Combat Zone Approach Advice

[loandreu]

Hi all. With the new Power Play 2, I seem to have found new reasons to get involved in inter-power politics, AKA Power Combat Zones. Never done much of faction CZ work before, so I am not sure I am approaching it in an efficient way. I just picked a good enough ship (Python MK II), and decided to outfit almost exclusively with beam lasers, because it seems an OK approach with long-term battle engagements. Not a good fighter myself, more of a scavenger, but still I manage to clear some of the fighters. The advice I was seeking is, would you pick a different type of weaponry (ammunition vs energy here) for long-term CZ fights?

[Holeypaladin]

If power combat zones are anything like war combat zones, I wouldn't recommend beam lasers as your only weaponry. This is because the ships in war combat zones have incredibly tanky hulls, and beam lasers deal hardly any damage to hulls at all.

Ammunition-based weaponry tends to be much more effective against hull tanks, but you don't want to use up too much ammo too quickly. So multicannons are a better option than frags, as frags go through ammo way too fast. Plasmas are also great, but make your shots count, as they can run out of ammo if you miss too much. And the PmkII doesn't have the best convergence for fixed plasmas, so there's that to consider as well. I like to use fixed weapons, which is why I prefer the FDL and the Krait mk II.

[ждун]

yea I would probably not go with beams to be "efficient" there.

The question is how you define efficiency.
To be efficient in terms of farming merits in power combat zones may mean (1) you want to achieve a high kill rate in order to farm most possible merits per time unit. It could also mean (2) you want to pay as little mats for ammo synthetisation or avoid synthing ammo completely (i.e. ammoless build). Or to be efficient may mean to (3) find a good ballance between ammo synthetisation costs and kill rate.

Approach (2), avoiding any ammo synthetisation going with a laser only build. The advantage is you don't have to synthesize ammo and you can do it all day. But you cannot expect a really high kill rate. Meaning your progression in the pp2 grind will be rather slow.

Approach (1), don't care about mats cost. Focusing on high DPS and hence high kill rate. These builds however are usually ammo hungry and you must synthesize ammo frequently. That can cost you a lot of mats and require to farm raw material for the ammo between sessions. For that approach I can suggest this proved lightweight python2 frag build
https://edsy.org/s/vIdNqZ2
This build achieves 539 dps, which is probably one of the highest dps builds possible. This build works very well in power combat zones achieving very high kill rate. However you will also have to synthesize ammo for the frags every few minutes. You will have to visit material trader once per hour for downtrading raw mats and you will have to stock up on high grade raw mats about once per week considering you play every day.

Approach (3) finding a good ballance. Here are different options possible. For this I can recommend Multi-Cannons builds. Multicannons provide good dps, you must not reload them so often, and synthetisation is quite cheap as well. My favorite for this approach at the moment is an all gimballed MC corvette with rapid fire and thermal shock engineering.
i had introduced this build in this thread
https://steamcommunity.com/app/359320/discussions/0/6660355746101811567/
https://edsy.org/s/vbsiEjj
This is a quite fast killer. Not as fast as the frag python but it comes close. However it requires much less mats for ammo and you can do a lot more kills before having to visit the mats trader. I find the build a lot of fun in combat zones and its meets a good ballance between material costs and kill rate.

[loandreu]

Thanks, guys! I like the advice, and I will be checking the recommended builds O7

[Agony_Aunt]

Originally posted by Holeypaladin:

If power combat zones are anything like war combat zones,

I heard they are a bit easier. Less tanky enemies.

My advice to OP is to simply try it out and see if it works. What I do for CZs in general is park my FC nearby as a place to rearm and repair after doing a CZ and get back in quickly, so it doesn't matter too much about ammo as long as its enough to get through the CZ without needing to synthesize more ammo.

All laser is ok if you've got lots of firepower. My Corvette is all lasers, but its really overkill for shields and not great for hull, although does the job.

My other all laser ship is my FAS, which are all engineered short-range bursts with inertial impact. Its tricky to make it work though, you have to be right up to the enemy to hit them because of the huge jitter you get with them. Still, when it does land hits, its pretty impressive.

On the ammo side of things, i have a Krait with all double-shot frags, and while its great at deleting ships, it can run out of ammo before a CZ is over if i'm not being careful and making every salvo count.

My other ships with frags that are not engineered with double shot tend to do better in CZs.

Its a bit of a toss up. Frags are great for breaking down heavily engineered ships, but the ammo is a limitation. High capacity can help in this regard, but then you give up other possible options.

MCs are a decent choice if in larger slots. You don't want that hardness damage reduction penalty of smaller hardpoints vs bigger ships, especially in CZs. My all MC type 10 does well in CZs.

[loandreu]

Originally posted by Agony_Aunt:

Originally posted by Holeypaladin:

If power combat zones are anything like war combat zones,

I heard they are a bit easier. Less tanky enemies.

My advice to OP is to simply try it out and see if it works. What I do for CZs in general is park my FC nearby as a place to rearm and repair after doing a CZ and get back in quickly, so it doesn't matter too much about ammo as long as its enough to get through the CZ without needing to synthesize more ammo.

All laser is ok if you've got lots of firepower. My Corvette is all lasers, but its really overkill for shields and not great for hull, although does the job.

My other all laser ship is my FAS, which are all engineered short-range bursts with inertial impact. Its tricky to make it work though, you have to be right up to the enemy to hit them because of the huge jitter you get with them. Still, when it does land hits, its pretty impressive.

On the ammo side of things, i have a Krait with all double-shot frags, and while its great at deleting ships, it can run out of ammo before a CZ is over if i'm not being careful and making every salvo count.

My other ships with frags that are not engineered with double shot tend to do better in CZs.

Its a bit of a toss up. Frags are great for breaking down heavily engineered ships, but the ammo is a limitation. High capacity can help in this regard, but then you give up other possible options.

MCs are a decent choice if in larger slots. You don't want that hardness damage reduction penalty of smaller hardpoints vs bigger ships, especially in CZs. My all MC type 10 does well in CZs.

Thanks, this is good info as well. I never quite understood the MC damage reduction penalty thing. So MC's damage goes down depending on target size and weapon size?

[0Samuel]

Originally posted by loandreu:

Thanks, this is good info as well. I never quite understood the MC damage reduction penalty thing. So MC's damage goes down depending on target size and weapon size?

Not just MCs- the armor hardness versus armor piercing mechanic applies to the overwhelming majority of weapons that deal hull damage, only excluding weird things like overheating or corrosion or ramming.

...I'm actually not sure if it applies to ramming. I feel like the answer should be 'no,' but sometimes with this game....

Anyway, every ship has an armor hardness rating. Yes, this is shown in game- it shows up in the defence section of the "Ship Specs" bar in the outfitting menu, and you can also find it in the the statistics category of the ship tab of the right hand panel, under "Armor Rating," as opposed to "Integrity" or "Armor Health," respectively. It's not obvious, but it IS there. No, it does not show up in the shipyard- you have to look it up online if you want to know what it is before you buy the ship.

As an aside- This state of affairs is still miles better than the situation of supercruise handling which, despite making a fairly enormous impact on gameplay, is completely ignored by all in game documentation and which the community has had to painstakingly measure empirically.

Also, for consistency- the term "Armor Hardness" does not appear in game, but the game calls the actual health of the ship so many different things that we've all ended up using this term instead of the official one because "Armor Rating" could be too easily confused for that.

Generally, larger ships do have higher armor hardness; it's not a perfect correspondence, where some of the pricier hull tanking mediums also have high armor hardness, and some of the cheaper clearly civilian ships have lower hardness than they should for their size, but it is a good metric. EDSY has it in the table along with everything else.

Every time a weapon strikes the hull, this value is compared to that weapons armor piercing attribute. If the armor piercing exceeds the armor hardness, the damage goes through unimpeded, at least until resistances and such are taken into account. If the armor hardness is higher, though, the damage is multiplied by the quotient of the armor piercing over the armor hardness; the lower the piercing, the smaller the fraction of the damage that gets through. Note that this ONLY applies to hull damage; there's no penalty for using undersized weaponry against shields.

This is separate from resistances, and works multiplicatively with them, so if your armor piercing is bad and you are shooting the sort of high-end NPC that has stacked resistances, you'll be dealing a fraction of a fraction of your nominal damage.

As for the Armor Piercing, this can be found all over the outfitting menus on any of the screens that give you information about the weapon, very much including the ones for weapons you have not yet purchased, and can also be found in a "Show info" drop down (drop-up?) if you select the relevant weapon in the modules tab of the right hand panel.

Larger weapons tend to have higher armor piercing than smaller weapons, and for weapon types where armor piercing varies with size this correlation is a lot stronger than the variation between multicannons and frags, say. However, it does tend to be the case that weapons that deliver a lot of small munitions have lower armor piercing than ones that sporadically deliver large payloads; cannons are better than multicannons are better than frags, which tie with pulse and burst lasers and leave beam lasers scraping the bottom of the barrel.

There are several weapon types that do not vary by size, though; mines and missiles and flak all have a consistent armor piercing of 60, and plasma accelerators and railguns have a consistent armor piercing of 100. 60 is a little under a lot of ships, but not enough to eat into the damage by much, while 100 beats the armor hardness of everything. Then there's torpedoes, which have an armor piercing of 10,000, despite that being functionally the same as 100, because why not.

Anyhoo, this mechanic one of the reasons railguns and plasma accelerators tend to be perpetually popular- with most other weapon types you have to bring a larger ship to kill a larger ship, and that's just the way things are. Realistically multicannons are about 'par;' the largest multicannon that most ships can fit will be good enough for ships of their size. Frags or all-laser builds are for punching down, cannons and railguns are for punching up, and will struggle against ships that are somewhere in the other direction.

Plasma accelerators are for people who don't want to think about any of this and would rather have an "I win button," and that's fair enough, but the power draw and heating issues are what comes with that and that's fair too.

[ждун]

yes its all correct that you say about armor hardness. Therefore when you go with multicannons or frags, corrosive debuff is a must have. This reduces the armro hardness on the target by 20 effectively making medium ships to small ships and large ships to medium ships.

Then, from my own experience large ships are rare in power combat zones. The majority (definetely more than 50%) are small ships. vipers, cobras, vultures, dbx. Less often you see mediums such as pythons, kraits, FDLS. From time to time anacondas show up, but maybe 5% at most.

As for up to mediums you beat armor hardness of the vast majority of the ships with corrosive and a typical MC build with a mix of huge/large/medium MCs.

Weapons with high armor piercing such as plasmas, have other disadvantages by design which overweight their armor piercing advantage and in case of plasmas also their resistance bypass by big margin. The main disadvantage of plasma is not even the heat, projectile speed and power draw. This is something you can counter with skill and proper engineering. But their main problem is really low damage despite armor piercing and resistance bypass. The damage over time (DPS) of plasmas is a lough compared to almost any other weapon and you can't do much about it. It takes a geological age to kill something in power zones with PA's even if you land hits well and can handle the power consumption and heat generation. So I doubt that plasmas are realy popular in combat zones today. They were popular maybe for PVP but specific reasons. They are good shield burners (and thats only thing they are good at) and in pvp you are often facing shield tanks with hullarious resistances. That is the only application where plasma makes sense. If you want to be effective in power combat zones, I mean achive a high kill rate, you better don't go with plasmas.