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| Re: Chaff vs Beamers |
Sun, 13 April 2003 07:29   |
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Initiative is fairly important. But it all depends on ship design. If it's pure missile ships vs pure missile ships it's first shot winner! (example nubs full of only arms + computers) - assuming ship numbers are equal.
It's all design vs counter design. Hence the replayability of stars.
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| Re: Chaff vs Beamers |
Tue, 15 April 2003 11:38 |
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 yucaf |
 | Master Chief Petty Officer |
Messages: 100
Registered: December 2002
Location: India | |
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| vonKreedon wrote on Sat, 12 April 2003 22:15 |
I am surprised to hear so many claim that initiative is unimportant, at least outside of BBs. My consistent experience has been that he who shoots furstest and hardest wins, from DDs to Nubs. Doesn't matter what sort of jamming you have, if I'm shooting first and accurately you go away faster than I do, assuming equal chaff/anti-chaff beamers. But I seem to be hearing that this is not the experience of other players; am I hearing clearly?
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Before Nubians, yes, initiative will often give you the victory in a battle if you present fairly similar forces to the place. This is because defenses are so weak compared to firepower. However, when you get the superlatanium and later when you reach the Nubian, then the ratio damage/defense shifts heavily, in particular because you can add jammers for example and present most of the time a ratio shield/armor close to 1. When you get there, the armaggedon is not so good anymore, especially against combined fleets (beamers/sappers+missiles/torps)
At this stage, if you present fairly equal forces in a battle, and in good numbers (let's say above 50 ships on each side), then the design is really what will determine who wins. Of course initiative is still important, if you get to shoot his chaff first, then sapp his shields and then send your missiles/torps before he has fired a single beam, then of course you have a great advantage. However, often you can have the first shot and loose, because for example he presented a very good counter design, for example reducing the accuracy of your missiles to 20% so that they won't kill many ships, and his counter-shot will kill your unjammed missile boats. He's left with damaged ships, you are left with nothing. This is just an example, many situations are possible.
Before the superlat/Nub era, the one who gets first shot generally kills a lot of enemy ships, therefore reducing the strength of the counter-shot. With Nubs you need several shots to start reducing the enemy fleet significantly, hence the lesser importance of initiative.
As was said, it's all a matter of counter design, if you have a chance to do it. Sometime your minerals are already invested and you have no choice but to use what you already have 
FWIW,
YucaF
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| Jason Cawley on jammers vs computers (Re: Chaff vs Beamers) |
Wed, 16 April 2003 17:39 |
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| Micha | 
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Messages: 2342
Registered: November 2002
Location: Belgium GMT +1 | |
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| vonKreedon wrote on Wed, 16 April 2003 21:20 |
If I have as much or more computing power than my opponent has jamming, how can my accuracy be degraded that far? Perhaps shooting at a late game IS, but otherwise I would expect to have at least as much computing power as my opponent has jamming.
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My math is bad, but for more info you can look up some articles in the newsgroup, search for "inaccuracy" and "jamming", you'll find dozens. Add "Jason Cawley" to the search and you get the best. ;-)
Pasting just one of them here, I think the formula might be useful:
From:Jason Cawley
Subject:Re: Warships: Cruiser design, best options?
Discussions:rec.games.computer.stars
Date:1998/02/01 |
Tobias Gladh wrote:
> two Super Battle-computers (gives a hit chance of 80)
> Four computers is overkill, as you'll get a hit-rate of 4*30 + 20 =
> 140%!
Um, Jeffrey has already pointed out that that is not how it works. Two SBCs will give you around a 60% chance to hit; 4 around 80% as Jeffrey said. (Not to mention higher initiative with 4). Each computer reduces the inaccuracy by 30% (assuming no enemy jamming, etc). So two of them give 1 - .7 * .7 = .51 or about cut the number of misses in half. Four cut the misses in half twice, which means turn 3/4s of the misses into hits. Etc.
One other thing to be careful about here is the way computers interact with jammers. The whole targeting of all the computers (51% for 2 SBCs, or 76% for 4) is the number that gets "traded off" with enemy jamming on a 1% for 1% basis, before the result is applied to the jihads inaccuracy (or accuracy, if the jamming is stronger). That is, suppose 4 SBCs target jihads at a ship with 1 jammer 20. Then the targeting is -
(1 - (.7^4)) - .2 = .56
Which gives +45% (that's the targeting times the jihads inaccuracy, .8) hits to the original 20%, or 65% hits overall.
It can be a little tricky before you are used to it. Know it was for me :-) The general effect is to make it so high jamming and high computing (but different), tend to make the final accuracy move toward the underlying accuracy of the weapon. While the impact of a little computing, if unopposed by jamming, is high on an innaccurate weapon.
More computing has a lesser effect; when you get up to the 6 battle nexus range with 98.44% targeting, more do little for the targeting (though they help initiative). But decent jamming will have a serious effect against even such high targeting, if the underlying accuracy of the weapon is low. E.g. with 6 jammer 30, get 88% jamming. Against say 6 nexus targeting (98.44% as mentioned) with a doomsday missle (25% base accuracy), you get like this -
(.9844 - .88235) * .75 (doom innaccuracy) + .25 (base acc) = .3265
compare no jamming
.9844 * .75 + .25 = .9883
So even though the targeting was stronger than the jamming (nexus, rated 50, vs. jammer 30, and 6 times), still the jamming manages to cut the number of hits a lot; to about 1/3rd in this case, compared to what would happen without the jamming. Of course the final accuracy is higher than the base accuracy, because the computing/targting is stronger. But not nearly so much as you might expect...
overall (when targeting > jamming)
((targeting - jamming) * inaccuracy) + accuracy = final accuracy
With targeting and jamming for multiple systems each given by -
(1 - (1-systemrating)^numberofsystems)
Not as simple as it might at first appear, then :-)
Anyway, it is a system worth getting used to and learning the ins and outs of - at least if you play humans and want to win :-)
I hope this is helpful.
Sincerely,
Jason Cawley
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I too hope this is helpful, I don't understand a thing of it! Formulas make my brain melt down, my attention immediatly starts wondering off. Maybe I should ask Zoid for advice? :-)
I just go on experience and testbeds, stuff like above I leave to my math mad (team) mates,
regards,
mch
...
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| Re: Chaff vs Beamers |
Wed, 16 April 2003 17:45 |
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| Micha |
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Messages: 2342
Registered: November 2002
Location: Belgium GMT +1 | |
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| vonKreedon wrote on Wed, 16 April 2003 21:20 |
I'm hearing that the base armor of the Nub really swings things towards jamming and deflecting. The argument seems to be that the huge armor base of the Nub makes the Nubs stay around long enough to make unjammed ships go away faster than the later firing, but jammed Nubs. Is this an accurate paraphrasing of the argument?
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And now from my own experience: when you get to nubs you usually don't have much iron left (nor germ for computers), so there aren't much missile ships around anymore, beams rule in this era.
Against the missile ships that are flying around beamers need to get in range, so they need to be though, and with nubs this is very easy to achieve, you make your nubs hard to kill and cheap at the same time, first shot is as good as of no value (except in a few exceptions). Plenty of general slots to put in defensive items.
BTW play RS since you won't be adding any armor to your nubs anyway,
regards,
mch
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| Re: Chaff vs Beamers |
Thu, 17 April 2003 02:39 |
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| Micha |
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Messages: 2342
Registered: November 2002
Location: Belgium GMT +1 | |
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| vonKreedon wrote on Thu, 17 April 2003 07:50 |
| Quote: |
: when you get to nubs you usually don't have much iron left (nor germ for computers), so there aren't much missile ships around anymore, beams rule in this era.
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This may explain some of my lack of understanding; for whatever reason, race design or game play, I have tended to have plenty of all minerals available when I start building Nubs.
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Most are not that lucky.  Given some game circumstances like having good remote mining sites, no real ship building untill the nub era etc you may indeed have plenty of minerals left. (For example In WKF I had iron in abundance because I didn't build a single missile ship untill about two year before the game ended, which was 2497.)
As for races, when playing PP you make a race that will have more minerals than other races, when playing AR ... well  
Still missile fleets will be smaller than beamer fleets, harder to gather etc. And easier to deal with, 10.000s of chaff is usually no exception in the nub era ... So the first shot just eats chaff (even with the normal chaff/anti-chaff/anit-anti-chaff/etc)
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Now what were we talking about?? Computers for first shot or computers to decrease inaccuracy??  Or jamming? Really need to get some more sleep ...
Anyway: first shot loses importance, jamming is important and we all hope to see Stars! Supernova someday!  
| Quote: |
The Cawley formulas made a vague and general sense to me; jammers have a greater impact than computers in the jammer/computing interaction using capital missiles.
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Yes, that was also the impression I had from reading articles (not only this one) about the subject ...
regards,
mch
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I only wish it wasn't so godawful expensive, so I could have UR on every race design.
