But the assassin ship can only do it once, for comparison, before it's more or less spent and it cannot use any other alpha based weapons for another several minutes due to the difficulty in making a non-doomcube ship with regen, capacity, and an absolutely monstrous alpha gun. But at the same time, you're potentially one hit killing the shields of a non-tank ship at around 2mil blocks, and if the builder is a moron, up to 6mil blocks.Ī DPS based ship cannot do that. That's a LOT of blocks you need to find room for. If you can one hit kill someone's shields, then you've made some sacrifices in other areas to be able to support the power capacity - though power capacity is a lot easier to fit onto a ship than the regen required to stably fire a similarly enormous DPS cannon, even with docked reactors.įor instance, a 1.5 million block ship could potentially put out 100 million alpha damage in one go, at the cost of needing 500 million power storage - which, in terms of raw blocks, is 500,000 unconnected power capacitors - much, much less if they're all connected with the group bonus. What I've pretty much determined is that an alpha damage assassin ship is great, but alpha damage for endurance based fleet ships is not quite as good. Heck, thats why when I build missile turrets these days I automatically build in some cannon/cannon backups so that they can keep contributing to the fight during those long reloads. A pure DPS ship is going to take forever to kill something, while an alpha striker is completely screwed if the target survives the opening salvo and now has 30 seconds to a minute of pure retaliation time. So each system has what it's best at, and you're going to do best if you have a good balance of weapons instead of trying to go all one or the other. Both have the same DPS overall, but the lower constant power drain of the DPS turrets is far easier to manage compared to the massive power drain of launching an alpha strike. This also ends up lending itself well to having DPS weapons as turrets, and alpha strikers as ship mounted weapons. Cannons ROF is already good enough, and the projectile speed should be good enough (might need a bit of a buff.maybe.) but it still doesn't compare to the derpy accuracy of beams when used correctly.Ĭlick to expand.Yup, an alpha weapon costs an arm and a leg to fire, relegating them to larger ships that can afford to be carrying tens of millions of power capacity, where a much smaller ship could carry the DPS version of the same weapon quite easily. Cannons aren't about to get hitscanning or lockon anytime soon, but beam/cannon's already hitscan. Cannons are not the easiest thing in the world to aim when people are accelerating and changing speeds through 3d space.ģ) You can't really balance aim beyond ROF, hitscanning, lockon and projectile speed. If I put my cursor on you and click I win.Ģ) I have seen people miss with cannons for minutes at a time. *I don't view aim as an issue for a few reasons.ġ) I chose beams because beams are hitscan. Side note side note, if you want to look and interact with graphs like this, go to and type in 'y=(alpha damage of weapon)ceil(ROF of the weapon (10/1 for cannon/cannon at 100%, 1/50 for beam/pulse at 100%))x' That's not even guarenteed, to get the most out of it you'd have to purposely get your alpha damage to barely finish their shields off. Slight side note, this doesn't actually really change much, the best case scenario with beam/pulse is that you gain 50 seconds of hull breaking. In addition to that, causing bigger sways in damage is better. TL DR alpha OP on shields, DPS OP on hull, refrain from using one in the others job unless you have a reason, it doesn't work so well. Lots of low damage, high rate of fire projectiles cut through systems like butter. The exponential decay in system damage and the risk of over-penetration destroys alpha weapons abilities to effectively and efficiently take down ships health. Why isn't this the case though? There's one balancing factor that makes alpha a poor choice against ships*. Even though all weapons have the same DPS, alpha weapons have a higher damage over time because of how they use their damage.īack before I thought about this more, I thought this was OP, and you can clearly see why. Every time the cannon fires, and reloads, it does 2 damage over. Every time the beam fires, and reloads, it does 1,000 damage over 50 seconds, 20 DPS. They all have the same DPS when they've reloaded. Why is that? Well, all weapons in the game have the same DPS…sort of. The beams system always puts out the same or higher damage the cannon does.
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