Cybran Battleship Suffers reduced DPS when using torpedos.

[JeeVeS]

A Galaxy class attempts to fire it's two proton cannons once every 4 seconds. However, it appears to be unable to fire while also firing a torpedo volley, which takes a bit less than 4 seconds to complete. The torpedo volley is on a 10 second cycle, which because of the inability to use both weapons at the same time, forces every second round from the proton cannons to be delayed by 2 seconds. This causes it to fire after 4 seconds, then after 6 seconds, then after 4 seconds, repeating. DPS is reduced by approximately 20%, to 360 instead of 450. The cycling of the individual barrels on the proton cannons does not seem relevant.

To view for yourself, simply watch the game timer while a Galaxy shoots at a naval target in torpedo range, then watch it again while shooting at a land target without having any torpedo targets nearby.

Fix: Without getting into a balance discussion, I would just shift the torpedoes to something like 2 every 4 seconds @ 100 damage each, raising their dps from 20 to 50 and at least making them slightly useful. This would only have the potential to delay the proton cannons once on the initial firing, vice continuously for every second shot. As it currently sits, Galaxy has just over half the torpedo dps of a t1 sub...

Edit: Grammar.

[IceDreamer]

I will look into this.

EDIT: There is nothing in the code to suggest that anything untoward is happening. I also cannot reproduce this in Sandbox using RenderFireClock = true. It takes 2.4s for the Torpedoes to fire a full cycle.

[JeeVeS]

I'm not familiar with what renderfireclock does; is it just a counter? Regardless, the fire cycle is launch + reload, which is 10 seconds total. This timing is what delays every second shot from the proton cannons. I would be very surprised if you were unable to recreate this using the method I mentioned.

[Apofenas]

Yes, was able to reproduce that. Those 20 dps torps make both 225 dps cannons to lose 3-4 seconds. BTW why the galaxy has those pathetic torps?

[IceDreamer]

This makes no sense. Both Resin and I are unable to see anything wrong with the script which might cause this, not to mention that I can't reproduce it :/

[Sheeo]

Confirmed, and it doesn't just happen for the galaxy--the tempest is affected as well.

I suspect any unit with several weapons that have differing salvosize and salvodelays suffer from this issue, but I don't have the time to test.

My hypothesis is that it's a sideffect of how the engine handles multiple weapons firing at once -- it seems to be handling them sequentially, where the next weapon can only fire once the current weapons salvo is fired fully. Can someone contradict/confirm this?

In that case, a potential fix is to mess with salvosize for all affected units.

I quickly tested the fatboy too. It appears as firing several guntypes simultaneously, but none of its weapons have salvosizes above 1, so this is consistent with my hypothesis.

[Sheeo]

Another affected unit is the Salem, which has a MuzzleSalvoSize = 2 for its nanite torpedoes, and a MuzzleSalvoDelay of 0.8.

I suspect that this whole thing primarily happens when MuzzleSalvoSize > 1, and is worse when MuzzleSalvoDelay > 0.

[IceDreamer]

If Sheeo's hypothesis is true, I hesitate to fix this by adjusting the weapons, that's just a patching over. I think we need Domino to look more deeply at the cause behind this, and see if he can find a way to fix it at the source...

[Sheeo]

If my hypothesis is true, it would have to be fixed by simultaneously firing all weapons rather than sequentially.

I think this is done engine-side within the moho.unit_methods class, since I can't find anything in the lua code that actually walks through guns and fires projectiles. So we would have to override that behavior and imitate it in lua.

Changing the salvosize doesn't necesarrily fix the issue -- we'll need to test. There could be other parameters that could cause the code to not jump on to the next weapon, and salvosize might not have anything to do with it. It could be slow muzzlevelocity and the projectile not leaving the craft quickly enough or something like that.

Having also tested the summit class battleship; I think it's safe to conclude that this is what's happening. It's also delayed when firing its main guns while the AA turret is firing, albeit only slightly.

Since every unit is affected, I see it as primarily a balance issue that can be worked around and needs to be taken into account during balancing periods. I.e. the summit isn't nerfed on its main DPS (barely) as much as the Salem or the Galaxy.

[IceDreamer]

I just figured out the best test: UEF Cruiser. See if, while firing those Missiles, the Gauss cannon is interrupted.

If yes - Confirmed
If is it NOT, try modding the unit so that on the Missile weapon, NotExclusive = false, and see if it then IS interrupted.

If no - Hypothesis disproved
If yes - Confirmed and engine-side exception code discovered, in the form of the NotExclusive setting.

Additionally, set NotExclusive = true on the Battleship's Torpedo weapon, and see if the problem vanishes.