Cosmetic Weapons

[Myrdral]

I suppose my wall of text mostly just said that the weapons are not cosmetic. They have an intended role however situational it may be. Most of the time they are to deal with singular units of that type where the unit would be completely vulnerable otherwise. Almost all of those weapons are of a type that the unit does not normally attack. AA on otherwise weaponless transports, torpedos on amphibious units or AA on certain large investment units like destroyers. I like the AA on Valiant example a lot because the destroyer would need more frigate and cruiser etc support without it. The AA on the destroyer makes it a viable option to produce much earlier after upgrading to t2 naval than it would be without the AA. It would really suck if you could not safely build a destroyer because of 1 bomber on the other side. I think that AA gun is there mostly so that the most expensive and generally powerful t2 naval unit is not countered by 1 t1 bomber or gunship(including a not even fully loaded ghetto). Removing it would make the most powerful t2 naval unit too easily countered by air if you produce it before cruisers/shields/a few frigates. Buffing the AA gun on the Valiant would blur the role of the ship with the cruiser and frigate. As it is, you still would build frigates over destroyers for AA and cruisers over both for AA. That little AA gun may make it a good option to go for a few frigates then a destroyer then a cruiser rather than a few frigates then a cruiser then a destroyer. This destroyer before cruiser option seems best when your opponent has built t1 bombers/gunships and submarines. Putting a combination of destroyer to counter the subs/frigates/destroyers/cruisers in that order into the water seems to be the best counter to an opponent with mostly subs and bombers. Lack of AA on the destroyer would make it too vulnerable to air and you would be forced to build the cruiser first which would die horribly to the submarines. Perhaps the wagner torpedos are far less important than the Valiant AA gun and I would be happy to see that changed before the Valiant AA. I do think the fact that the low dps weapon on the wagner is a torpedo which can divert anti-torpedos just as well as a torpedo with much greater damage makes it something which will always be useful. Torpedos can be effective even with low damage per torpedo as long as you have higher damage torpedos from other units. I believe the best torpedo systems have a high rate of fire or salvo quantity( usually both ) in exchange for lower damage per torpedo. For this reason, out of all the low dps weapons, the wagners has the most usefulness for being a torpedo. I am sure there are many other pretty low dps torpedos on even main naval units to aid in the defeating of torpedo defenses even if their dps is a small % of the total dps on that naval unit. The valiant has 150 damage torpedos with only 30 dps(not much more dps than its AA gun when considering you are shooting gneerally higher health naval units with it instead of low health air) for example. I am perfectly happy with some low dps high damage torpedos from a Valiant in combination with other smaller damage torpedos. The Neptune battlecruiser is higher tech and has only 20 dps torpedos but a much higher rate of fire and only 80 damage per torpedo. This lower dps torpedo system on a higher tech ship is actually better than the Valiant at defeating torpedo defense systems. With the two together, the majority of torpedo defense will hit the Neptune's low damage torpedos as more of them are in the water. More of the Neptune's torpedos will still get through in terms of numbers but more dps worth of torpedos from the Valiant will get through. In a similar manner to the torpedos defeating torpedo defenses, small weapons also contribute to reducing overkill by your larger damage per shot units. A best case scenario in terms of dps has your large units hitting a target until it is reduced to health below the weapons damage per shot, then having smaller damage per shot units take over and finish the killing the unit. With a Valiant firing at an air unit along with a cruiser, occassionally the AA gun will finish the target between shots from teh cruiser. The cruiser will not overkill that unit in these rare events and waste much of its damage potential. A snoop preventing an artillery from wasting a shot to finish an lab with very low health remaining is a far more frequent scenario in which those little guns are far from cosmetic or useless.

[Myrdral]

Just ran a couple quick tests. UEF and Cybran destroyers both lose to a single torpedo bomber, and a Broadsword loses to 2 interceptors.

Stratbomber wins against 3 interceptors, but the Revenant's tail guns are much weaker than the Ambassador.

It would seem that a torpedo bomber's torpedos are not very well defended against by anti-torpedos then? I had a concern that the torpedos would drop too close to the destroyers. Believe I heard TA4life mention something like that about the anti-torpedo systems. Is the AA gun of the destroyer missing the stork at lot as well? I did not really assess the ability of that AA gun to actually hit air units. It may only be useful against slower t1 bombers. A stork flies at the same elevation as a scorcher t1 bomber but 50% faster for the stork. I was mistaken about the Valiant being able to defend against torpedo bombers due to the anti-torpedo and AA gun not actually hitting their targets. I am glad you ran the test as I was unsure how that would play out. Hard to tell if weapons will actually hit just from the database without doing more math than I felt like =P. If you feel like testing one more thing, try pitting the Valiant against increasing numbers of bombers starting with 1. If it doesn't kill at least a bomber 1v1 then I will absolutely agree that its AA gun is just about completely worthless. Do you think it likely that the AA gun was added only to defend against t1 air and not so much against t2? It may not even be good at hitting t1 interceptors but only the slower t1 air. Torpedo bombers are probably also designed to avoid torpedo defense by dropping their torpedos within the defenses minimum range. This makes torpedo bombers able to more reliably damage naval units even while being decimated by cruisers and fighters. I always thought of torpedo bombers as being somewhat suicidal against a large navy. If anti-torpedo worked against them, then they would need huge numbers to defeat the defense and deal any damage. They would be rendered obsolete too easily by even some of the worst anti-torpedo systems and unable to deal any damage whatsoever even in their specialized suicidal air vs naval role. They do not have to suicide in some situations, but they do not have much of a choice if the opponent keeps their navy together and doesn't allow you to engage single ships with the torpedo bombers.

[Myrdral]

By the way, how do you control units from 2 opposing sides to run these tests? Did you have 2 instances of supcom or a friend helping? Can it be done by yourself with only one instance of supcom?

[Icy]

To test with 2 sides you use cheats and the setfocusarmy command to take control of the AI.

Every single weapon I tested with the exception of missiles and torps missed a lot, especially when the aircraft was flying away. DPS issues aside, a simple velocity increase would make those aa guns quite a bit better.

The only torpedo bomber that can be stopped by torp defense is sera (afaik, i rarely ever see them built). Aeon ones have depth charges that ignore torp defense, and UEF/Cybran drop homing missiles that never even touch the water.

I think you may have slightly misunderstood the point I was trying to make. It wasn't that a lot of units have secondary weapons that literally cannot kill anything. Instead it was more like they are just too weak and/or inaccurate to do anything useful in a relevant amount of time under normal circumstances. The aa gun on the Valiant requires 43 direct hits to kill a single UEF torpedo bomber, and considering the cost of a torpedo bomber you are most likely going to see more than one. That destroyer, even with a few frigates around it, is going to be dead before the first bomber. The weapons are so weak compared to the cost of the units that have them that you can honestly just ignore the fact that they even exist in pretty much any realistic situation.

[Myrdral]

I tested Valiant vs t1 air and it was able to hit all of those. I saw 100% hits for the Valiant AA gun for over 100 shots against UEF bombers, scouts and interceptors. t1 Bomber died while making its second pass although I could imagine some of them making 3 passes if they focused on turning outside of the Valiant's range. Valiant can by no means stand up to an equal economic value of t1 bombers. I think that AA gun is only meant to deal with small amount of t1 air reliably.

I believe your intent in the original post is to have these low dps weapon system buffed while nerfing other weapon systems of units like the Valiant or so that it may more effectively combat a wider array of air units in the case of the Valiant? I worry that buffing the AA on valiant would diminish the role of other more dedicated AA units and blur the need to build dedicated counters to your opponent's units. The valiant also already struggles to match up with other destroyers in terms of naval combat. Nerfing its direct fire dps or torpedo/anti-torpedo for more AA would make it lose to other faction's navies even worse than it already is.

Concerning evaluating the balance of individual weapon systems:
Is it appropriate to assess the cost-effectiveness of individual weapon systems like this? Can we say Mass value of Valiant's AA gun = DPS of AA gun * ( Total mass of Valiant / Total Dps of Valiant ) This is reasonable to me. The major flaw I see is that some types of DPS including may cost more mass for the same amount of DPS.

The AA gun is roughly 4.5% of the total dps of the destroyer. This possibly means that only 4.5% of the destroyers mass is accounted for in that weapon system. As such I imagine it is only meant to deal with 4.5% of the destroyer's value in t1 or t2 air units. 4.5% of the destroyer's mass value is 100 mass. A t1 bomber takes 80 mass and the Valiant could kill a single bomber while losing around 4.5% of its health(not sure on this health loss number if some of the bombs miss?) I can say that the AA gun of the Valiant is roughly cost-efficient vs t1 bombers. The ship as a whole is very inefficient vs t1 bombers. The AA gun is mostly neglible vs t1 transports as they will probably never enter the range of the AA gun. The AA gun is useful vs spy planes who are scouting the water or against interceptors fighting over the water. The ship as a whole is definitely not able to fight effectively vs t1 bombers and especially vs t2 torpedo bombers. If only evaluating the AA gun for how much mass was really dedicated to that AA gun out of the destroyer's cost, then I would say the AA gun is not in need of a buff without nerfing of its other weapon systems.

[noobymcnoobcake]

That AA can stop mercys. Very usefull to stop your first destroyer being taken out.