When huge missiles first came out, people claimed that they were OP and the new meta and the Basking shark was too powerful (my noncombat command ship beat it with scratched paint.) If fire and flamethrowers get added, I'm sure people will say it's OP and the new meta. And the same for anything else that gets added. APS is just too versatile. Others may be better in certain situations, but APS is good in any situation. If these had been HA frontsiders, that's the only situation I would expect the plasma to win. A little personal note. If you are going to be using alloy in your hull armour, I like to have a skin of alloy for the lower radar/sonar signature.
Woh, that Firepower Difference though. 225 vs 709. All of this being said, plasma is designed as a firm counter to sloped heavy armor meta, and your APS gun is hitting one of its best target profiles against standard metal/alloy beams. Also, and I don't claim to be a plsma expert here: your are sending those plasma shots down at 2400 m/s? But only using 15 charges per shot. That's a TON of wasted energy, since the speed wont really matter, it doesn't do impact damage. You could cut that to 800-1000, save a TON of energy, and find a better sweet spot of the charges per shot. I almost imagine your getting close to heat throttling your ROF unless your spending another ton of energy on active cooling?
I'm actually pretty amazed by how good your realistic building is after such a short time! You've clearly understood the overall concepts (especially the parts that actually translate to FtD) even if the level of detail isn't crazy, and I actually really like your version of semi-realistic. Also, in my experience 90% of the time that a turret first gets exposed on a surface ship it's because of CRAM or something similar blowing the deck armor off by hitting the well armored turret cap, so in my opinion the wide barbettes are actually a very good idea.
1:02 - Love using plasma in adventure mode but it's so ludicrously expensive. Between it and particle cannons I always wonder why my ships are so expensive. 😂
plasma for me seems really bad just do to it's cost and lack of versatility like if the target isn't dense it doesn't do very well where aps doesn't have such weaknesses (edit) well aps does which is lots of heavy armor slopes but even then it can still do significant damage
Honestly, I personally NEVER use plasma that has more than 10 charges per shot. I zse rapid fire ~5 charge plasma because it just cores out its target mich like the APS, while also leaving a bigger hole where it's traveling to battle some of the inaccuracy through stability and heat buildup. And I feel like that's way better than just sending 100 charges at once or so.
Sorry it's taken me a few days to get back to this. I touched on the concept in the livestream, but Plasma has a real issue when it comes to high damage per shot setups. To explain why we'll look at the most basic scenario, a big pile of vertical, (or horizontal), beams several layers deep. The first block you hit takes the full damage. Perfect It now propagates in 6 directions from this initial block. This means that 5 real blocks and 1 air block get damage transferred to them, but air counts as 2 blocks with plasma propagation rules. So the damage gets split 7 ways, and 2 of those 7 ways are allocated to empty air which eats the damage, that damage is gone, lost. 2/7ths is 28.57%. You've lost over a quarter of your damage just at the first propagation. of the 5 blocks that get damage transferred to them, 4 are in the outer layer, and 1 is in the second layer. It's even worse at the next one as all the blocks in the first layer now have air on 2 sides of them, so they lose 4/9ths of the damage transferred to them. And the one block in the second layer has the same math outlined for the first propagation event in layer 1. I won't go through the math in detail for the final loss amount as it's a bit hard to visualise without a diagram but in the end just 42% of the initial damage remains after the propagation. The next layer is even worse as you have 4 blocks in layer 2 and 8 blocks in layer 1 losing 4/9ths and 1 block in layer 3 losing 2/7ths in their propagation. Whilst you can math this out for a super exact number you can use a multiplier of 0.6 to get a very close approximation of the amount of remaining damage transferred, 42%*0.6 = 25.2%. So your now down to a quarter of your starting damage, and it's spread not quite evenly amongst over 20 blocks at this point. Your looking at a 100k+ damage reaching the target just to pop a 4m metal beam at this point, and the amount you'll need grows exponentially from there. Thus plasma is most efficient when you it the target with just enough damage to pop a single block.Anymore and an enormous percentage gets wasted, and if you go beyond one propagation that amount starts to exceed half your initial damage which makes it become really inefficient.
would be interesting to see how much worse the plasma would do if the AI was on broadside 2.0 with the ability to turn the ship to present fresh armor... because I think it will lose pretty hard vs armor piercing
I feel like Plasma needs a cost reduction. It's okay for a specialized weapon to be cheap or for a very versatile weapon to be expensive but a specialized weapon that is also expensive? No sense in using it unless you are building to counter a very specific craft. Why would I want to build something that is only good against wedge spam front siders?
Hey man, don't know who to ask so I come to you for answear. Why the hell in campaign its always 1v1 battles. My fleet is designed to work together yet DWG sends single ship and its always 1v1!? The hell is wrong with the campaign!? (Not to mention that there is little to no explanation/tutorial for campaign mechanics for newbie like me)
You can adjust the block count of battles so that multiple ships can be on play at once. It's also only in the early game that the AI does that, once they get more resources they do send larger forces at you.
isn't the "bow" the front? The stern is the back if i remember correctly. :)
Yup. I consistently got that wrong. XD
When huge missiles first came out, people claimed that they were OP and the new meta and the Basking shark was too powerful (my noncombat command ship beat it with scratched paint.)
If fire and flamethrowers get added, I'm sure people will say it's OP and the new meta. And the same for anything else that gets added.
APS is just too versatile. Others may be better in certain situations, but APS is good in any situation.
If these had been HA frontsiders, that's the only situation I would expect the plasma to win.
A little personal note. If you are going to be using alloy in your hull armour, I like to have a skin of alloy for the lower radar/sonar signature.
huge missiles were op thats why they nerfed them.
Bro said: "not actually tremendously thicc armor..." this armor scheme is as thicc as my whole ship bro ! XD
Woh, that Firepower Difference though. 225 vs 709.
All of this being said, plasma is designed as a firm counter to sloped heavy armor meta, and your APS gun is hitting one of its best target profiles against standard metal/alloy beams.
Also, and I don't claim to be a plsma expert here: your are sending those plasma shots down at 2400 m/s? But only using 15 charges per shot. That's a TON of wasted energy, since the speed wont really matter, it doesn't do impact damage. You could cut that to 800-1000, save a TON of energy, and find a better sweet spot of the charges per shot. I almost imagine your getting close to heat throttling your ROF unless your spending another ton of energy on active cooling?
Excellent points! I was suspecting that my plasma was sub-optimal. Nice to have confirmation! XD
I'm actually pretty amazed by how good your realistic building is after such a short time! You've clearly understood the overall concepts (especially the parts that actually translate to FtD) even if the level of detail isn't crazy, and I actually really like your version of semi-realistic. Also, in my experience 90% of the time that a turret first gets exposed on a surface ship it's because of CRAM or something similar blowing the deck armor off by hitting the well armored turret cap, so in my opinion the wide barbettes are actually a very good idea.
Before watching, will predict aps will win at same cost
Unless both ships are heavy armour bricks, but almost no one builds ships like that.
@@NearQuasar mine get pretty dense but not with HA that just doesn't float well
1:02 - Love using plasma in adventure mode but it's so ludicrously expensive. Between it and particle cannons I always wonder why my ships are so expensive. 😂
Use vertical propellers, then you can use two layers of beam diagonals for the entire belt along with a lot of metal
Very interesting... Imma have to learn plasma
plasma for me seems really bad just do to it's cost and lack of versatility like if the target isn't dense it doesn't do very well where aps doesn't have such weaknesses
(edit) well aps does which is lots of heavy armor slopes but even then it can still do significant damage
Yup. Plasma is more a specialized weapon, despite it's apparent versatility.
APS is still king of FtD weapons! 👑
Honestly, I personally NEVER use plasma that has more than 10 charges per shot. I zse rapid fire ~5 charge plasma because it just cores out its target mich like the APS, while also leaving a bigger hole where it's traveling to battle some of the inaccuracy through stability and heat buildup. And I feel like that's way better than just sending 100 charges at once or so.
I live the empty space in your ships man super cool. It makes it super realistic i wish i could fit everything like you
Sorry it's taken me a few days to get back to this.
I touched on the concept in the livestream, but Plasma has a real issue when it comes to high damage per shot setups. To explain why we'll look at the most basic scenario, a big pile of vertical, (or horizontal), beams several layers deep.
The first block you hit takes the full damage. Perfect
It now propagates in 6 directions from this initial block. This means that 5 real blocks and 1 air block get damage transferred to them, but air counts as 2 blocks with plasma propagation rules. So the damage gets split 7 ways, and 2 of those 7 ways are allocated to empty air which eats the damage, that damage is gone, lost. 2/7ths is 28.57%. You've lost over a quarter of your damage just at the first propagation. of the 5 blocks that get damage transferred to them, 4 are in the outer layer, and 1 is in the second layer.
It's even worse at the next one as all the blocks in the first layer now have air on 2 sides of them, so they lose 4/9ths of the damage transferred to them. And the one block in the second layer has the same math outlined for the first propagation event in layer 1. I won't go through the math in detail for the final loss amount as it's a bit hard to visualise without a diagram but in the end just 42% of the initial damage remains after the propagation.
The next layer is even worse as you have 4 blocks in layer 2 and 8 blocks in layer 1 losing 4/9ths and 1 block in layer 3 losing 2/7ths in their propagation. Whilst you can math this out for a super exact number you can use a multiplier of 0.6 to get a very close approximation of the amount of remaining damage transferred, 42%*0.6 = 25.2%. So your now down to a quarter of your starting damage, and it's spread not quite evenly amongst over 20 blocks at this point.
Your looking at a 100k+ damage reaching the target just to pop a 4m metal beam at this point, and the amount you'll need grows exponentially from there.
Thus plasma is most efficient when you it the target with just enough damage to pop a single block.Anymore and an enormous percentage gets wasted, and if you go beyond one propagation that amount starts to exceed half your initial damage which makes it become really inefficient.
Would plasma treat the .5 block air gap left by appliqué panels? Usually use those as an air gap
I don't think so. They were implemented partially to counter air-gap fillers.
would be interesting to see how much worse the plasma would do if the AI was on broadside 2.0 with the ability to turn the ship to present fresh armor... because I think it will lose pretty hard vs armor piercing
21:16 I don't get why health is a thing, it's a ship it's either floating and/or fighting or it's destroyed.
Because if health drops below 55%, regardless of the blocks destroyed, the ship despawns. :D
I feel like Plasma needs a cost reduction. It's okay for a specialized weapon to be cheap or for a very versatile weapon to be expensive but a specialized weapon that is also expensive? No sense in using it unless you are building to counter a very specific craft. Why would I want to build something that is only good against wedge spam front siders?
I prefer my aps as AP head-HEAT-HE-HE-HE etc
wait, was the particle cannon been switched to this new plasma cannon? (I havent logged into FTDs in half a year so dont know new changes)
No, plasma is an entirely new weapon type. PAC is still here. 👍
@@BorderWise12 alright, time to get back to FTDs
@@BorderWise12by the way borderwise, do you have a tutorial explaining this new plasma cannons?
nevermind, found it.
Another point I've not seen yet, pc is down so can't check, but do ciws weapons work against plasma? And if so, how easily?
They do not. You cannot shoot plasma down. I think.
@@oygemprime3864 From what ive seen of the patch notes you can't, but shields reduce their damage.
Hey man, don't know who to ask so I come to you for answear. Why the hell in campaign its always 1v1 battles.
My fleet is designed to work together yet DWG sends single ship and its always 1v1!?
The hell is wrong with the campaign!? (Not to mention that there is little to no explanation/tutorial for campaign mechanics for newbie like me)
You can adjust the block count of battles so that multiple ships can be on play at once.
It's also only in the early game that the AI does that, once they get more resources they do send larger forces at you.
Thanks. @@BorderWise12
You sure say like a lot like every like other word like is like you know? Like
Yeah, I know. Verbal habit. 😅