Talk:Craft Armaments

I'm guessing from looking at the weapon accuracys and their ranges that craft weapon fire probably is calculated similarly to Battlescape combat, i.e. you can hit or not based on the accuracy, then comes in the size and range which might get you an incidental hit anyway. Otherwise the cannon would be even more pointless than it already is with a 10% accuracy - but close up this probably translates to something half reasonable. Equally the Stingray and Avalanche might turn out to have similar hit rates when at their respective maximum ranges are factored in. Of course the Plasma Beam owns everything else in almost every category so its fairly moot. --Sfnhltb 09:49, 7 March 2007 (PST)

The rate of fire of the Cannon might disguise its rate of misses, but your observation about Stingrays vs. Avalanches is intriguing.--Ethereal Cereal 14:36, 7 March 2007 (PST)

Well another thing that might possible - people think that the rate of fire increases as you close in, although the reload rate is given as a fixed number. Is it possible its just hits happen more often as you close in, so the combat completes faster but everything is actually firing at the same speed? (someone might have tested in depth with a stopwatch or something to know the answer, cant really comment solidly either way myself, but it seems a possibility at least) --Sfnhltb 15:17, 7 March 2007 (PST)

Try this. Get some Avengers and use either laser cannons or stingrays. Find some trouble and save the game. Launch the attack and set the two ships to their respective extreme aggression settings. Notice which one of the two gets fired on the most often or which one uses up its ammo before the other. It might take a few tries. You should be able to see a clear difference between the two ships, but a slow-down utility or - with an emulator - slowing down the emulation may help. My guess is that the exchange of attacks between the UFO and interceptor are actually happening at the same rate. However the time compression differs from ship to ship depending on how close they are to the UFO. -NKF

According to the data at the following thread, (http://www.strategycore.co.uk/forums/index.php?showtopic=535 ) the accuracies listed here and in the UFOpaedia are incorrect. It seems likely that he's correct, as the accuracy rating for each weapon is identical to the damage rating of each weapon. If someone could read the code of the game and find the actual accuracy to confirm/deny this, it'd be appreciated. Also, I read somewhere; (possibly here, although I can't relocate the data) that the ranges given for the Craft Armaments were too low by a factor of 8. This matches what I have seen in game(the plasma beam cautious attack range is 416, for example, and 52*8 is 416) with all 6 craft weapons. Shouldn't this be listed? -27 May, 2007, Arrow Quivershaft,

I did some tests earlier today, and measuring based on the range number displayed in the Interception window, the weapons have maximum ranges as follows- Avalanche: 480 Stingray: 240 Cannon: 80 Fusion Ball: 520 Plasma Beam: 416 Laser Cannon: 280

The default standoff range is 560 units of range. This allows us to put into perspective the ranges given on the alien craft, which are in the same units of measurement: Small Scout: 0 Medium Scout: 120 Large Scout: 272 Harvester: 176 Abductor: 160 Terror Ship: 336 Supply Ship: 288 Battleship: 520

This may not change anything, but I find it more useful to compare in the actual units the game displays to you, rather than the Kilometers of range it doesn't give you. -27 May, 2007, Arrow Quivershaft

So it seems that you've found that 1 game km = 8 distance units. Makes sense. What's caught my interst are those unknowns in Zombie's weapon tables.

By the way, for your convenience if you don't already use it: Enter three tildes (~~~) to insert your handle. It also turns it into a wikilink to your personal talk page. Enter four tildes (~~~~) to do the same and append the current timestamp. Saves having to type it out each time! I'll end this with an example of entering four tildes: NKF 00:02, 29 May 2007 (PDT)

It seems to hold that 8 distance units = 1 km, except for the laser cannon, which is an enigma in regards to range, since it should instead be 168 instead of 280; in other words, it should be outclassed by the Stingray in regards to range. 280 / 8 = 35. Of course, given that they totally screwed up the accuracy ratings, positing that they mistyped the Laser Cannon range isn't a huge leap.

Interestingly enough, actually, it appears that the accuracy and range of the Laser Cannon are the same number, based on this data. Perhaps that's where the error comes from; I will edit this into the Laser Cannon entry.Arrow Quivershaft 00:49, 29 May 2007 (PDT)

Probably AQ was using an XComUtil patched version of the game, which has the Laser Cannon range increased to 35(km). Spike 15:19, 2 July 2009 (EDT)

Weapon Damage Ranges

I was just scratching my head thinking about compiling a min/max-rounds-to-hit table to scuttle a Battleship, and suddenly remembered that like the Battlescape, weapon damage for air-to-air combat is variable.

Thought there would be mention of it on this page, but can't spot it. On further research it's on the firepower table sub-page. I'd like to work it into this page but before that I'd like to clarify if the range is meant to be 50% to 100% or 50% to 150%? I had a feeling it was the latter - like the alien weapons, but I'd better confirm it just to be sure. -NKF 04:56, 1 April 2009 (EDT)

Preliminary tests seem to indicate it is 50% to 100% ... I armed an Avenger with 1 Fusion Ball Launcher, and waited for an Abductor to spawn, then saved and Intercepted. Initial results seem to indicate that FBL will never do enough in 1 hit to crash an Abductor... which means that it's max damage is less than 250. ... 150% damage = 345 damage in 1 hit... that would be impressive...

I also discovered some funky results... seems like Xcom is one of those games that "stores the next random number in memory". Or so my results from using 1 FBL on a Medium Scout would show. Jasonred 14:29, 1 April 2009 (EDT)

Revised Fire Rates

I propose to put a note on the article that the fire rates shown (from UFOPaedia) are probably wrong. I might even change them to the observed actual values. I could add an extra column with the actual values, but that might be confusing.

Actual observed rates of fire:

Weapon:         Fire Interval in Game Seconds
                Aggressive/Standard/Cautious    
Cannon                   2 /  2 /  2
Laser Cannon            12 / 12 / 12
Plasma Cannon           12 / 12 / 12
Stingray                16 / 24 / 32
Avalanche               24 / 36 / 48
Fusion Ball             16 / 24 / 32

Spike 17:30, 9 February 2010 (EST)

OK I'm going to take the plunge and change the main page. It's a wiki after all. Spike 16:45, 11 February 2010 (EST)

Fusion Balls better than Plasma Beams?

In favour of the much maligned FBL, based on revised firing rates (see above) and other data, a Plasma Beam armed aircraft must endure 6x the exposure to enemy fire before it inflicts more damage than a Fusion Ball armed aircraft.

Plasma Beam aircraft requires 26gs to close range from 65km to 52km, plus an average 72gs to fire 7 times, at which point it exceeds the average damage of a (fully expended) Fusion Ball Launcher. Total 98gs. During this time a Battleship (firing on average every 24gs) will get an average of 5 shots off.

The Fusion Ball Launcher aircraft is fully expended in an average of 16gs in aggressive mode. The Battleship will on average only get one shot off. The FBL aircraft is disengaging before the Plasma Beam aircraft has even come into firing range.

Arguably this means that using FBL armed aircraft is a much more sustainable strategy against Battleships, since the XCom fleet will suffer 5x - 6x less damage per sortie. It requires being able to put at least 3 aircraft (12 FB) and preferably 4 aircraft (16 FB) into the air. But then it's always best to use 4 aircraft when engaging Battleships, so as to minimise XCom fleet damage and losses.

The much higher ammo costs of the FBL should be considered against the cost of replacing aircraft, and even more importantly, lost interception coverage during aircraft repair time.

Of course this will be moot to Commanders who prefer to let Battleships land and engage them on the ground. :)

Spike 19:05, 9 February 2010 (EST)

If only because it has a greater range than the plasma beam, the Battleship is definitely one of the few worthy FBL candidates, as you want it shot down fast. The others are the small and medium scout - only because it's overkill and easily vapourizes them.

The FBL has always had the edge over the amount of potential damage it can deal in a short amount of time, but it's the overall convenience offered by the more frugal Plasma Beam that puts it in better favour, even if you do have to expose the ship to more damage vs. a Battleship.

The limited ammunition of the FBL and the chance that each shot will miss makes it a much more expensive gamble than the plasma beam. But that's why the plasma beam/FBL combo is always a good one. It also helps mitigate the interceptor last-shot-fired idiosyncrasy where they pull out of range the moment the last round is fired, dropping the missile out of its working range.

One other thing to consider is that the importance of the loss of air time for damaged interceptors will change depending on the number and distribution of interceptor aircraft you have in your employ. -NKF 00:06, 11 February 2010 (EST)

You still have an economic cost when aircraft are lost or damaged. Either you pay ahead of time by buying and maintaining an aircraft fleet with excess capacity, more than you need, or you pay after the event by replacing aircraft, and by coverage gaps, leading to missed opportunities and avoidable enemy successes. Either way, losing aircraft costs you.

'Chance of missing...'? But don't FBL's have 100% hit probability? And (even without using Seb76's fix for last-shot-miss) you can avoid missing the last shot by staying in Aggressive when fighting a Battleship. You might as well, since there is no standoff advantage to be lost.

The economics are also interesting. Taking a Battleship down with FBLs has a direct cost of $640,000 in ammunition (1600 damage to down, vs $400/(dmg point), see here and here). Of course with 'frugal' Plasma Beams, each UFO splash costs nothing (once the aircraft and weapon are paid for). $640K is a very large amount to spend on splashing a UFO, but it's only the same amount as replacing a single lost Interceptor and much less than the cost of losing any advanced aircraft, or even losing use of a damaged advance aircraft for part of a month. How many Commanders would throw away an Interceptor in order to bring down a Battleship, without much of a second thought? If FBLs could avoid that, using them pays for itself in cash terms.

My thinking about this was prompted by discussion of XComUtil Craft Armaments economics. With 'new laser weapons', producing Plasma Beams becomes extremely expensive, and FBLs might actually be a cheaper or easier alternative at earlier stages of the game. Which is all interesting, because it's good to create reasons to use something other than the old formula of Plasma Beams all round. Spike 17:00, 11 February 2010 (EST)

You're not taking into account the opportunity cost: The workshops which make the FBL ammo would have produced laser cannons or something profitable/useful instead if FBL weren't there. Or a commander could do with less engineers and thus expenses without FBLs. Also, wouldn't using Aggressive mode to avoid last-shot bug up the damage to XCom craft? Lastly, I think X-COM inventory management is a bit of a problem for FBLs, especially with the "unarmed craft doesn't rearm when ammo is transferred to base" issue in X-COM1. Cesium 01:00, 12 February 2010 (EST)

Ah, the opportunity costs! Good question. I'm very interested in those, but have still not really done a proper quantitative analysis across the board. With opportunity costs we need to be very careful to define the scenarios and what we are trying to measure. So to be clear, we're comparing FBL strategy vs Plasma Beam strategy against Battleships, and the argument is that, if there are any benefits from the FBL strategy in terms of reduced aircraft losses/outages, or avoiding overcapacity in the aircraft fleet (including hangars), then those benefits are outweighed by the opportunity costs of manufacturing the FBL ammo, vs alternative uses for the same manufacturing capacity. And we look at 2 cases - normal UFO, and XComUtil with the 'new laser weapons' option making Plasma Beams more expensive.

As a baseline first let's look in more detail at the direct cost situation. The total cost (including labour, materials and opportunity cost of Elerium & Alloys) for a Plasma Beam is about $320,250. For an FBL it's about $256,410. This gives a difference of $63,840. This is not even enough money to load the FBL with one Fusion Ball. So clearly we want to compare the cost of the ammo with the benefit of reduced aircraft damage and losses. As per above, downing a Battleship with FBL costs you $640K in direct ammo costs. Right there that's enough to build 2 Plasma Beams, which you can then run for free - a convincing argument. Let's factor in the opportunity cost. (I'm going to use my data for TFTD and hope it's the same for UFO-EU equivalents)

The base cost of Engineers/Technicians works out to $36/hr, all in. Profitability per hr for Laser/Gauss Cannon is $97, so the opportunity cost of not producing Laser/Gauss Cannon is $61 per Engineer-hr. The $640K of FBL ammo to down the Battleship (9.2 rounds average) takes 3710 Engineer-hrs to make, so that's an additional opportunity cost of $226,300 - a whacking total of $886K to bring down each Battleship, including direct costs and opportunity costs of the FBL ammo.

Let's take a look at the stronger case, when we are using 'new laser weapons'. The XCU Plasma Beam is more expensive in total manufacturing costs, at around $698,250. The XCU FBL is the same cost (the observation that sparked this discussion in the XComUtil page). So each FBL is $441840 cheaper than a PB. This means you can manufacture an FBL and more than 3 full reloads for the same price as a PB. So the opportunity cost argument doesn't cut in until you have killed about 3-4 Battleships. Or rather, until that point, it cuts the other way - you have the opportunity cost of manufacturing PBs. And the opportunity cost is less, because the most profitable manufactured item is no longer the Laser/Gauss Cannon at $97/hr but the FBL itself at $81.5/hr, so your opportunity cost of manufacture is down to $45.5 per Engineer-hr, only $168K of opportunity cost for enough FBL ammo to bring down a Battleship ($808K total). Now, when you factor in the opportunity costs of building the PB, at a massive 5000 hrs, that adds $227,500 to the bill for each Plasma Beam. Or to put it another way, in terms of Engineer hours, you can build an FBL and nearly 4 full reloads of ammo, for the same effort (and opportunity cost) as a PB.

Having looked at the debit (cost) side, we now need to look at the credit (benefit) side.

As noted above, a flight of 4 FBL-armed aircraft should be able to bring down a Battleship in 16gs (2 volleys each) while enduring only 1-2 shots total from the Battleship. With only moderate luck they should bring the Battleship down on the first volley (8 FBs vs an expected 9 FBs to splash the UFO). Conversely a flight of 4 PB-armed aircraft needs to get 2 volleys off each (12gs), after closing range (26gs), for a total of 38gs fire exposure to the Battleship, receiving around 2 hits. So actually, with a 4-aircraft flight, there is not much difference in the damage received, only about 1 hit on average. My initial calculations were only for 1 aircraft in the intercepting flight, which is not that realistic!

So what is the cost of a hit? A single Battleship hit will wipe out an Interceptor, and in fact in a sense you get off lightly, since the damage will 'overkill' the Interceptor. That's an immediate loss of $600K to replace the Interceptor, plus the weapons on board. For PBs this would be another $640K for a total $1.24M. For XCU PBs the total loss is $2M. For FBLs, ignoring the ammo since you are going to fire that anyway, the total loss is around $1.1M. Against advanced aircraft, the 148 strength UFO weapon will inflict an average of 111 damage, which means 111 hrs of downtime per shot. How much is that 4.5 days of downtime worth? Let's say you had a "pool" Interceptor that you could ferry in, and a spare hangar somewhere to hold this reserve Interceptor. 4.5/30 of a month's rental and hanger fees is around $100K, not much. But what if it's an advanced aircraft you need to replace it with? It's hard to figure a per-month cost for manufactured aircraft as it depends on their service life. But the more advanced the aircraft is, the more expensive it is to have 111 hrs downtime. As a worst case, let's take the full manufacturing cost as a monthly "rental". On this basis, downtime from a Battleship hit costs $250K for a Firestorm, $317K for a Lightning, $525K for an Avenger. But even these worst case costs for the 'extra' Battleship hit that is mitigated by the FBLs, are significantly lower than the direct and opportunity costs of the FBL ammo to kill the Battleship, at $886K.

In conclusion then, the FBL argument probably only holds if you are flying Interceptors against the Battleship. In that case, I believe the cost argument holds and you should use FBLs rather than PBs. As a short-medium term strategy (for 3-4 Battleship engagements), it also makes sense on economic grounds when using the XCU 'new laser weapons' option, due to PBs being much more expensive than FBLs, and because the FBL technology path is the "golden goose". Spike 20:32, 12 February 2010 (EST)

Thinking about it, by the time you can access the FBLs, your money and elerium problems really should be on the decline (starting with the Heavy Plasma overstock). Before long the costs of production and lost engineering time really is a non-issue. You mainly have to remember to keep building the ammo and that's that.

I might be mixing it up with the last shot missing problem. Nevertheless, isn't there a small amount of randomness to the missile's to-hit each time it is fired? If it's a guaranteed hit every time, then that does give it quite an edge.

As for the aircraft - losing aircraft is definitely an unwanted outcome, thus that is out of the question. However, regarding employing more ships to cover downtime of damaged aircraft, I didn't really mean to employ more aircraft than is reasonably necessary. Just to have enough, such as one interceptor, at reasonably spaced out bases. Each base's effective combat range should have enough of an overlap that their interceptors can jump in to fill in while the damaged battleship-destroyer is being fixed. Also, using damage-minimizing strategies (multi-ships and LOTS of FBLs), you shouldn't have to worry about taking on so much damage that you can't afford some rest between battleships.

One other thought: There's also the amount of UFOs each weapon can tackle in a single flight to consider. -NKF 02:02, 12 February 2010 (EST)