A analysis of beam weapons

Broken beam weapons?

I was intending to do an analysis of beams vs missiles but I realized analysis is complicated by the fact that efficiency of defense needs to be taken into account as well, so I shelved the project because I hadn't gotten defense stats yet.

Instead what I'm doing is to analyze beam weapons only.

Premise 1: The relevant criteria for comparison between beam weapons is DMG/Size component. Because of the way the combat system works, a weapon with a higher DMG/Size component ratio is always superior because you can get a higher overall attack by filling the hull with that weapon.

E.g A laser with damage 1, size 5 = 0.2 Dmg/Size is superior to something with stats damage 2, size 20 = 0.1 Dmg/size because assuming the same hull size say 100, filling it all with the first will give you a higher attack (20) then filling it with the second (10).

Sidenote 1: In some cases, a weapon that has a small raw size, is a better choice even if it has a lower dmg/size ratio, because of limited space. If you have space for a 10 size weapon, a 12 size weapon is useless even if it has a high dmg/ratio. This shall be ignored.

Premise 2: Higher tech beam weapons, should have a higher Dmg/size ratio. Because you spend research points to get new weapons, the higher tech beam weapons should have a higher dmg/size ratio, otherwise you are worse off. Another point to note is that since the BC cost of beam weapons increase (or at least remain the same as the last tech) as you go up the tech levels (one exception see later), this means that any newer tech weapon that has lower or even equal dmg/size ratio then the prior one is counter productive since even ignoring the research paid, it is at least as expensive ($$ speaking) to build if not more so that the precusor tech.

Methodology :

A) I calculated the size of each weapon component across all hull sizes and at the following minituraztion levels ,none, 40% and 115%

Divided the damage by the size.

C) Ran down the beam techs for each category (hull size + miniaturization bonus) and highlighted examples where the DMG/Size fell compared to the prior one. Such weapons are 'broken' for that hull size+miniaturization bonus.

Findings

1) For beam weapons there was one obviously broken weapon. Subspace blaster. In terms of dmg/size ratio it is way inferior to the prior 3, Disrupters I, II and III , across all hull sizes and miniaturization techs. It is obvious enough if you just look at the stats even without calculating dmg/size. It has lower damage, higher base size (same as disrupter I) and equal scaling factor as disrupters I II and III. It is not strictly inferior to Disrupters III though, because subspace blasters cost less (65 vs 70), but it is strictly inferior to disrupters I and II, which cost the same (65 for both).

2) Phasers IV appears to be a weapon that is broken in some settings. For a tiny hull with no miniaturization, Phasers IV has a lower DMG/size ratio than phasers III (0.524 vs 0.532). At small hull, Phasers IV is just 0.001 better, so it's practically broken as well, Considering that phasers IV cost 5BC more.

At 140% miniaturization the same thing occurs, and phasers IV are worse than phasers III with tiny hull.

3) Particle beam II is also another weapon that is practically broken with medium and huge hulls (0% minituration), small,large,huge (140% minituraztion), all hull sizes (115% minituraztions) because particle beam II is just between 0-0.005 better.

Conclusions

Subspace blasters are useless.

It is usually optimal to not stop at particle beam II since it can be inferior to particle beam I (from space weapons). Similarly phasers IV is not a good point to start if you are using only tiny and to some extent small hull sizes.

In terms of greatest jump between techs, the jump from Phasers IV to disrupters I, leads to the highest improvement in dmg/size , no doubt helped by the 2 point damage jump. I'm not sure at what point it is optimal to stop when taking into account research efforts, should I calculate dmg/size per research point ?

Not many earth shaking conclusions so far, and it's unlikely that people who have researched to phasers IV are using primarily tiny/small hulls, but the analysis of missiles which i will start in another thread is a bit more interesting

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