Balance Proposal: Universal Weapon Power Equation

[Haste]

I admit to have only skimmed this for the time being, but if I'm correct in reading this then it looks like you are claiming we could balance fighter weapons without accounting for:

• Alpha damage, or the ability to use quick flicks to immediately do large amounts of damage at very close range where accuracy is far higher than medium and long range.
  
• Burst damage, which has a similar impact in fighter PvP in particular, where it allows players to capitalize on opportune moments where maximum target surface area is available for them to hit (say while turning), or again when the target is at close range.
  

At a glance it also looks like exponential relationships are not treated accordingly. For example, again in fighter PvP but certainly also in every other class, just at different scales with different weights, velocity is a highly exponential factor. Players are happy when they achieve 5-10% hitrate with a 600 m/s gun -- especially a high-refire, low alpha one, which we have established we apparently don't care about -- while hitrates approach nearly 100% at a velocity like 1200. Meaning linear power usage increase for this is an objectively incorrect approach.

Other things that I don't see any handling for are burstfire mechanics, where a gun can temporarily do large amounts of burst damage yet its damage over time is fairly tame, which is good for capitalizing on opportunities but places restrictions on the player. I also don't see how hybrids are handled. It seems like they would be incredibly heavily punished for their ability to do alright against both shields and hull, acting as if they are simultaneously hitting both at the same time. This is not how the game works. In reality you're only ever shooting shields or hull on a target, and while guns that do both add to the player's burst generally (which we've gone over above), by allowing the user to dedicate more of their weapon slots to hull damage by rocking some hybrids, it is definitely not a big enough advantage to warrant your extreme approach towards nerfing their efficiency.

There are likely myriad other issues. Given your attitude on display here I might even be tempted to actually run the game's guns through these numbers just to have a good laugh, but I don't really know if that is worth my time. The current formula started out simple and was gradually adjusted and, yes, made more complex as we learned more about how gun statistics should really be weighed. Unfortunately I don't see any quick way for you to prove that your approach is correct. Perhaps staring at some of the resulting numbers and realizing how wildly off they are might do it.

Oh. I just realized we're also weighing range as an equal stat to velocity. That might be the spiciest take I've read on gun balance in a while. It sounds funny to me that a 10 m/s gun crawling towards a target 60,000 meters away would have the same power usage for the same damage as a 600 m/s gun with 1000 range, which might just actually hit something.

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I plugged in these numbers with a 1.0 efficiency factor which appears to give results that are at least from the same universe as the current formula.

To see how good this formula is, we will compare two similar guns, the Daito (6.67, 750 m/s) and the Drake Type A (also 6.67, 750 m/s).

The Drake Type A deals 114.4 hull damage and 85.8 shield damage per shot for 121 energy per shot.
The Daito deals 162 hull damage and 81 shield damage per shot for 119 energy per shot.

Obviously the Daito in terms of raw performance is the better gun. Thanks to this Great And Objective, Superior Formula™, it now also uses less energy to do much more damage! Of course, the 3 damage less that it does to shields is so very crippling that it warrants a 43.9% increase in efficiency.

Your formula is bad.

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Now, for the record, I like seeing someone else tinker with this and I am not in any way shape or form claiming that my approach is the perfect, flawless one. I think we'd have a more productive conversation, however, if we dropped the attitude. The reality is that the current formula was tweaked and tuned over about a decade. It started out simple, and over time I learned that certain stats mattered more or less than I thought, or in some cases less -- like hybrid guns, where up until very recently I did in fact just add up both hull and energy damage and used that value in the rest of the equation. That turned out to be wrong, however, which is why we now have the more complex, less elegant-looking solution.

There's one last little thing that's being overlooked here, too, which is that powerplant values are pretty much completely arbitrary. Igiss or someone set up some initial values a very long time ago, and since then they have been reshuffled and adjusted however people -- usually me -- saw fit. I have recently played around with the idea of halving every large ship powerplant and also halving all power usage of their guns to make energy damage a little bit more consistent and balanced. I don't really see how this completely arbitrary approach to powerplant capacity and recharge can ever result in some sort of God-given perfect formula that can be used for every gun from the smallest to the largest ships. That implies that powercore values have to be set up perfectly to begin with across classes. They are not, and I doubt they ever will be.

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