Yes, it's good to mix weapons; no disruptors aren't very good

[Kalemenos]

We players love having strong opinions about weapons. I ran some numbers and want to share the results, but I hope to avoid starting the Next Galactic War. Summary: yes, mixing weapons is better than uni-weapons, and disruptors just don’t cut it.

I know, I know, there are some real “disrupter” fans out there. I’ve always doubted them, as they have short range and do low damage. So I did a numbers study of weapons to see, really, how they perform. People have many wordy opinions, but, I thought, let’s look at the actual NUMBERS.

So I made a nice Excel table, and I thought other players out there might enjoy seeing the results. Every row was 0.10 “time.” This is important, because “daily average” is a worthless statistic: the weapon does not do daily damage, but it does all its damage when it fires, and then does nothing during cooldown. So down the rows, I entered the damage when it actually fires, in order, shields, then armor, then hull (disruptors of course go right to hull). If anyone wants to see and even critique my Excel file, I’d love to share it, only I don’t know how in this forum.

The scenario: Imagine your dad gives you a junk car out on some acres, and he also gives you an RPG to blow the thing to smithereens. But instead of a car, we have a battleship is just sitting there, and one or more weapons get to blast it apart to see how long it takes to kill it. This battleship has 3 large neutronium armors, and 3 L hypershields, so it can endure this much damage:

This battleship:
Shields, 3960
Armor, 5220
Hull, 3000

Assumptions:
Every shot hits, the attacking ship is immortal, the damage is the average damage per hit as reported on the wiki, and I ignore modifiers such as regeneration, bonuses (relics, leaders, etc.), accuracy, tracking, evasion, disparity, ship rank. Such things are where the player’s cleverness comes in to get the advantage. Here, I’m just studying a baseline.

Weapons (I use average damage per hit, not per day, as reported on the wiki):
L Stormfire Autocannon III (av dmg. 120, coold. 1.7, 150% vs shield, 25% armor, 125% hull)
L Plasma III (av dmg. 231, coold. 6.4, 25% vs shield, 200% armor, 150% hull)
M Disruptor III (av dmg. 24.5 (yawn), coold. 3.4, attacks straight to hull at 100%)

First test: ONE WEAPON just sits there and fires at it. How long does it last?
Autocannon: 365.50 (i.e., battleship loses all shield then armor then hull in this many days)
Plasma: 569.60
Disruptor: 414.80
Conclusion: Sorry, disruptor lovers, the Autocannon wins. (The low cooldown helps.)

Second test: TWO WEAPONS. Battleship lasts this many days:
2 Autocannons: 181.90
2 Plasmas: 288.00
1 Autocannon + 1 Plasma: 115.60
Conclusion: Sorry uni-weapon lovers, mixing weapons is actually really good. Where one is weak the other is strong. Teamwork!

Third Test: FOUR WEAPONS. Battleship lasts:
2 Autocannons + 2 Plasmas: 56.20
1 Autocannon + 1 Plasma + 2 Disruptors: 102.00
Conclusion: Sorry again, disruptor lovers, it would have been more effective to not use disruptors.

I tried games with only disruptor fleets to see how it would go. I found them terribly weak, quickly demolished or pushed into retreat. I guess it was because of the low range of disruptors.

So lately I’ve been experimenting, applying all of this:
1. mix weapons, do so weighed vs. my enemy’s strengths (e.g., plasma vs armor),
2. add a little spice of disruptors. I do this by organizing one armada with several (for me) conventional fleets, but adding an extra fleet or two of ONLY disruptors. (Of course, disruptors are M slot, so eventually you get stuck with a L, so I’ll fill it with a Cloud Lightening or something just to keep the anti-hull theme going.)

Great results. I can’t figure out why yet, but I seem to get MORE out of my disruptors in this setup than whole armadas of only disruptor fleets, few casualties and no retreats. I think it is because of the mix: It takes some time for the conventional weapons to wear through the armor and shields, but when the conventional weapons finally get to the hull, it rips through them really fast. Therefore when disruptors can get to work on the hulls early in the battle, it speeds up the conventional weapon’s hull demolition. And since there are other fleets, strike craft, and so on occupying the enemy, it helps the disruptor fleets get to work without getting obliterated or forced into retreat.

I will continue to experiment, and I love learning discoveries from others on these boards.

[Speed Malus]

Disruptors are nice.

(The sheer extent of my knowledge)

[Elitewrecker PT]

Copy it to a google sheets or something?

[Kufesska]

1)autocannons and plasmas are good only on paper
2)you can't ignore autocannons' and plasmas' accuracy, and say they are better
3)please never use cloud lightning, disruptors are used only for s/m slots on destroyers/cruisers(corvetts too but they are worst ship type, only for early game), no L-slots involved
4)you can't compare L-slot weapon with M-slot, you have to pick 2 M-slot, or 4 S-slot, basic stellaris weapons slots math
5)never heard of those "uni-weapon lovers", of cource if you use weapons with bonus damage to shield and penalty to armor, you better use at least one of the opposite(except when enemy goes full armor or full shields)
"uni-weapon" is good for penetrating/non-penetrating weapons: you either focus on damaging hull with ALL your weapons, for fastest destroying of it
or go full mix of anti-armor + anti-shield weapons
go full-disruptors or full missiles/strike craft, those that ignore only shield, so it won't be like half weapons already destroying hull, while other half trying to cut through shield for no reason, so your fleets works for half of its potential
6)disruptors are not best for destroying battleships, they are excellent at destroying all previous ships, but at the point when enemy researched and started mass-producing battleships you better have torpedos or artillery battleships
7)biggest powers of disruptors:
a)attacking hull reduces enemy ship's attack speed, starting to reduce it's dps from the
first shot
b)and you don't have to go through all hull points to get rid of the ship - after 50%
enemy ship will try to disengage, reducing total power of the fleet you are fighting with

it has downside though - often enemy lose only small amount of the ships, while other
succesfully disengage, and return some months later

i hope that i wrote my points understandable enough

[Mattrex]

Originally posted by Kalemenos:

Assumptions:
Every shot hits, the attacking ship is immortal,

Without discounting the data, this is an important flaw in your argument against disruptors.

The major benefit of penetrating weapons like disruptors (aside from the fact that they ignore a large part of your opponent's defenses) is that a ship becomes weaker (loses fire rate) the more hull damage it takes. This means that, for penetrating weapons, from your very first shot you are not only putting him closer to death but diminishing his ability to do the same to you.

This is obviously of no concern to you if your opponent has no ability to fight back in the first place. But in a real war situation, where your opponent is shooting back, you gain considerable advantage by reducing his fighting power from the very beginning of the fight, while he has to eat through your shields and armor before he can begin doing the same to you.

Disruptors have weaknesses, but a poor MTTK in a "spherical cow in a vacuum" test isn't one of them.

[Kufesska]

disruptors are not "perfect weapons" though
for example they are worse against starbases
or if you have 2 fleets that have same speed, but one fleet is full disruptors and another is full missiles and artillery combat computers, most likely missile fleet will humiliate disruptors fleet

[Xaphnir]

Why are you directly comparing L-slot and M-slot weapons? There's an M-slot version of the autocannon, use that one. Of course the L-slot weapons are going to do more damage (especially if you don't take tracking and accuracy into account). If you take into consideration that you can generally get about twice as many M slots as L-slots, then disruptor MTTK blows autocannon MTTK away. Or, if we use an M-slot stormfire autocannon, its MTTK against this target is 667 days. So, regardless of how you do it, disruptors clearly are superior in terms of MTTK for a single weapon against such a target in the test parameters you've set out if you give a fair comparison. If you mix weapons, it's a little closer: 1 M-slot plasma+1 M-slot autocannon destroys in an average of ~284 days, while for 2 M-slot disruptors it's 208 days. So again, disruptors win in terms of raw MTTK. And this is before even considering the superior accuracy and tracking of disruptors.

The other thing is all you're doing here is spreadsheeting it out. Did you actually test these in game at all? Because when people talk about how effective weapons are in game, they're not just looking at raw DPS on a spreadsheet. They're talking about a number of factors and their actual performance in game. The fact that disruptors damage hull first, reducing the damage output of enemy ships, is not something you can ignore. Their 100% tracking is not something you can ignore. This would be like if I tried to say Warcraft Logs' rankings were inaccurate because Simcraft's rankings are different from it. Except what you're doing isn't even that, it's more "LFR raider made some spreadsheets and said that the rankings are different based on that."

[RCMidas]

At a certain point, however, you have to pick autocannons as your primary weapon simply so that whenever some other empire irritates you, you can say "Why I auto..." before you declare war.

[Kalemenos]

Great feedback, thanks! Two of you good writers asked about comparing L and M slots: yes, I'm aware of that. But if one wanted to deploy said weapons on a mid or late game (presupposed as we're dealing with III level weapons and a battleship), this is what in reality one would get, since there is no L disruptor.

Originally posted by Kufesska:

i hope that i wrote my points understandable enough

Yes, I think you did, thanks, but...

Originally posted by Kufesska:

1)autocannons and plasmas are good only on paper

What do you mean by that? If it means, "as opposed to in game," I seem to shred and fry things all the time with these, so you seem to perceive something's wrong with them, and I'm curious what that might be.

Originally posted by Mattrex:

...a ship becomes weaker (loses fire rate) the more hull damage it takes.

Good point, which is also Kufessa's #7.a. While the focus of my little study was straight-out damage output, this and countless other factors modify the results. This little study was to examine the baseline before all the other modifiers kick in. I think it would be impossible to study all the possibilities of all the modifiers in a battle, which addresses the legitimate objection you raise in your second paragraph. I'm sorry, but what does MTTK mean?

Originally posted by Kufesska:

6)disruptors are not best for destroying battleships, they are excellent at destroying all previous ships, but at the point when enemy researched and started mass-producing battleships you better have torpedos or artillery battleships

Certainly. I chose the battleship since it has lots of defense components, allowing the shooting to go on for a longer time to make the results clearer. I really like torps vs. big things.

[MarkDey]

I agree that assuming every shot hits skews the results. You could reduce the damage by an accuracy percentage to try and account for it.

[Xaphnir]

Originally posted by Kalemenos:

I'm sorry, but what does MTTK mean?

Mean time to kill, i.e. the average amount of time it takes to destroy the target.

Originally posted by Kalemenos:

Great feedback, thanks! Two of you good writers asked about comparing L and M slots: yes, I'm aware of that. But if one wanted to deploy said weapons on a mid or late game (presupposed as we're dealing with III level weapons and a battleship), this is what in reality one would get, since there is no L disruptor.

I mean, yeah, late game you might be using L-slot weapons on battleships, but you still need to get M-slots (or S-slots if using corvettes) if you're gonna use disruptors. And you can get twice as many M slots as L slots for the same naval capacity.

Originally posted by Kalemenos:

Good point, which is also Kufessa's #7.a. While the focus of my little study was straight-out damage output, this and countless other factors modify the results. This little study was to examine the baseline before all the other modifiers kick in. I think it would be impossible to study all the possibilities of all the modifiers in a battle, which addresses the legitimate objection you raise in your second paragraph.

At the very least, you could have taken accuracy into account. Tracking would be easy to take into account, too, but given the target you set up here, tracking is irrelevant because they all have tracking greater than a base T5 component battleship's evasion. But if you were to make the target a corvette, something the AI tends to spam a lot of in the late game, their high evasion would swing the results hard in the disruptors' favor due to their 100% tracking.

[Mattrex]

Originally posted by Kalemenos:

I'm sorry, but what does MTTK mean?

Mean Time To Kill, or how long it takes on average for a weapon to destroy its target. Roughly what you were evaluating in your original tests.

[yuzhonglu]

Against AI for your first couple of wars go full laser with some point defense. It's the cheapest option techwise and works great against the frigates and missiles and low shield fleets the AI brings.

[Kalemenos]

Originally posted by yuzhonglu:

Against AI for your first couple of wars go full laser with some point defense. It's the cheapest option techwise and works great against the frigates and missiles and low shield fleets the AI brings.

You are correct. I usually design two corvettes right out of the gate, one with lasers, the other with missiles and point defense. Then make 15 lasers + 5 missile/PD boats. The PD kills the AI missiles, but the AI seems to not use point defense at that point in the game.

[Kalemenos]

Originally posted by Xaphnir:

At the very least, you could have taken accuracy into account.

True. It took some time to compile my study, and I debated whether to include that one. But I was looking for raw damage. There are so many possible variables - that's where the player's strategy comes in - I was thinking whether to include some or none. But you're probably right, accuracy is a "given" with each weapon and not just a player choice or unique result of some game event or leader. If I get time I might revisit it and put in the percentages.

[Ryika]

Originally posted by Kalemenos:

True. It took some time to compile my study, and I debated whether to include that one. But I was looking for raw damage.

That's like saying to determine who is the best MMA fighter, I compared overall muscle mass.

Sorry, but that's just a pretty useless statistic, especially when you then use it to make claims about the general usefulness of weapons.