1.1.3 Beta Update available on unstable Steam branch

This is not the time for me to get into specifics, but I am absolutely thrilled by many of the changes you listed... others I'll have to wait and see as the broad effects in game play are still unclear.

 

It's been a while since I played, but if memory serves, the damage per shot normally diminishes with this modification yes?

If so, does this then not motivate the player to skip the mod entirely and just add more standard weapons instead? Between the increased space requirements, added cost, and additional penalties to hit, what's the point? Perhaps if the damage output was increased to the same for each consecutive shot it would be the kind of thing to consider, but as it stands right now, in practical terms, better to have two standard weapons than just one with the auto-fire modification.

 

Thank you for the warm reply.
It's confusing in-game. I know the numbers displayed in past releases were wrong, (even though the correct damage was being applied).Then of course if multiple weapons were in a single bank, one could hit and the other miss... that also distorts the perception of damage output.
Still, with the base penalty going to 75% on the third shot, combined with a 50% increase in space requirements... I don't know if this is a worthwhile modification .

 

That makes sense. Hehe, could I request a quality of life change with AF. Is it possible to speed up the attack animation of auto fire? In large battles, having to wait for the 3 attack animation before going to the next ship actually gets a bit annoying.

 

Well that's the thing Keith, I don't design with theoretical damage in mind, but practical damage, it's what allows me to consistently devastate AI ships. Examining your statement closer, what I see is that in the early game, your chances of missing are too heavy for my taste, as target enhancing techs are not available to the degree required to offset such drastic penalties. As the game progresses and the techs come into play, they become partially negated by evasion algorithms, so not much of an advantage gained. Of course we must also accept that the possibility of two out of three shots missing is extremely high, at base level, it is more likely to be the case is it not?

Overall what is being done now is tilting the game more to the offense, something I advocated in the past till I was blue in the face (blue face, funny with my avatar). However this one move seems like overkill. Regardless, after you release the final version of 1.13, I will be happy to present some demonstrations of my altered designs against the AI ships. Perhaps it will be as you say, I'll keep an open mind.

 

So we can use a bit of theory to help us see how effective Auto-Fire is. I am doing a bit of math, so if you want the simply summary just look at the bottom of the post.

If you look at the numbers below, what I did was calculate the AF damage increase depending on the difference between Attack and Defense (so for example if you had an Attack of 200 and the enemy had Defense 125...that's a value of 75 for this chart). The trick is a decrease of 25 attack does not equal 25% drop in miss chance....that drop depends on what your current A vs D difference is (the higher the value, the less the drop hurts you. The closer attack is to defense, the more the drop penalizes your to hit rate)

I am also assuming shield block does not compound on the extra attacks, which based on the response from the other thread regarding shield blocking appears accurate. So this means that AF gets a slight boost because its extra attacks don't worry about shields. I am ignoring that for this example as the difference isn't too significant and its dependent on base damage and shield block...so I don't want to muddle the example.



Since the mod increases my mass by 75%, the damage increase should be at least 75% to give net value (we are ignoring the large cost increase for this example).

So the breakpoint is 110, aka you need a significant accuracy difference for Auto-Fire to be worth....IF AF is your only mod.

Now here is the next trick, if your already using a mod, then your requirements change a bit. Here is an quick example, if your base weapon is mass 10, and you add SP to it (so +75% increase), that's mass 17.5. If we now add AF (another +75%), the mass increases to 25. However, technically my new mass is only 43% bigger than what I had with the SP weapon, its not the full 75% anymore. What that means is, for dmg/mass calculations, the more mods you add, the lower the mass cost of each mod for dmg/mass. In complete laymen's terms, adding multiple mods to the same weapon group is more efficient than splitting them up.

So with a 43% mass increase on AF, you need a 85 difference in accuracy to break even on mass.


QUICK SUMMARY
So a lot of math, if you want a quick summary, I wouldn't even think about using AF until my attack values were reliably 120 over the enemies defense, to also account for the big cost increase. If I wanted to add some other big mods to the weapon as well, probably 100 would be my bare minimum threshold.

 

Hats off to you @KarasLegacy for taking the time to do this. I admit that while I'm good with this sort of thing, I don't like to do it unless absolutely necessary. What you illustrated is basically what I thought, I like to play this game in my mind before sitting down with it and my point is this.

In the early game, with which my preferred settings is very long, it is better to spend the extra space on two weapons that suffer no base penalty, rather than saving a small amount of space to have the effect of three weapons that will miss on average half the time.
The space cost being 75% for autofire, gives me 1.5 hits on average due to penalties alone. Two standard weapons have no added penalties. Early on, (which for me and anyone else that plays at reduced tech and production rates is quite a long time), autofire is not viable.

Apart from the reduced research and production though, I do give the AI a bonus in these areas compared to my race, as well as a maximum start, this will largely ensure that they devote some attention to defensive capabilities. What this means is that attaining the threshold attack value over the AI will be more difficult.

To make a long story short, why would I bother with this modification? By the time I could get it to an effective state, the contest will already have been decided with different designs that the AI will be hard pressed to counter (based on the changelog).Even worse, if the AI uses this mod extensively against my own designs... they will be at an even greater dis-advantage.

 

I don't, but that means giving up space which I use in a more effective way. As the bulk of my ships tend to be small, this is a very tough call for me.