Careful Shooter vs Trigger-Happy testing

[HidesHisFace]

Yeah, this question again. Which is better?

I tried to figure this out, could not find any reliable data regarding the elements I wanted included, such as bionics and shooting specialist effects... So I decided to do some testing myself.

Some believe that careful shooter is basically a hindrance due to aim speed debuff, so I wanted to make sure.

Here are my findings, in case someone finds it interesting. No hard data, didn't do any hard testing and excel spreadsheets. I'm too lazy, and I was interested in something more than a dps test.

I did testing in batches, against lancers and centipedes, mostly lancers.

0 skill test; excellent assault rifle, range 30.
Careful shooter, as expected, wins pretty consistently.

This confirmed quite firmly that careful shooter is significantly better at lower skills - the only exception was a shotgun.

Now, people claimed that Trigger-Happy picks up at around 15 skill.
And this is where my findings got surprising.
15 skill test, excellent assault rifle, range 30
Against human-like opponents, careful shooter consistently wins against trigger happy
Against centipedes, better DPS from trigger-happy starts pulling through, due to to the fact that centipedes are easy to hit and negate the accuracy penalty.

When bumped to legendary quality - Careful Shooter was still winnin consistently.

All further tests were conducted with legendary quality weapons.

At skill level 20, legendary assault rifle, range 30
Careful Shooter just barely wins
Trigger happy starts gaining advantage at very short ranges only against human-sized opponents. Very consistently better than careful shooter against centipedes.

skill 20, Legendary Charge lance:
Careful shooter very consistently outperforms against human like opponents at longer ranges, difference close to nil at longer ranges.

Skill 20, legendary minigun:
Surprisingly very little difference against human-sized opponents, but trigger-happy gets to shoot very significantly faster

Skill 20, legendary sniper rifle:
Careful shooter massively outperforms trigger happy.

So, what happens when you factor in bionics?
Not much changes, honestly - the difference are still there, just very minimal at shorter tanges, but sniper still is better in hands of a Careful Shooter.

Situation changes when we factor in the shooting specialist WITH bionic or archotech eyes.
At this stage, differences in accuracy at shorter ranges are fairly insignificant, while the massive buff to shooting speed shows through, even with sniper rifles, sniper rifle becomes nearly as accurate. IF you have some even longer ranged, modded weapons, careful shooter might still be superior, however.

TL;DR:
Careful shooter is nowhere near as bad as I expected it to be, and it is definitely NOT a hindrance.
Hilariously, with most weapons, CF consistently outperforms TH until higher levels in shooting skill are achieved, combined with the highest quality weapons and, preferably bionics.

Careful shooter, from what I noticed, has a tendency to deliver very consistent salvos against human-sized opponents, while TH tends to do more "chip" damage.
As expected, sniper and long range weapons are significantly more consistent with CF.

Against large targets that negate penalties to shooting skill, Trigger Happy is consistently better.

Things even out with bionics in tow and highest quality gear, but CF remains much more consistent with longest range weapons. Shooting specialists, once fitted with best possible gear are better of with Trigger-Happy.

T-H gains advantage the longer the combat lasts and against groups, where stray shots may hit unintended target.

[Morvana]

I often saw people saying that trigger happy is way better at high level, but it's probably the type to optimise things to no end so they probably use THE weapon which make it shine like the sun compared to the other.

For the random pawn I am on the side of "it depends".

[HunterSilver]

The wiki has pretty extensive research on the two traits. You seem to be unhappy with their measure of dps, but it's just a % value of average damage based on distance and accuracy. You can combine the data on aim time and shooting accuracy to calculate out the expected use cases of any given weapon.

[MadArtillery]

Curious how these tests would actually transfer over to actual fights with multiple targets as missed shots can still hit enemies.

[Raymond]

Originally posted by Morvana:

I often saw people saying that trigger happy is way better at high level, but it's probably the type to optimise things to no end so they probably use THE weapon which make it shine like the sun compared to the other.

For the random pawn I am on the side of "it depends".

the meta have changed multiple time. Assault rifle used to be the sole meta weapon once upon a time, now it's not anymore. Last time someone did extensive test between trigger happy and careful shooter, it was also 4-5 years ago.

[Astasia]

Ya this is just basic math and limited visual testing isn't really necessary.

At 20 skill a normal colonist has 99% accuracy, a careful shooter has 99.43% accuracy, and a trigger happy colonist has 98.16% accuracy. At 30 tile range that's 73% chance to hit, 84% chance to hit, and 57% chance to hit respectively. With say a 2/2 weapon it's a 12.5% DPS loss for careful shooter (2.5 aim time, 2.0 cooldown) and a 25% DPS increase for trigger happy (1 aim time, 2 cooldown), 84*0.875=73.5 and 57*1.25=71.25. 20 skill without bionics is around the point where the DPS evens out for all three, after that diminishing returns kick in and careful shooter becomes a hard detriment and trigger happy starts to pull out ahead. Not all weapons have an equal aim time and cooldown though, like the sniper rifle has 210 aim time and 138 cooldown, which means a trigger happy pawn will out DPS a careful shooter at even lower skill than that.

The values at say 30 aiming which you can get from just 20 skill, archotech eyes and marksman command, are 99.650% for no trait, 99.725% for careful shooter, and 99.537% for trigger happy. At 30 tiles again this is 90%, 92%, and 87%, at 40 tiles it's 86%, 89% and 83%. I don't think I have to do the math here for you to realize how much of an impact the aim time difference is at this point with such a tiny difference in accuracy values. Without mods colonists can get up to around 50-60 aiming, so 30 is a pretty low bar. Shooting Specialist also makes a huge difference as you noticed, making careful shooter even worse.

But wait, there's more. Time spent aiming is time spent not being able to move, trigger happy colonists can much more easily kite enemies and stay safe in mobile engagements. Aim time also applies to more than just aiming a gun, the activation time of utility items like jump packs and the cast time of psycasts also use the aim time stat, making careful shooter significantly worse at those things and the trigger happy colonist significantly better. Trigger happy is not only the better stat at ranged DPS, but it's one of the best stats for combat focused melee colonists as well allowing them to have significantly higher mobility in combat using their jump packs (tough, jogger and trigger happy is probably the optimal melee pawn trait loadout (and no, nimble is not good)).

TLDR Careful Shooter is a negative trait and is to be avoided if you are min-maxing. It's questionably useful very early game, if you never have to be mobile in any of your early fighting, but loses all benefits by mid game and becomes a significant penalty later game, and is always just a terrible trait if you also plan to use psycasts or jump packs.

[HidesHisFace]

Originally posted by HunterSilver:

The wiki has pretty extensive research on the two traits. You seem to be unhappy with their measure of dps, but it's just a % value of average damage based on distance and accuracy. You can combine the data on aim time and shooting accuracy to calculate out the expected use cases of any given weapon.

Wiki testing didn't quite include multiple weapons. Besides, pure DPS as a measurement is not exactly that useful in the grand scheme of things, when enemies take damage to various body parts and instakill is a thing.

I figured that if instakill is a thing, consistency of the shots may be more important than pure DPS gain.
And seems I was right.

It is not like all your enemies are centipedes. Vast majority of threats that you face is something human-like.
With this in mind, the notion that Careful Shooter is basically a negative trait is demonstrably false - and both are far clores in effectiveness than I expected.

Yes, there is a point where Trigger-Happy overtakes Careful-Shooter, but it basically requires specialisation and full set of bionic eye replacement - it is more just the question of high skill - you need a fully decked character.
Otherwise, both skills are very much surprisingly similar in effectiveness.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Urist:

Besides, pure DPS as a measurement is not exactly that useful in the grand scheme of things, when enemies take damage to various body parts and instakill is a thing.

I figured that if instakill is a thing, consistency of the shots may be more important than pure DPS gain.

It's the opposite of what you figure though. Consistancy of shots or higher accuracy does not mean more insta kills. Accuracy does not correlate to better body part targeting. The DPS difference between the two is related to number of shots fired over a given period of time and how many of them hit. Trigger happy shoots more shots in the same period of time and of those shots fired more hit than careful shooter is able to put out and hit with. Objectively trigger happy becomes the better trait as soon as chance to hit multiplied by aim time (firing cycle) becomes higher than careful shooters chance to hit multiplied by aim time. There are no hidden factors involved.

[HunterSilver]

Originally posted by Urist:

Besides, pure DPS as a measurement is not exactly that useful in the grand scheme of things, when enemies take damage to various body parts and instakill is a thing.

This is explicitly not what data is recorded on the wiki. Again, the dps measurements are of your accuracy over distance and changes in fire rate based on cooldown and windup time of the weapon. The wiki measures this for every single weapon and gives you very simple to use readouts for that data.

Nothing about this is an absolute change in damage per shot, it's a measurement of your average damage output based on how much you're firing and how much you're missing based on your distance from your target.

I can understand the desire to empirically test information, but none of this is meaningful in any way and ignores the pertinent and useful data that is already available.

[Astasia]

Just to add further and expand on what MadArtillery said, combat in the game is not a series of controlled duels. Your colonists are generally greatly outnumbered and firing into crowds, "misses" often still hit something. This is why people generally suggest low accuracy high RPM weapons for low skill colonists, it doesn't matter too much if they are hitting their target the idea is to get a lot of bullets moving in the direction of the enemy because that is still useful. Even at aim levels where trigger happy seems like a "DPS on target loss" the extra bullets might still be hitting something and contributing more to the battle.

[HidesHisFace]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Just to add further and expand on what MadArtillery said, combat in the game is not a series of controlled duels. Your colonists are generally greatly outnumbered and firing into crowds, "misses" often still hit something. This is why people generally suggest low accuracy high RPM weapons for low skill colonists, it doesn't matter too much if they are hitting their target the idea is to get a lot of bullets moving in the direction of the enemy because that is still useful. Even at aim levels where trigger happy seems like a "DPS on target loss" the extra bullets might still be hitting something and contributing more to the battle.

This is something I need to test still - but this is also something I mentioned when discussing my limited minigun testing - that even though the difference against single target was fairly minor, increased effective rate of fire will matter against hordes, AND against the enemies that are more resistant to damage, like heavily armoured ones, or those that have redundant body parts, like Centipedes - this is where DPS comes into play.

That being said - after reading all the opinions from years before, I was expecting a far bigger difference between the two.

There is are also couple of aspects I would need to test, but I need to figure out a reliable method tha would eliminate RNG - fights with hordes and dispersed crowds.

I suspect that Trigger-Happy will massively pull through in crowds, and that ability to switch targets more quickly will help with dispersed targets.

This is explicitly not what data is recorded on the wiki. Again, the dps measurements are of your accuracy over distance and changes in fire rate based on cooldown and windup time of the weapon. The wiki measures this for every single weapon and gives you very simple to use readouts for that data.

The point is - DPS matters if the enemy is a healthbar. And rimworld doesn't quite work like that - you can down the enemy through damage to multiple body parts, damage to the brain, neck, heard, liver - these can cause instakill, which negates DPS.
In this scenario - a weapon with low damage per shot but high dps will take longer to kill simply if the high damage but low dps weapon gets lucky.
And Careful Shooter makes these types of weapons more consistent.
Yes, Trigger-Happy will get vastly more shots over time, but also each individual shot is affected by RNG more.

In my testing - especially with legendary charge lances, before application of bionics and shooting specialist, the higher DPS of Trigger Happy didn't matter when Careful Shooters where consistently killing the targets with single shots.

Fact of a matter is - Trigger-Happy offers better DPS, this is not what I'm disputing. I'm also not trying to convince anyone it is not a better over long period of time - it objectively is, unless you are running a body purist colony - it becomes a bit more nuanced in this case.
My question was simple - how much and when Trigger Happy becomes significantly better - and the surprising result is - in short firefights, Trigger Happy is not really better until your pawns are really fully decked.
Trigger Happy gains the edge against hordes and in prolonged firefights where volume of fire has a chance to shine.

[Morvana]

I guess the key aspect is how long you play with your colony. I tend to finish my games before my pawn accuracy get that high.

Also Urist has a point for the "DPS isn't all" part. Depending of the weapon, careful shooter can give you one or two additional hit on the first salvo which can make the difference to put down the target, allowing you to switch target immediatly when with Tigger-Happy you will have to make one full voley again on the same target, "wasting" DPS. How often it happens seems hard to evaluate.

But of course if a pawn get its accuracy so ridiculously high as described by Astasia there is a point were the positive impact of careful shooter is nothing compared to the drawback.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Morvana:

I guess the key aspect is how long you play with your colony. I tend to finish my games before my pawn accuracy get that high.

Also Urist has a point for the "DPS isn't all" part. Depending of the weapon, careful shooter can give you one or two additional hit on the first salvo which can make the difference to put down the target, allowing you to switch target immediatly when with Tigger-Happy you will have to make one full voley again on the same target, "wasting" DPS. How often it happens seems hard to evaluate.

But of course if a pawn get its accuracy so ridiculously high as described by Astasia there is a point were the positive impact of careful shooter is nothing compared to the drawback.

Misses aren't "wasted DPS" since they are already factored into the DPS numbers. You can say sometimes an alpha shot might miss with a trigger happy, but the difference in accuracy generally means it's more likely to hit than miss, and the trigger happy pawn can line up and fire their second shot long before the careful shooter. Careful shooters can also miss, it's not like they have 100% accuracy. The more colonists you have in your line the more closely to the average DPS numbers your output will be. It's not like if you have 10 careful shooters firing at max range with a sniper you can count on all 10 to hit every time, nor can you assume with trigger happy all 10 will miss. This idea of one lucky instakill with the alpha shot being an advantage only applies in, like I said before, controlled duels. Even then you can say at max sniper range with a single colonist a careful shooter has 10% more chance to hit and that might be a shot that instakills, but more likely it will not instakill and it will require two shots, it's it's more likely the trigger happy pawn will hit both shots and kill the pawn faster than the careful shooter. At moderate skill 30% of the time the trigger happy pawn might miss and the careful shooter hits, and 10% of those times the shot might hit a vital organ and kill the enemy with the first shot. Is that 3% situation really a bonus for careful shooter?

The main weapon where this type of thing might be a factor is the sniper rifle, and I don't think it's really appreciated how large of a difference in firing speeds this is. A sniper rifle has an aim time of 210 ticks and a cooldown of 138 ticks, a total of 348 ticks between shots. A careful shooter is 262.5 aim time and 138 cooldown, a total of 400.5 ticks between shots. Trigger happy has an aim time of 105 tick and a cooldown of 138 ticks, a total of 243 ticks between shots. A trigger happy colonist has finished firing their first round of shots and started aiming their second shot before the careful shooter has finished aiming their first shot. By the time a careful shooter has finished firing their second shot, the trigger happy colonist is aiming their 4th. That's why the small difference in hit chance doesn't make up the difference. And again, the sniper rifle is also the most likely weapon you will be wanting to kite with, and the faster aim time means they can back up and fire their second shot from a safe distance much more quickly.

And to cycle back to something said previously. Enemies do have "hit point bars" and DPS does matter when taking them down. There are actually two hit point bars, one is literally a total hit points where if a pawn takes more than like 200 damage total they die instantly regardless of their injuries (this also applies to colonists). The second, is pain. After something like 60 damage an average pawn will go down. Weapons like chain shotguns and charge rifles can hit this in one burst at high qualities. Weapons like snipers and charge lances become pretty bad in sustained combat because of this (beyond their poor DPS values), since they more likely need two rounds of fire to down an enemy. Snipers have a range advantage which means they are useful for other things, charge lances really don't, they are generally not great weapons to use.

[HidesHisFace]

Originally posted by Astasia:

And to cycle back to something said previously. Enemies do have "hit point bars" and DPS does matter when taking them down. There are actually two hit point bars, one is literally a total hit points where if a pawn takes more than like 200 damage total they die instantly regardless of their injuries (this also applies to colonists). The second, is pain. After something like 60 damage an average pawn will go down. Weapons like chain shotguns and charge rifles can hit this in one burst at high qualities. Weapons like snipers and charge lances become pretty bad in sustained combat because of this (beyond their poor DPS values), since they more likely need two rounds of fire to down an enemy. Snipers have a range advantage which means they are useful for other things, charge lances really don't, they are generally not great weapons to use.

You are correct here.
But, how much of a health bar you have to take down is not exactly consistent, depending on enemy - with mechanoids alone this is pretty massively varied. Smaller mechs tend to go down to vital organ shots, but centipedes and boss mechs have a ton of redundancies built in and can take the beating. And don't get me started on pawns, where we have inconsistent armour values, xenotypes and traits.
Bottom line, combat is more than just a DPS test.

Either way, Careful Shooter pulls higher dps on shooting skills up to ~15 on higher weapon ranges. The closer it gets, obviously Trigger-Happy will start getting the edge.
On skill level of 20, the difference is negligible beyond sniper weapons - which is the thing that surprised me, as I was expecting Trigger Happy to cleanly wipe the floor with Careful Shooter at this stage.

Now, that does not factor in various peculiarities of combat, especially crowds and stray shots hitting, and new target acquisition - in which case I'm fairly certain Trigger-Happy is a definitive way to go.

But for something people tend to call a "terrible trait", Careful Shooter isn't half bad.

[Astasia]

The terribleness is the things it does to non-DPS mechanics. If it was just an accuracy/DPS difference it would be "fine" for early-mid game and a bearable penalty late game, and I probably wouldn't call it a negative trait. In the grand scheme of things and with RNG involved the DPS difference isn't going to be all that noticeable most of the time. The problem is that aim time locks a colonist in place for the duration, and also affects non-gunplay stuff like jump packs and psycasts. This is what makes the trait just detrimental. Mobility in combat is often very important, shooting and then moving back and shooting again is an extremely effective strategy for a lot of engagements, and careful shooter directly penalizes that. The extra aim time can make kiting certain enemies impossible with certain weapons, while trigger happy makes it much easier. That on top of not providing any long term clear advantage as compensation is what makes it a terrible trait. I would rather have slowpoke on my colonist than careful shooter, that is the kind of detriment careful shooter has in combat mobility.

[HidesHisFace]

Originally posted by Astasia:

The terribleness is the things it does to non-DPS mechanics. If it was just an accuracy/DPS difference it would be "fine" for early-mid game and a bearable penalty late game, and I probably wouldn't call it a negative trait. In the grand scheme of things and with RNG involved the DPS difference isn't going to be all that noticeable most of the time. The problem is that aim time locks a colonist in place for the duration, and also affects non-gunplay stuff like jump packs and psycasts. This is what makes the trait just detrimental. Mobility in combat is often very important, shooting and then moving back and shooting again is an extremely effective strategy for a lot of engagements, and careful shooter directly penalizes that. The extra aim time can make kiting certain enemies impossible with certain weapons, while trigger happy makes it much easier. That on top of not providing any long term clear advantage as compensation is what makes it a terrible trait. I would rather have slowpoke on my colonist than careful shooter, that is the kind of detriment careful shooter has in combat mobility.

Aye, that is something I did not think about, as I'm typically using static defences myself, and overwhelming firepower. And I generally gravitate towards weapons with fairly low aim times to start with, where that careful shooter penalties do not hinder you as much.

Still though, for basic scenario of slugging it out of cover, your basic grunt work, it gets the job done well enough until my colony is basically full of people decked fully with bionics of all sorts, which is where trigger happy blows it right out of the water.

The thing is - what harms Careful Shooter in a long run is a simple fact of diminishing returns of accuracy skill - because everage combat range is rarely bigger than ~30. And you have far more way to improve accuracy than aim time, at least before we factor mods in.
But even with mods, aim time reduction will be always useful, while accuracy increase at one point won't matter any longer.