Craft Weapons DPS Spreadsheet

[Eddie]

The most important aspect of aircombat is actually retaliations. If you have enough air power to shoot down the craft searching for your base, retaliations stop beeing an issue. Instead, they become a welcome source of new optional dangerous missions with high rewards (gauss farming).
If you have Predators with thrusters and two max dodge pilots (for the lead interceptor) you can catch and shoot down most of the craft looking for your base. Corvette is possible to shoot down with two Predators. If you also have a Kraken and 105 mm rockets, you can shoot down all craft looking for your base. I've checked, the tougher vessels all slow down enough for a Kraken to catch. They might still find your base before they slow down though.

I do not think this is a good state of things, retaliations should not be stoppable that easily.

[ohartenstein23]

It's not necessarily easy to field a Kraken with four fully-trained pilots, it's that by the time the retaliations start, you probably have already done the necessary craft research and have the manufacturing infrastructure to keep the ammo up.  If you know to plan your air game to counter peacekeeping and retaliation missions and how much money that can make you, then sure, the air game isn't hard.  As with practically everything in Piratez, having the knowledge makes the game much easier.  The point of my spreadsheet and this thread is to jumpstart some education in air combat; not to be too hard on Meridian, but since he invested much more in battlescape research, he's lacking air power against even the 'easier' military ships.  If he spent some of his excess cash into an air force, he'd be in a much better position to counter the peacekeeping missions he can't currently stop.

Edit: So craft speed really does matter against retaliations - I just had a merc corvette escape my entire fleet (most notably my Kraken and Predator with a thruster - probably could have done it with dodgy Nightmare + avalanche Brave Whaler) and detect my research base.  The follow-up Breaker is too fast for anything but a Saber, so I had to call an evacuation of all my brainers and quick sold all the buildings.  So piratez cannot live by Kraken alone.

[Eddie]

Kind of, but not really on topic: Jetbike!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKHz7wOjb9w

[ohartenstein23]

Of course it's Colin Furze.  I should have expected that on clicking the link.

[legionof1]

It is interesting that you actually try to protect yourself via air combat. I find that base defense is one the best parts of the game. And not just from game-play, the pile of plasma tier armament is quite lucrative. Aside from one particular stargod deployment, a base defense properly played is pretty easy loot.

[ohartenstein23]

Compare that to the loot you can get from shooting down the crackdown craft - if you don't let the sentry detect your base, you get a fighter.  Shoot down fighter, get gunship/heavy gunship.  And so on until Cruisers/Destroyers/Battleships, which have the haul of plasma weapons, plus plastasteel, engines, hellerium, and craft weapon parts for taking down more ships.  Of course, late game when I'm building fuel capsules for the Conqueror, I don't really want to spend time doing any missions, so I just leave the downed craft.

[Eddie]

What I'm worried about when defending my bases is the small ones which don't have a good defence layout yet. I didn't play a base defence on such a base so far, so I don't know if it is actually a problem. I should try and find out I guess.

[ivandogovich]

as long as you get your barracks near the hangars/lift tube/summoning circle... you should be able to put a lot of troops on the enemy in a hurry.

[legionof1]

The key for effective base defense is getting maximum firepower bearing on the lift tile as quickly as possible. Preferably multiple launcher type weapons. To that end placing barracks adjacent to lift is a good idea. Prisons, summoning circles, detection buildings and anything with housing can spawn gals in it, plan out base accordingly. the goal is to get all these buildings as close to the lift as possible while leaving the lift attached to only one non hanger tile. Hanger goes on opposite side of lift from friendly spawning tile.

Example:
HHHH
HHHH
L
BB
BS

[Arthanor]

Wanted to play around with the spreadsheet (looks like it has a lot of potential) but it fails because it can't read the ufopaedia or something? It's making use of more advanced spreadsheet features than I know, so I'm not sure what's going on...

[ohartenstein23]

Dangit, it's broken again.  Hang on, let me check.

Edit: Not broken, it's just that sometimes the import sheets don't properly grab the data from https://ufopaedia.org - try flipping through the sheets to see which one isn't importing correctly; it may refresh when you look at it.

By the way, with the way updates to the air game are going, that spreadsheet will probably become impossible to upkeep... For example, if shields get implemented, calculating the 'average' interception will become impossible without simulation, which was not the point of me creating the sheet.  I might leave it up anyways, but make a new sheet just for DPS and cost.

[Arthanor]

Ah! Odd.. I thought I had tried that.. works now.

Interesting to see the effect of size on damage applied through increased accuracy. Says I should still be able to take on cruisers with just a dragon with 3 railguns.

The complete analysis is definitely better than my partial one.

[Eddie]

I noticed an error in your spreadsheet regarding the handling of shipping armor. For damage, you use the formula:

Code: [Select]

(MaxDamage - Armor) * 0.75The correct one would be:

Code: [Select]

(MaxDamage * 0.75) -  Armor
Example 50mm Cannon vs 10 armor shipping:
The damage range is 10 - 20 (average 15), with armor it's 0 - 10 (average 5). Using (MaxDamage - Armor) * 0.75 would give an incorrect 10 * 0.75 = 7.5 average damage.

The above corrected formula holds as long as armor is not greater than minimum damage. If Armor is greater than minimum damage (but still lower than maximum damage), the following formula can be used:

Code: [Select]

(MaxDamage - Armor)^2 / MaxDamage

[ohartenstein23]

Even that would still give not the correct average damage, this was just a simplification for the average interception.  If you're doing an interception where the average damage of a weapon is below the armor of a UFO, you should rethink your choices.  The spreadsheet gets a number of things wrong because it approximates things for the sake of a simple calculation.  You shouldn't be using it to plan out every single interception, just to get an idea of what you need to take down a certain level of UFO.  Besides, it'll all be useless once craft shields start entering the picture.

[Eddie]

Right now I was thinking about intercepting a gunship. It has 10 armor and I need to do 500 damage to down it. So not that much damage needed. The damage output of the gunship is not that high, so the problem is not surviving but doing the damage.

My available weapons and how much ammo I would need (only from this weapon, with maxed pilots):
50mm Cannon - needs about 180 rounds, costs 540 000 from shop
Spike Rockets - needs about 50 rockets, costs 800 000 from shop
Seagull - needs about 15 missiles, costs 750 000 from shop

So two interceptors with Seagulls and 50mm Cannon would easily do the job. One could do enough damage, but then it's risky. So, I would say this is a perfectly legitimate interception.

So the questions I ask myself about that interception are:
- How much would the ammo required cost? Surprising that Seagull is cheaper than Spike Rockets.
- Could I do it with just 50mm Cannons? Are the three that I have enough? (No, needs 4 to be save or 3 and some other weapon.)
- How much damage would the Reticulan Plasma Charger do or the Sonic Oscillator? (Both do about 100 damage when shooting all their ammo, with maxed pilots)

The most important question is, is buying Seagulls worth it, and how many do I need. They are damn expansive, so I would like to know if I'm wasting money or not. And to answer that, I need correct formulas.