Sniper rifle balance

[tadasga]

Sniper rifles (and HMG) have really big disadvantages compared to LMG:

1) higher base ini cost, means you can't use weapon attacks if you are at or below 6 ini, which is not an unusual situation (without getting penalty)
2) you get less attacks so less buffs/debuffs per attack
3) more attacks means more flexibility - you can choose an attack type or buff or smth if situation changes

So what are the upsides of those weapons? Do they do more damage per ini? Mb they have some synergy with some talents I am overlooking? Or is it for tactics 2x weapon cost shot/perma penalty?

[tadasga]

Or are they more for roleplaying having funsies one shotting enemies?

[Dr. Spendlove]

Higher init weapons typically deal more damage and have more penetration. Enemy armor subtracts a flat number from incoming damage. If your foe has lots of armor, your LMG attacks could do half as much damage as an HMG attack due to so much being subtracted via armor. High deflection armor has a similar story.

Also, Sniper rifles have very high accuracy. This means you can give a couple ranks of Sniper to a Combat Medic, use healing skills from position 4 and use your minimal Rifle skill from your two ranks of Sniper to deal reliable damage when your crew doesn't need healing.

Additionally there are cases where you're going to go into initiative penalty anyway, such as using Full Auto. In this case, I'd rather have additional damage and penetration if I'm going into an initiative penalty for next turn anyway.

[Dr. Spendlove]

Furthermore, Sniper rifles use Quickness to boost accuracy (1 standard die per 2 Quickness, rounded down) instead of Strength. Quickness adds to initiative (1 per 2 Quickness rounded down.) while Strength adds a little HP instead. For a back-row fighter, more initiative is often better than a little extra HP, especially because Quickness helps with dodging ranged attacks as well as melee (while Strength only helps versus melee.)

[tadasga]

I see. Thank you.

[tadasga]

Hmm I am looking at combat logs, damage reduction doesn't seem to be flat, but as a percentage of damage.

[tadasga]

Ok I really don't understand how do I need to read combat or how damage calculations are made

[tadasga]

Like how to understand this 178 dmg - 77% soak = 124

[tadasga]

Or even better two different damage rolls (49 and 63) same soak percentage and damage done 26 and 25

[Dr. Spendlove]

The display is wonky. It is a flat amount but it displays as how much the flat amount reduced as a percentage.

[tadasga]

I am not sure if it's true, because the soak percentage seems to be the same if same guy is attacking. Can't really argue, because I don't know how to read it.

[Fringehunter7719]

Here's a combat log I screenshotted last week:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1733035872

The numbers don't appear to match up with a flat damage reduction at all.

An example of an alternative possibility would be that it's treating both the weapon damage as what the wiki calls a "weighted dice" (which is displayed, a random value from half-max to max) and the soak as a weighted dice for percentage reduction:

Phys Dmg [25-44]=35 - Soak [36%]=25, would represent 29% mitigation, which falls in the 18-36% range

Phys Dmg [25-44]=32 - Soak [36%]=24, would represent 31% mitigation, which falls in the 18-36% range

Or a piercing example:
Phys Dmg [41-64]=56p - Soak [38%]=47, would represent 16% mitigation, which falls in the 0-19% range

I'm not fully convinced that's how it works either, as really bad rolls (less than 25% mitigation) don't seem to occur as often as would be expected.

One of the most obvious ways (and I don't have any screenshots of this) to observe that flat damage reduction does not seem to be occuring is to let an enemy with a pistol attack a friendly with the A5 heavy armor. That armor has 72 ballistic soak, so on a non piercing hit you should be looking at -36 to -72 reduced damage if it's flat, an A5 pistol (which is probably better than enemies have in early game) does 41-66 damage. This means that an A5 pistol vs. A5 heavy armor should have a 50% chance of doing 0 damage, and a preponderance of the remaining hits doing damage close to 0.

[tadasga]

So in combat log soak x% means x - upper limit of how much can be soaked and the actual soaked amount is random percentage below that? That might be a bug in displaying like wrong variable in print out screen.

It would make considerably more sense and more intuitive to display percentage of how much was soaked.

[Fringehunter7719]

Well, I'm not sure that's really right either. Certainly in game on the loadout screen armor is displayed as a %, not a flat value, e.g.:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1733083750
Here you can see the A4 Meshed Body Armor listed as 22-44% Ballistic soak and 19-38% Melee soak

And here is the Plated Combat Armor in play against level 1 pirates:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1733080890

Basic pistol clearly isn't hitting for 0 or near zero in any case, which doesn't fit flat damage reduction at all.

On the other hand the actual values seem pretty consistent, to a greater degree than expected. I can't quite figure out how that's coming to pass. It might be the compounding effect of two soak rolls (one from armor, one from fortitude), it might be that when the range is given as "22-44%" it really means that (i.e. 22 flat damage reduced, up to 44 percent reduced, rather than 22 percent reduced up to 44 percent reduced), which would be pretty weird.

[Dr. Spendlove]

Yeah, we ought to have this straightened out. The game mechanics other than in the combat log and a particular armor display have always been flat values. But that does make me wonder why we don't see less damage applied when someone is wearing heavy armor as stated above...

[Fringehunter7719]

Apologies for the self quote, but looking at this again:

Originally posted by Fringehunter7719:

On the other hand the actual values seem pretty consistent, to a greater degree than expected. I can't quite figure out how that's coming to pass. It might be the compounding effect of two soak rolls (one from armor, one from fortitude), it might be that when the range is given as "22-44%" it really means that (i.e. 22 flat damage reduced, up to 44 percent reduced, rather than 22 percent reduced up to 44 percent reduced), which would be pretty weird.

The first one is looking likely to me, since all my soldiers (that was a quickly created new game at level 1 with immediate upgrade to A4 weapons locker) were in the same armor, which was the A4 heavy armor in the pic above, with 34-68% ballistic soak, and yet each soldier had their own specific soak % in the log, that was above this figure, the same for all attacks, but different from one another.

That would fit with the soak % being soak % from armor and soak % from fortitude. Due to the central limit theorem this would mean we'd expect compressed values more towards the middle of the possible outcomes (although they still seem slightly upwardly biased in that small sample, so I'm still not sure).

The values of the pistol hits: [27-46] giving those 20 and 16 results just would not be possible if there was always a flat 34 minimum reduction as listed on the armor, so I think the second conjecture in my quote must also be wrong. No flat minimum looks possible to me at all at this point.