correct treatment of the pass-through minimums.  It also can be used to calculate DPS or DPS/hton of weapons against various defense types.  I think it's pretty cool, but it might be a little tricky to use.  I'm planning to put together a demonstration video... but it's going to have to wait.

Access the calculator at https://bpprofcalc.blogspot.com.  

If you've used it before, look for the new dropdown to select what it is calculating - DPS, DPS/hton, or Survival Time, and also look for the new spot to enter the rank bonus.  The cells needing protection are fairly well protected, but if you think you screw it up beyond help... just reload the page. 

I'm working on a new launcher comparison... all this stuff I'm learning has changed my evaluations of the launchers.