Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » The Academy » Detection in Stars! (A full rundown on scanners and cloaks)
| Re: Detection in Stars! |
Tue, 24 May 2016 02:55   |
|
 magic9mushroom |
 | Commander |
Messages: 1361
Registered: May 2008 | |
|
Okay, so this is the "next post" I mentioned, in which I'll analyse the guts of detection I posted above. I'm keeping them separate because the guts are straight game mechanics, whereas this is more metagaming and optimisation. That also means that this is my view on things and my synthesis rather than cold hard data of which I am a mere messenger, so while I think most of this is pretty solid I'm not the best Stars! player in the world and you might want to treat this accordingly.
Scanning and scanners
- I've seen people arguing both that NAS is better for detecting minefields/wormholes and that penetrating scanners are better for detecting them. Given that penetrating scan range is about half of ordinary scan range, that NAS doubles ordinary scan range, and that minefields/wormholes are 75% cloaked vs. ordinary scans but uncloaked to penscans, the ultimate answer is that by and large they're about even once decent penetrating scanners appear at Elec 10. If you want a full breakdown:
- Before penetrating scanners are available, NAS is going to have twice the detection range of non-NAS. Obviously.
- The Ferret Scanner has a short penetrating range of 50 ly, while NAS races will have 75 ly (Possum) or 112 ly (Gazelle).
- The Dolphin Scanner has a penetrating range of 100 ly, while NAS races will have 112 ly (Gazelle) or 137 ly (Cheetah).
- The Elephant Scanner has a penetrating range of 200 ly, while NAS races will have 167 ly (Eagle Eye) or eventually 250 ly (Peerless).
- Complicating this is that planetary scanners stop improving at Elec 8 for NAS races, while they continue to improve for penscan races. This means that at Elec 10, along with the Dolphin Scanner a non-NAS race is going to have the Snooper 320X planetary scanner and as such 160 ly of minefield detection from their planets. And at maxed Electronics against the NAS Peerless's 250 ly the penscan race also has the Snooper 620X and its 310 ly penscan range.
- Keep in mind, when putting scanners on Frigate and Galleon designs, that a second scanner adds only 19% to the first scanner's range. It's often worth it anyway, but not always.
Cloaking
- I made a spreadsheet a few days ago comparing cloak units required to get a given cloaking % and the increase in scanner range required to beat that cloaking %. XAPBob has been kind enough to host it here.
- The graph at the top (and another graph to the right of it) plot for every %cloak the cloak units/kT required to achieve that value and the increase in scanner range (or equivalently, scanner number in a picket line) needed to breach that %cloak. For instance, you need 420 cloak units/kT to achieve 80% cloaking, and you need 5x the scanner range to detect it, so there's a point at (420,5). The graphs only differ in that the one on the left uses a logarithmic scale.
- The graphs further down plot the total and marginal "efficiency" of various cloaking percentages. The total efficiency is defined as (increase in scanner power required, % of range vs. uncloaked)/(cloak units/kT required). The marginal efficiency is defined as (increase in scanner power required, % of range vs. uncloaked, compared to 1% less cloaking)/(increase in cloak units/kT required, compared to 1% less cloaking).
- Follow the blue lines marked "Normal" for now. I'll get to the red lines later.
- What can be seen from the efficiency graphs is that there are two rather different "sorts" of cloaking. There's "partial" cloaking, in which you cloak a fleet up to the 50% or 75% breakpoints for a relatively small expenditure, and there's "full" cloaking, in which you use a larger investment to go for 98% or as close to it as you can get. "Full" cloaking is far more efficient in terms of the amount of scanning required to defend equivalently against it, to the point where it becomes infeasible for much of the game for opponents to breach 98% cloaking over any significant distance (a Galleon full of Eagle Eye Scanners only achieves 11 ly range against a 98% cloak). Some awareness o
...
[Updated on: Wed, 12 June 2019 15:44] by Moderator
Report message to a moderator
|
|
|
|
Current Time: Tue May 07 21:39:10 EDT 2024
|
Members
Search
Help
Register
Login
Home
