Cha, Cha, Cha, Cahnges.... Turn and face the strange...
by: Brian Randich
a/k/a Brian_R
RATE
THIS!
Kixeye recently
came out with a defense rating system. Most people don’t
understand it. Kixeye might not understand it. I’m going to help
you understand it, and how to audit Kixeye’s work. Let’s go!
WHAT
ARE THESE OTHER PERCENTAGES?
Things that used
to give resistances now give a stat called survival. Survival has a
number associated with it, and a percentage after. For example, new
folded ferrite armors give 720 survival. This will convert to a
percentage based on the tier of your ship. T6 ships seem to need
about 28 points for 1% of survival, T7 needs 32 points for 1%, and T8
needs 64 points. If multiple survivals apply, you add them all
together. For example, if you have pen survival of 50% and turret
survival of 25%, you have 50%+25% = 75% survival if you are hit by a
pen turrets.
Now we need to talk about how this affects flagships. Most of our
flagships before had higher resistances. They were typically about
5% higher (80% versus 75% or 85 versus 80 for the normal ships),
which translated into about 20-25% less damage taken. This was
mostly normalized to armor. For example, an Eradicator has 7361
(+115.02%) ballistic survival and 7092 (+110.81%) radio survival.
The flagship built the same way has 7541 (+117.83%) ballistic
survival and 7272 (+113.63%) radio survival. We’ll assume each
build has the newest battery for 28.13% turret survival, which puts
the numbers as close as possible to minimize the difference. We’ll
also figure assume radioactive damage, as that’s most of the damage
you find in the newest siege target. There is a 1.18% difference in
effective health now versus a 25% reduction in damage taken before.
Your flag was a lot more tankier before than now. The benefit it has
over regular ships is about 1/20 as much as before.
HOW
DID YOU FIGURE THAT OUT?
The percentages
after the number show how much longer a ship will survive if being
hit by a damage type (or turret). If you had +200% penetrative
survival, you would last (100% + 200% = 300%) three times as long
versus penetrative damage as opposed to not having that survival. We
can use that to make an effective armor versus a certain damage type.
Since survival is how long you last, we can find out effective armor
with:
(1+survival
%) * Armor = Effective Armor
From the above
equation:
Brutal
Eradicator: 30,235,165 * (1+113.63% + 28.13%) = 73,096,534
Eradicator:
30,235,165 * (1+110.81% + 28.13%) = 72,243,903
73,096,534/72,243,903
= 1.0118, or a 1.18% increase in effective health
MY
HYPER-30’S SUCK NOW!
Splash damage
reduction got a similar change to a survival statistic. The
difference is that splash has now changed, where you take more damage
if you take a direct hit from the projectile, but less damage if you
are near the edge of the splash. This makes sense in real life but
is different to how the game has been played for the remainder of its
nine-year history, and how players built ships to counteract. It’s
not really possible to figure out how this works for our ships at
this time. The formerly 30% splash damage reduction on the hyper-30
dropped to 8.44%, but the overall damage taken still depends on how
far a ship is away from the projectile. With so many moving things
and particles and being unsure of the opponent’s splash and spread,
that’s really hard to figure out. Can you tell where the actual
particle of the damage comes from one of those throwers in siege
targets? I can’t.
BATTERIES!
So, let’s
break this down. Batteries (siege battery 1-4, assault battery,
garrison battery, conquest battery, etc.) were changed massively.
The siege batteries 1-4 had their turret survivals changed to very
different numbers, and that makes sense. Even before the update, you
got more turret defense (now survival) as you went up. Some made it
up to 50% (or 49.5%) with retrofits, but at a certain point, they all
came with 50% turret defense and no retrofits. Most batteries that
were at the “top level,” having 50% turret defense before, now
had 900 turret survival (900/64 = 14.06% on a T8 hull). However, the
ballistic/radioactive/penetrative/corrosive battery I’s from the
last raid cycle, as well as Pillage and this new raid, were given
1,800 turret survival. Before the defense update, people had to
choose from all these batteries with 50% turret defense. The more
recently released stuff was better because of the increase in damage,
but everything had the same defensive statistics.
People made decisions based on these numbers, and the defense update
came near the end of the first month of building the new fleets. A
lot of players put batteries onto assault fleets, even though assault
targets have the least amount of turrets and turret damage (other
than Skirmish with no turrets). This was done after the redemption
for Pillage was over. People put soon-to-be inferior items on, and
didn’t have the option to claim new batteries based on an increased
defense number. I didn’t mind the loss in damage that the assault
battery had, as long as I wasn’t taking more damage from an
inferior turret defense. (Yes, more damage = killing things faster =
less damage because you take fewer shots. I don’t mind that,
either.)
In checking the batteries, one may wonder why these changes were
made. In general, it was stated that PVE hulls had their power
shifted to armor points, so players could try different builds
without batteries. Is anyone doing that, even in assault, where it’s
safest to do so? People have probably put them on beforehand, and
would be less likely to omit batteries in later cycles with more
turrets. Maybe we’ll know in a year if no one tests it now.
Looking among the batteries, I tried to consider different power
based on its intended hull (a siege-class specific battery would have
more turret survival than an assault-class specific battery), or if
there were clear differences between tier classes. There aren’t.
There is no single reason that can be applied to all the changes.
The conquest battery deserves its own paragraph. After being brought
into the FM as an interesting choice on speed versus damage, it
suddenly became mandatory to put on. Since PVP hulls didn’t have
their armor changed like PVE hulls did, and the PVE batteries all had
their turret survival changed drastically, a battery had to exist to
give PVP hulls their old power. There are two problems with this.
The first is that while 6,400 turret survival is 100% for T8
conquerors, it’s 3,200 to get to 100% for T7 conquerors. The 6,400
turret survival on a T7 hull converts to 200% survival, or lasting
three times as long as before, or 66.67% turret defense. After the
change, everyone has to swap out their battery on every conqueror
hull. I wonder why there wasn’t some sort of stat added in below
every battery that give 50% turret defense (even if rounded up at
r15) that read “Conqueror Turret Survival: 6400.” Kix has done
stats and abilities that depend on faction, so they can create
different stats or dependencies. I wonder why they didn’t do it
there (Although we probably really know why. But they took off the
refit tax, so that makes it okay, right?).
WHAT’S THIS BATTLE REPORT?
After a battle, a screen pops up with every damage type and how much
of each damage type you evaded (evade working against a missile, for
example), resisted (your survival lowered the damage), and taken
(what damage actually hit you). You can use this along with your
survival ratings to help figure out builds in terms of
armors/specials. For a quick example, 100% survival means you last
twice as long as without it. If you last twice as long, you should
resist half the damage. In that case, the blue bar would equal the
red bar.
However, no player really knows how new splash works. Since every
damage type could have splash (even missiles, think of the cryo
fields from a year ago or the Proto-Nem’s special ability), you
can’t get accurate, reproducible results with any consistency.
Every single roll of spread and splash would have to be exactly the
same as a previous attempt, and that’s impossible to tell based on
what you see.
If you want to check Kix’s work, and want to assume that you get
exactly an even percentage of damage two separate times (Kix hates
significant figures, so it’s hard to know when you get exactly 7%),
you can figure your effective health against each damage type with
what’s shown above, then see how much damage you take two separate
times. If those times have different percentages, you can try to
solve them in a matrix. If you want to go to the lengths of doing
all that, you probably know how to solve matrices, or can find an
online calculator to do so.
SO WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE YOU?
The point of this defense update was to help change things away from
needing endlessly-increasing resistances. Creating massive leaps in
effective armor is one way to do this. Another way is to cycle
mechanics and have hulls with weaknesses to them (such as taking
Proto-Apollos into the glowing nav relays where they’d get stunned
to death). Increasing our damage facilitates increasing enemy armor
at the top levels of play, and that’s something else they’re
doing. This solution doesn’t seem necessary, but it won’t be
going away anytime soon, and it seems to work with Kix’s goals at
the cost of widespread confusion among the playerbase.
It’s actually pretty hard to get these new changes sorted out. You
can use math for some of them, but there’s plenty that’s obscured
from the player base. We get reminded every raid that Kix can change
the damage whenever they want. Usually they tune it down, but that
just means it was too high to start with. You have to choose to
believe Kix that things are working as intended and there’s
consistency among targets or individual runs. Personally, I don’t
have any faith in a company that halves the damage of a 2,000,000
damage weapon and it goes down to 800,000.
