All about Weapons - DISTANT WORLDS 2
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- Опубліковано 8 вер 2024
- An extension to the latest update of "Scott's DW2 guide" discussing what all the different weapon stats mean, a look at each weapon category, followed by a deep dive into how TO HIT and DAMAGE calculations are made in game. A number of components in the design screen and how they affect these calculations is also covered.
Link to my PDF guide: www.matrixgame...
Man you are putting some quality content here, congrats.
I don't like the epsilon very much because it is a dead end at T3, and the -40% to shields really hurts as from my experience you're hitting the shields most of the time. I am a big fan of pulse weapons, tech all the way to T9 and the damage output is just too high, you just have to set aggressive behavior even to stronger targets and it will bump into other ships to mitigate damage falloff and accuracy loss.
I did have some good results with missiles too, I was playing with ackdarians carriers and with pulse weapons I wasn't even able to fire because the destroyers and fighters/bombers would clean everything before it got into range, so I've put hive missiles and it had much more impact with the fights having a great front/backline division, with hyperdeny and fleet bonuses it became the perfect support ship.
The rail weapons seems like a good very early weapon or a newbie trap as it falls tremendously later on with better shields and better reactive armor numbers. The beam one seems the worst of all to me, very weak damage and the accuracy and range doesn't make up to it, also trash tier as fighter/bomber weapons due to low damage per shot, very underwhelming. It had to have 0% damage falloff and better as PD to even begin to become viable.
I read everywhere that the damage control module only affects hull and components, not armor. Even the galactopedia mentions that. Maybe you need to check that but it's a mandatory module anyway to me.
I would love for you to make a video focusing on fighters/bombers, I'm having some weird behavior from them not shooting, flying very slowly and also having very long rebuild times (I tested once and got 3 weeks to build 1 fighter in a 6 medium bay carrier), but would love some detailed analysis on their effectiveness taking out pirate bases, starports and in battle in general.
I respect Dastactic and other youtubers but I think you are putting the best content out there!
Some great points! And thanks for the kind words. It's good to consider your path because you are making an investment along a particular technology. I think ANY weapon will work - if you have enough of them. I've had bad luck with Rail guns - but to be honest, I need to spend some more times with missiles.
With regards to damage control - Erik Rutins explained this in a forum thread and he was clear that armor is included. However, I haven't been able to test because it's hard to get an enemy ship with just armor and no shields.
Finally - fighters and bombers - they seem to work well with torps - because they distract the PD and then my torpedoes get through more easily. So I never have one without the other except very early game. But I will put together some testing and make a video on it soon! Thanks again for sharing your experiences!
i picked beam cause it sounded cool and i wanted a smaller long range weapon to accompany my big-ass missiles. not surprised about it being weak sauce though.
@@scottsspace5562 yeah...your Guides helped me a lot (coming from Stellaris and nowadays i barely Touch Stellaris ..DW2 is so much better..only the Graphics could be better) .
But i agree with Leo..you underestimated the Range.
I tested a lot and found that a good Mix is the Way to go when you want to MinMax.
In my current Run on Hard i have CloseRange with Pulse and at least 1 Ion for disabling Systems,at little bit PDs mixed in and LongRange with Missiles.
When i have Carriers i will combine them with Torpedos cause the Fighters will bait a lot of PDs so the Torpedos wont be harmed that often.
Only Beams i found pretty useless.
Keep on doing the good!! Work.
Maybe 1 Question OOT:
When i build my Patrolfleets i have to i have to set every Single Ship to Patrol...i cant find an Option to Set a whole fleet to Patrol.
Overseen it or doesnt it exist?
Just another voice saying you made a great guide here! I love how you clearly and concisely explain everything at a good pace.
Glad you enjoyed it!
i like that you run these test. i'm too lazy to do it myself, but i value seeing side by sides of the options. particularly when in action
Thanks for the vid man, really helps further understand the game. I have about 1800 hrs in stellaris and its fun learning another complex X4 space game. liked and subbed!
Great content thank you Scott, your written guide was very useful too.
Glad it was helpful!
These type of games are so detailed that is so much fun to nerd out! Love it. Something that maybe be additionally helpful are two additional stats.
1) damage per second per unit size. For example if a weapon A has twice the damage per second of weapon B, but 4 times the size, then you can can put 4 of weapon B on for every 1 of weapon A. Then weapon B is actually better, since it would lead to twice the dps on ship (1/2 the raw damage but 4 times the number). Its easy to loose track of the sizes in selecting weapons.
2) damage per second per unit size per accuracy: you mention this in your analysis, but the inaccuracy of the weapons subtracts from the DPS. So if a weapon has a expected accuary of 85% then the effective raw dps = raw dps x 0.85 = effective dps.
you can even combine the 1) and 2) for a most effective weapon assessment damage per second per unit size x accuracy is probably the most useful damage analytics. That number and the range and you've got a good since of basic weapon effective and then the details on shield penetration and dps are icing on the cake.
This was great! Very informative. Thanks!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Really enjoying the content! Fun drinking game, take a swig every time you hear 'my guide' 😜
Although youtube videos can be monetized (in theory - I'm sure it's pennies for any potential level I might reach) - the guide is a labor of love with nothing in it for me except many kind thanks from good people. So I don't feel like promoting it is self-serving at all. 🙂
@@scottsspace5562 it's a great guide, thank you for making it!
Your guide and YT tutorials are awesome! Thank you so much!
Thank you very much, greatly appreciated. For some reason I can't shake the feeling that the shield penetration is supposed to completely bypass shields in case it procs. Having this partial bypass, that further more also counts towards the shield strength, is very strange.
Thanks and thanks for watching! I'm 99% sure this is how it works (currently) according to the developers themselves.
FYI, PD hits take away from the damage potential of a missile. If you have a missile with 10 damage, gets hit one time with your 5 damage PD then the missile will only damage you for 5 points. The health of the missile is the same as its damage potential.
great video!
I strongly disagree with importance of range. Especially in fleet battle range is indirect increase in dps. Ship does 0 dps if it has to approach target to attack it. Thats is why long range weapons are so good. Because often whole fleet can attack most of the time and deal damage. While short range fleet will spend most of time running around.
yeah plus if you set your fleet to be cautious they tend to stay away from enemy ships range, i played a build theme where i had missile ships with fast speed and targeting, and less armor.
How have you found torpedoes do against pd? I expected them to be terrible, because projectiles don't appear to have any health (in game files), and So I assumed that they would get wrecked by point defense, simply because you have so few projectiles and they don't seem to have very good weapon countermeasures.
but then in game, I see point defense projectiles sometimes disappear when hitting missiles, but the missile continues on to it's target.
Do you think there's a hidden projectile health stat somewhere? Do you find that point defense isn't hitting your torpedoes, or is it hitting them but not killing them?
See my reply above - my fighters absorb the PD so I have been lucky I think. They are certainly targeted by PD often when I don't have fighters. So far - every time a PD hits my torps - they are destroyed (but they do miss) but I will watch more carefully now that you mention it. Projectiles do have their own stat called "Weapons countermeasures" which I believe shows how resilient it is to PDs and other weapons (I THINK).
Thanks! I'd personally like a deep dive into ship boarding and ion, I haven't seen that topic covered anywhere yet
There is a quick boarding discussion/demo in Episode 3 of my Ikkuro playthrough. Check it out. But yes - future mechanic video on that.
I'd love to see your analysis of racial specific weapons.
I guess you have missed the range factor. There is 3 ranges, AI ship design contain range 1 2 and 3. If you design a missile boat, you avoid range 1 and 2 damage, so you always win, this is why missiles has larger sizes, it's a limit to how OP they are.
It even work well against creatures because they have no missile counters, but has long range beam weapons, so the longer range you can shoot from the more damage you can deliver, no need to take many hits to close in with a rail gun.
The closing in part is a HUGE deal, because things is really slow for 70%+ of the tech tree, so you don't get ANY damage from range 1 and 2 weapons for half the battle, where missiles give you damage for the entire encounter.
Fighters might be the real super weapon, but since you can't start out with fighters, that makes it what you switch to, after you max conc missiles.
Thanks for the perspective. I am playing a game now with only missiles to do more experiments. The trouble with your theory is that is not how big (20+) ship battles behave. The ranges quickly close and there is a giant mess of ships all milling about at close range. Even on cautious settings for attack stance you can't keep your ships at range (except against creatures maybe).
Would having pairs of fleets be a nice strategy?
I imagine you could have a missile fleet at long range and a close range fleet that closes in first. For the close range fleet I'd probably pick sturdy epsilon missile destroyers with PD and fighters and fast frigates with a mix of pulse and ion.
Can such a close fleet keep the bulk of the enemy busy, tank damage and take out most fighters?
If not you could possibly mix the long range fleet with a few defensive ships.
That actually is a good idea. In small battles, my missiles ships (tier 4 up - tier 3 missiles did almost nothing for me) were able to keep distance initially and do some good initial damage. When the enemy warps to me (and I'm not warping to them obviously) they simply drop into the middle of me and my advantage never materializes. but attacking a pirate base, etc. missiles are pretty good!
I concentrated on what he said,paying close attention until the point where he mentioned he is a math teacher by day. i immediately had the urge to pull out my phone...
;-)
Hey Scott, not sure if you already figured it out but could the unexpected damage at 24:32 be from the reactive armor? If 25% of the damage gets passed on as penetration through shields to armor, so about 2.8 from (11.25 x 0.25) and the reactive armor is high enough (say 3), I think the pedia said that the damage is totally negated then so no armor damage. Thanks for posting these though, getting a better understanding of how I should build my ships for what reason.
Edit: Never mind, I see that you found it out in the PD REDUX video. Kinda funny though that you talk about shield penetration rarely happening and it seems to have happened on the first shot lol!
2 different shield penetrations - one from weapon and one from shield itself. It’s the latter I don’t see much of.
Also pay attention to the fact that there are interior and exterior components, external are outside the armor... Just to confuse the issue even more. Think about a naval ship. Sensor (radar) dishes are on masts or in thin domes, exposed to damage. The engines, fuel, armor, are inside the defensive hull.
Yup. There is also targeting/countermeasures for PD and regular weapons when firing on other weapons that I didn't go into. Too much to cover!
@@scottsspace5562 Just for amusement, i had 3 mining stations in an asteroid field, another empire had a station as well. Declared war, just cuz, and the stations started duking it out. It didn't take as long as thought it would.
I prefer torpedoes as my standoff and blasters for close in. Quantum Shards at 5000 range ruin enemies' days.
Endgame armors and shields are just OP.
Btw, is the math additive or multiplicative? For instance countermeasures you have Vector engines/Command/Crew/Component/Hull VS. Weapon/Command/Crew/Component/Hull And have you seen a limit ie, 80%+40% for a never miss, does it cap at say 95%
BTW, I have noticed an oddity I have yet to track down, maybe hull? But, a 5000 range torpedo on a mining station and the station was showing it had a 7000 range?!?
@@williamklett6660 Mining stations have +50% range so 5000+50% = 7500 range
@@Leonardo-gr6sn Thank you, somehow missed that
having played about 20 hours so far, got to destroyers a time or two.....the combat feels kinda weird, The distance is so close it just turns into a cluster fuck. Ships just slam into each other and sometimes even stop shooting . Its very akward. This game is all a bit akward in places. Its hard to know which ship is constructing, its hard to see easily what type of ship is in your fleet. You cannot create fleets with multiple types of escorts....that or its not explained.
Good video, not much content on the game as of now, so thx.
Just a question: are you certain that the DMG reduction is one after another and not all against the base DMG? And if so, are you sure on the order of these reductions?
I'm near 100% it's one after another. So if 25% of dmg passes through shield, the armor then works with that 25% dmg as the base when using percentages. The order I'm maybe only 85% positive about. I'm doing more testing so I will update if I find out more.
Scott
Great video, but would it be possible to give just an general overview on strategies for various load outs and how to set them up in the fleet AI setting...
I just need a means to understand the general significance of rock/paper/missile!!
Thanks
Will be doing 2 videos coming up - it will cover the rock/paper/missile thing to some degree.
Loving the content man. It was really helpful seeing the breakdown of the weapons. I currently haven’t had the availability to really dive into the numbers so thank you for doing it!
*little advice, if you can, try to do a little bit of audio editing to get rid of “ums” or other filler words. It was a little distracting at times.
My later videos have much less (that particular video is an early video) - except my playthroughs which I only do limited editing. But noted and thank you!
Great video.
You didn't take energy consumption into account, though? Isn't it significant?
The 'Static Energy Used' seems the same for every weapon of the same size, but the Energy Per Shot, together with Shots Per Volley and Volley Fire Rate should say that some weapons are more power-thirsty than others.
And that could be significant, yes?
I don't but I haven't had issues in my play thru (that I've noticed). It's something I kind of ignore. However, I'm not saying that is not potentially an issue. It would be cool if it was and you had to balance that - but right now I think it is too forgiving.
i'm mostly using omega beams or titan blasters and the end.
I can easy fit multiple L size Titan Basters on Escorts, that gives them ridiculous amount of dps to nuke enemy fleet faster, than they can run away against them.
Spam of M size Omega Beams instead offer very powerful alpha strikes at long range, what is superior with large fleets.
I rarely get that far before restarting. I play on slow research too. I will force myself to try these. Thanks for the tip!
Great content. +1 sub
The small amount of damage that is passing through the shields likely isn't defeating the armor's damage resistance (reactive rating? I forget what it's called), and thus doesn't do anything. I suppose there's a small chance it hits one of the exterior components.
Yes - in fact I was reading the ftr reactive thinking it was 1 for regular ships. It's not - even for early armor it's like 2 or 3. So that is exactly what was happening.
perfect
Great video but I can't find the data for shield or armor damage drop off in the actual game stats in the ship design screen. All I see is shield or armor bypass. But I'm only on tier one and two weapons. It would be nice if they included the former in the game since it is an important consideration. Or am I missing something???
If you go to the ship design screen, create a new design, and then hover over the weapon in the components list (upper left) - it will show that stat. I copied mine right off that pop-up screen. Some weapons don't have any - so it won't list that field. Be sure to hover over a weapon that has it (like torpedoes).
@@scottsspace5562 Thanks Scott. I think my problem is that I have only researched about 5 weapons on the basic level so none of them have that stat. I'm sure I'll see it later in my game. Thanks again for the videos. I would be totally lost if it wasn't for your help.
Scott, are you sure about the armor/shield bypass reducing the damage by the corresponding percentage? I thought that the bypass means that a percentage of the damage CAN go through armor/shield but it WON'T reduce the damage caused to them? As an example Concussion missile 16 dmg -25% shield damage and +25% bypass means 16-4=12 damage done to shields (-25% vs shield) and that 12 dmg has a 25% chance to go through and damage armor/hull/components on top of the 12 damage that caused to the shield already.
It must be like that otherwise a railgun with it's -50% shield damage and +50% bypass wouldn't do any damage to shields at all and in fact would be a useless weapon completely.
Yes - that I am 100% sure of that (I heard it directly from the development team) - at least that is what they said. My experiments confirmed it - though it wasn't exhaustive. But the game doesn't always work the way they say it should so I would not fall off my chair if it didn't always do that. There are bugs/mistakes in the software (as there always is).
But the 25% is the AMOUNT of damage passing through - NOT the % chance it will pass thru. Stranger, when it has a -25% bypass stat, that simply means it is a 25% damage reduction. There was a big discussion about this on the beta testers forum and that is where I got my info. Rail guns still hit the shields with 50% damage and they shoot often (very short time between volleys). But yes - I'm not a big fan of them.
@@scottsspace5562 Thank you :)
@@scottsspace5562 Beta tester's forum - is that completely closed to new people? I didn't get any news that the game was even in development until I saw upcoming releases on Steam one day. Seems to be a lot of already done research that I may not have access to.
@@Masterfully1 I believe it's officially over. The application was posted on the DWU (DW1) forum a year ago or so. There was a second beta wave of people added but I don't know where that was announced.
I'm using missiles and that's it
Play as humans, you'll get Bulwark Missile Batteries, small and large volleys and powerful
Scott, this is amazing. Thank you. One question/point to add to your guide about ECO. How revenue of colony is counted. Should be: pop x dev lvl. But I´m not able to count it. Only works on the start of the game: 2000M x 1,5 (50%(ish)) = around 30k revenue. I tried looking on the internet but none have answer right now. It looks like something in formula is missing. eg.: 3800M x 2,2 (120%) = 83k should be but I see - 135k in my last save. Only one species and very close to half of pop max according to planet view. Can it be because of luxury resources for example? I also added my empire bonus from leader, but still it is not enough.
Maybe I just can´t count anymore :)
If you have any idea, thank you!
It's not linear - that much I can tell you. However - I do not know the formula currently - I know the factors that help revenue (outlined in the guide)
@@scottsspace5562 Thank you
What are your experiences with various base designs? Can you make them really strong and play a bit of turtle strategy?
Or maybe a specific build that works well combined with small cheap defense fleets?
There is a limit to how strong you can make spaceports - unless you want to strip out research, commerce, recreation, etc. But those are so important for revenue, etc. So I don't usually modify but you can of course. The aren't great on defense in general (not like Stellaris, etc. where you can build super tough starbases). That is what defense bases are for (you need to research it). I build them only at super important colonies. But they can't get to the other side of the planet to intercept an invasion. So I tend to invest in a 8 - 10 ships defense fleet for each colony. Then I roam around with a couple of "main fleets" doing damage and defending my important mining stations near the borders.
do you know what does weapon contermeasure means? I also kind of confuesed by the hull hit point and the armor, although damage control should be working on both of them and I do see it working on armor. but when I use beam weapon against a 200 armor frigate which has only 150 hull size, it take significant more shots after the armor is depleted to explode than shots to wearing down its armor.
So when a PD weapon shoots at a missile - for example - the PD gets a TO HIT chance. The weapon countermeasure of the missile subtracts from that. The only thing protecting the hull is damage control. If you download my guide I provide a formula for damage (near the end of the guide).
Does robotic repair stack with itself or other modules?
What about AOE weapons?
They are worth a look - see - but I haven't had time. I've used them - they do work well (at least the L versions)
Did u just named your ship WTF ?