Phoenix Space Combat System for Dummies - Part Thirteen Test Battle Charlie - Missiles
Next in our series of tests of the battle system we will look at possibly the most popular ship killer in game with Missiles. We won't be looking at the dreaded anti-matter missiles as I don’t have any. Or even high mark missiles for that matter.
Our two test subjects will be the same two ships as last time. I am not sure if the shielded exploration vessel even noticed the attack in the last post so it is still aimlessly wandering around doing science stuff. The scout ship though has re-armed and gotten rid of all the light photon guns equipping instead with a single missile launcher, Magazines and ammo. In practice no warship carries a single tiny weapon like this and you will see ships with 100-200 missile launchers all trying to overwhelm the point defence of a defending ship. In this case the defending ship does not even have point defence (plus we want to see what the weapon 'does' not what it does if it gets past the point defence).
The Attacking ship
Since the defending ship has not changed we just need to take a look at the attacking ship which has enough missiles for one shot per round.
SPACE WEAPONS |
| ACC AF HP DMG |
| 1 Missile Launcher mkII (206) 1 |
| - 2 salvos of Missile +8 8 200 |
| - 2 salvos of Cloaked Kinetic Missile +8 1 60 |
The launcher does not tell us much except they are really easy to destroy. They don't even possess an accuracy or AF or Damage all of which are dependent on the weapon utilized.
The next two lines list the ammunition available and this ship is carrying two standard missiles and two cloaked kinetic missiles. The ship report states it has a +8 accuracy which is an improvement on the base launcher but both have only one hit point. This means both weapons will be destroyed if they are hit by one shot from a gatling laser (I say 'destroyed' what is actually happening is the missile is blinded by the laser and misses, it is not been hit with a physical weapon though it treats the hit as such).
Ammo Stats - The Missile
The missile stats of relevance are its
Damage 200 - this can do a lot of damage especially to unshielded/unarmoured ships
Explosive Damage 200 - you really want to store these in Magazines as if one gets hit in combat you will do a lot of damage to yourself
Accuracy 6 - Not stunningly impressive but since the ship has an accuracy of 8 this means the launcher is helping with the accuracy (guess).
No defence is listed so these will get destroyed by a single Gatling point defence shot
AF 8 Yuck. As will be seen this massively impacts this fight and basically means shields and armour are much, much better versus this weapon
Ammo Stats - The Cloaked Kinetic Missile
The Kinetic missile is very common as the default fall back weapon. The cloaked variety is just harder to hit with point defence.
Damage - 60 - much less than the missile but actually better as will be seen.
Explosive Damage 60 - much like the missile you would want these in magazines. It does less damage if hit though so not as bad as the missile
Accuracy 6 - same average accuracy which is also upped by two probably due to the Mark II launcher.
Defence 2 - So if this is hit once by a Gatling gun it will have around a 50% chance of being destroyed. It might need two hits though so can soak up more damage. Note that the defence is not listed on the weapon report which just lists the HP since the defence exists it is used instead of the HP.
Point Defence Stealth 10% Not sure how this is calculated it means that point defence will probably miss even seeing the missile 10% of the time thus again increasing the amount of missiles that get through.
The Attack
---------------------------------BATTLE REPORT----------------------------------
Shields are down
Armour protection: 20
ENEMY TARGETS SUPPORT TARGETS DEFEND TARGETS
Tousa - sh - Daidokoro (#####)None None
Targeting NHS Tousa - sh - Daidokoro (#####):
Position is on our enemy list.
Attacking NHS Tousa - sh - Daidokoro (#####)
--------------------------------------------
Round 1: 1 Missile Launcher mkII (Missile)
- 1 hit - 0 (22) [200] damage - 99%
Round 2: 1 Missile Launcher mkII (Cloaked Kinetic Missile)
- 1 hit - 13 (32) [60] damage - 99%
Round 3: 1 Missile Launcher mkII (Missile)
- 1 hit - 0 (24) [200] damage - 99%
Round 4: 1 Missile Launcher mkII (Cloaked Kinetic Missile)
- 1 hit - 7 (35) [60] damage - 99%
Incoming Fire from NHS Tousa - sh - Daidokoro (45223)
-----------------------------------------------------
Round 1: 1 Photon Scatter Gun
- 0 hit - 0 [0] damage - 2%
Round 2: 1 Photon Scatter Gun
- 0 hit - 0 [0] damage - 2%
Round 3: 1 Photon Scatter Gun
- 0 hit - 0 [0] damage - 2%
Round 4: 1 Photon Scatter Gun
- 0 hit - 0 [0] damage - 2%
Post Battle Summary
-------------------
Combat stress caused 0.5% integrity loss.
Ammo Expended: 2 Missiles (209)
2 Cloaked Kinetic Missiles (2040)
Ship hulls were undamaged in combat.
Couple of points from the report. You will note it says at the top 'Shields are down' which in this case just means there aren't any shields. Secondly since we did not specify any weapon load out (you can choose what fires first in the orders) the ammo has been selected randomly. The return fire was even less effective than last time with the only damage caused by the combat stress integrity loss which is tiny for a heavy hulled ship.
Here is where firing single weapons proves very useful as it exposes some interesting facts concerning the battle report.
1st Shot - Standard Missile. This hit (without point defence this is not unexpected) and had a potential 200 damage. The battle report says that 22 was blocked by the shields. This is not actually correct as it is the re-adjusted figure.
I am going to go into some math to show what it going on.
So the shot hits and does 200 damage which hits the shields.
The shield depth starts at 67.34.
The weapon has an AF of 8 so the shield depth gets multiplied by that to 538.72. This should protect against a mean of 269.36 damage.
The probability engine works out a random number of how much is blocked.
We can back calculate this by multiplying the report figure by 8. So 22 * 8 is 176 so the shield was actually only 32.6% effective.
The total damage blocked (176) is then divided by 8 to show the pressure put on the shields (so 22) - this is the report figure so the report does not show damage blocked by shields but instead the damage blocked by shields after being divided by the Armour Factor
This means only 22 damage gets through to the armour which does exactly the same so the armour depth increases from 40 to 320 and any resultant damage blocked then gets divided for damage to the armour. In this case the attack is totally absorbed by armour and shields (which has the side effect of not impacting the shield depth for that shot which only decreases if damage gets past the armour)
The 3rd shot has the same structure except here 176 was blocked by the shields (even less effective!) but the armour still soaked up the tiny 24 that was passed through.
2nd Shot Kinetic Missile. This weapon has no AF so is treated much like very other weapon we have seen, The 2nd shot has 32 damage exactly blocked by the shields (around 47% effective) with 28 then hitting the armour. The armour blocked 15 points of this ( potential damage - shield damage - actual damage) so only 37.5% effective then 13 points hit the hull and internals.
Much the same for the 4th Kinetic missile shot except the shields were around 52% effective and blocked 35 damage and the armour then soaked up a further 18 points (45% effective) allowing only 7 through to hull internals.
Conclusion
The battle had very little impact on the defending ship as its Armour Damage was only 1.3% ( 39.88/40 ) and its shields hardly dropped at all. You can see why people might prefer the less impressive looking kinetic missiles to the standard missiles as well. The standard missiles did bugger all really whilst the cloaked kinetic at least burnt off more shields and did some internal damage. Don't take this as a count against missiles though as as you go up the Marks the damage gets larger and the results better. Also weapons are basically a toolkit of options. A warship with one hundred missile launchers firing 100 normal mark I missiles a round would potentially be able to take out 200 freighters in one turn if firing missiles but only around 70 or so with kinetic missiles so it depends on what you are trying to do.
Next up will be either a single cannon combat or torpedoes dependent on which runs first.
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