Bias Concerning Snubcrafts (My Opinion and Suggestion to the Dev Team)

[Kazinsal]

Couple points of clarification, plus what ended up being a few paragraphs extra than I was setting out to write on damage calculation.

The damage the Corona deals to battleships was never increased. Previously it was doing 5000 damage per tick^[1] to all ship classes. This was objectively bad and turned the Corona into a fighter-spanking god-lance. The solution involved redefining the Corona's damage values on the client side and writing a new plugin on the server side to dynamically override damage values from specified weapons against different classes of ship. The result is that the Corona deals scaling amounts of damage to different ship classes. Probably the easiest one to kill with Corona bombers is cruisers and I think that needs a bit of a tweak, considering that cruisers are generally not outfitted with defensive weapons that can reach bombers at the kind of range the Corona is capable of dealing out.

Yes, bombers are designed to kill capital ships. That's entirely the point of a bomber. In the most recent patch, we reduced their effectiveness at swatting fighters out of the sky because that's A) not what they're meant for at all and B) an incredibly un-fun mechanic. Imagine if someone could lay down a mine right in front of your battleship that you would immediately float into and take five million damage? Not exactly fun. Now imagine that same weapon is applied to a cruiser, which wouldn't even have half of that one-shot EHP^[2] from full with a cap8. That's what SNAC snipes are like to fighters. Except a lot more small craft tend to be involved in fleet engagements than battleships, partially by design, but the rate happens.

As for patch rate, we're intending to increase that when needed. For weapons like the Corona that are already set up to have their damage values dynamically tweaked server-side, we can do that on the fly without even restarting the server. For weapons that aren't set up we can only buff them on the fly, and for range or speed changes, we need to deploy a patch. The patch deployment process can be a bit slow for a number of reasons, and it requires the server to be down for about half an hour, so we try to do them at off-peak times, which is unfortunately the middle of the night.

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^[1] For beam weapons, "tick" is defined as the invisible "pulse" generated by a the weapon at the refire rate set up for its continuous damage. In the case of the Corona, the refire is 16.67, so the tick rate is one tick per 60 milliseconds. Generally we'd refer to this for regular weapons as "damage per shot", but since it's a bit hard to determine when and where the actual "shot" of a beam weapon that's intended to be continuously fired is, "tick" is used instead.

^[2] We need to talk a bit about HP (hit points) vs. one-shot EHP (effective hit points) vs. total EHP. HP is your unarmoured, unmodified hull values. For an Eagle, this is 11,700. For an Osiris, this is 1,650,000. One-shot EHP is your HP multiplied by your armour multiplier, or how much points of damage you can effectively take from a single shot before dying. An AU Eagle has 11,700 * 2.5 = 29,250 one-shot EHP. A Cap8 Osiris has 1,650,000 * 4.0 = 6,600,000 one-shot EHP. Total EHP includes nanobots, which is currently valid for all ships except battlecruisers and larger. Nanobot calculation is a bit more complex since it's applied to HP, not one-shot EHP. An AU Eagle has (11,700 + 600 * 66) * 2.5 = 128,250 total EHP^[3]. A Cap8 Osiris has a total EHP of 6,600,000, the same as its one-shot EHP, because it has no nanobots.

^[3] If you've ever wondered why large fighter engagements take so long, look no further. You can put 700,000 damage into an Osiris with a single Heavy Mortar and eat almost 11% of its hull right there by just looking in the right direction and right clicking. Both you and the Osiris are moving so slowly that from close enough it's impossible to miss. The closest thing that exists for fighters is achieving a Mini Razor shot, which is significantly more difficult than achieving a Heavy Mortar shot on another battleship. A Mini Razor deals 17400 damage, which won't one-shot an AU8 Eagle -- remember, its one-shot EHP is 29,250 -- but will take away 13.5% of its total EHP assuming the pilot immediately slams that nanobot button. But the margin of error on a Mini Razor shot is a lot higher than the margin of error on a Heavy Mortar shot, so trying to get that kind of big damage chunk from a single shot against a fighter is difficult. When the SNAC was doing 132,000 one-shot damage against a fighter, well... there's the rub.

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None of this post is intended to be justification for the way fighter balance is. It's just the surface level of a deep dive into the game's mechanics and how they fundamentally apply differently to small ships than they do to large ones.

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Retired, permanently.