[1.0] Controlled combat testing results - 15 tests done (updated 19th Jul 2018)

Started by XeoNovaDan, July 08, 2018, 07:26:39 AM

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Boboid

I'm not super surprised that most of the melee weapons came out reasonably equal in pawn v pawn battles frankly.
Maces don't have the raw dps but their ability to Stun more consistently is a huge deal.
Just from personal experience I've noticed that a single stun is often enough to end a battle right there and then simply because the stunned pawn will take so much damage without being able to fight back. Humans are so flimsy that the stun time relative to combat time is reasonably long.

I'd be interested to see how the weapons compare in pawn v pawn fights when they're wearing power armor or plate armor. Especially now that Uranium maces have so much armor penetration relative to the blunt armor values of plate/power armor.

The fact that longswords and spears so consistently win against scythers/centipedes is kind of bonkers. Those stabs really are kicking the crap out of them. It's fairly unintuitive frankly.

It's such a finicky thing to balance though, a tiny buff can push a weapon over a threshold where it generates a positive feedback loop. Damaging the enemy so badly that it can't fight back effectively.
Time is obviously a huge deal as well - how long it takes to murder something is often very important, and obviously how dangerous that thing is during that time. Spears obviously sniping important mech parts is shortening fights considerably.

Obviously if you gib an enemy immediately and consistently when it enters melee combat it's 0% dangerous :P

A prison yard is certainly a slightly more elegant solution to Cabin Fever than mine...

I just chop their legs off... legless prisoners don't suffer cabin fever

XeoNovaDan

Quote from: Boboid on July 10, 2018, 07:06:39 AM
...

Yeah, indeed. I think I've already beaten you to the punch there since I've just finished some testing regarding how the longsword, spear and mace scale over different levels of armour (all steel unfortunately, but this should still be an indication). I also threw in a bonus set of runs to see how they fare against level 7 melee pawns with assault rifles, but said pawns also being high on go-juice (basically your average elite mercenary), but that testing was still done purely in melee combat. No plate armour was involved though since plate armour is already on par with flak gear when it comes to melee combat.

In fact, here are the results (bonus runs are on a separate chart):



One thing that's definitely interesting is that the spear scales better than the longsword over increasing levels of armour, but this is also unsurprising in another sense since the spear does have superior AP.

Bonus run results:



And, as always, the tables are available too, but sliced differently.

Naked test results:



Flak test results (taken from a previous test, still build 1959 though):



Power armour test results:



Bonus test results:






Quote from: Ser Kitteh on July 10, 2018, 06:52:33 AM
Alright, the big thing:

Powerclaw vs scyther
Powerclaw vs centipide
Powerclaw vs spear

Not sure about dual power claws or single power claws either. You do you!

I'll do both single and dual.

Canute

Quote from: Razzoriel on July 09, 2018, 03:09:16 PM
CutCleaveBonus is a multiplier.
A 10-damage attack that hits two body parts with 0 cutCleaveBonus deals 5 damage to each part.
A 10-damage attack that hits two body parts with 0.5 cutCleaveBonus deals 7.5 damage to each part.
Do you know maybe if weapon's with that bonus can hit multiple target's (infront) too ?
Then i would see at last a good advance from longsword vs spear.

And i think Xeo should use mace's out of uranium. Special when he use plasteel for longsword/spear.
And maybe test how club's out of jade are compared to them. Since i can't play the unstable i can't check that myself.

XeoNovaDan

Quote from: Canute on July 10, 2018, 09:09:48 AM
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Nope, longswords can't hit multiple targets at once; only multiple body parts on a single target. All tests have been conducted with steel weapons since that's the standard methodology; no plasteel involved other than in requests that specifically mention the use of plasteel weapons.

I could do a variation of the tests I've done with the weapon materials you've mentioned though.

Boboid

I'd be fairly interested to know how plasteel sharp weaponry compares to uranium maces - Given that the AP scales with damage I think that uranium maces might actually have the edge they're supposed to vs heavily armoured targets.
Plasteel only increasing sharp damage by 1.1 compared to uranium's 1.5 for blunt is a fairly big deal.
I imagine that vs lightly armoured targets Plasteel sharp weaponry will be even more dominant due to its attack speed. Although who knows what breakpoints that comparison will bring up, perhaps the maces might now be capable of gibbing a vital part that they were previously merely wounding.

The steel v steel tests in power armor look almost right, except for spears. God damn spears :P Were they wearing power armor helmets?

A prison yard is certainly a slightly more elegant solution to Cabin Fever than mine...

I just chop their legs off... legless prisoners don't suffer cabin fever

XeoNovaDan

Quote from: Boboid on July 10, 2018, 09:33:16 AM
...

Yep. Power armour and power armour helmets. If you mean by how spears scale much worse against people than they do against mechanoids, that'd simply be because humans have many more internal body parts than mechs.

Looks like this test's going to be a high priority one! Right now though, I'm just getting stuck in with modding, so the testing will start later.

Boboid

I mostly meant that Spears seem to be over-performing vs heavily armoured targets when compared to maces.

Also I hate to be the bringer of bad news but:
Quote
Melee attacks which deal higher damage are now much more likely to be chosen in melee combat.
So.. that's probably invalidated most of the melee data :'(

Edit: If Tynan happens to stick his head back into here: Any chance we could know what the new attack weighting system is?
A prison yard is certainly a slightly more elegant solution to Cabin Fever than mine...

I just chop their legs off... legless prisoners don't suffer cabin fever

Tynan

Quote from: Boboid on July 10, 2018, 09:57:58 AM
Edit: If Tynan happens to stick his head back into here: Any chance we could know what the new attack weighting system is?

I think it's just weight=power^2 (it used to be weight=power). But I haven't reviewed it. Ison implemented it but I still need to go over it. It'll probably change some more, I have a task to review more aspects of the melee system.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

Razzoriel

Quote from: Tynan on July 10, 2018, 10:11:50 AM
Quote from: Boboid on July 10, 2018, 09:57:58 AM
Edit: If Tynan happens to stick his head back into here: Any chance we could know what the new attack weighting system is?

I think it's just weight=power^2 (it used to be weight=power). But I haven't reviewed it. Ison implemented it but I still need to go over it. It'll probably change some more, I have a task to review more aspects of the melee system.
Is Commonality still there so we can make certain attacks more common despite their power?

XeoNovaDan

Quote from: Boboid on July 10, 2018, 09:33:16 AM
I'd be fairly interested to know how plasteel sharp weaponry compares to uranium maces - Given that the AP scales with damage I think that uranium maces might actually have the edge they're supposed to vs heavily armoured targets.
Plasteel only increasing sharp damage by 1.1 compared to uranium's 1.5 for blunt is a fairly big deal.
I imagine that vs lightly armoured targets Plasteel sharp weaponry will be even more dominant due to its attack speed. Although who knows what breakpoints that comparison will bring up, perhaps the maces might now be capable of gibbing a vital part that they were previously merely wounding.

Slacked a little today since I was instead occupied by modding things, but I did manage to get the testing done!

Chart:



It's odd that this didn't scale in the same way that the other chart did - possibly down to margin of error? Considering that melee's still very subject to change though, I don't think the lack of super thorough skew-checking is really relevant.

Once it's confirmed that melee's implementation is final or isn't expected to get any further changes, I'll probably do a batch of runs with a 300 sample size per equipment combination rather than the standard 100. 2,700 tests would be a lot to do, but I've been getting somewhat more efficient with this when I actually get around to doing it.

Also interesting is that plasteel spear wielders actually have a higher DPS than the longsword wielders, yet the longswords outperform the spears until power armour. This is probably due to the fact that longswords are simply better at dishing out pain, which compensates for their DPS deficit (9.78 for a level 14 pawn wielding a longsword vs. 10.45 with a spear).

Tables as always...

Naked:



Flak:



Power Armour:


Ser Kitteh

Huh. So with more armor, now maces are much better? Understandably due to mechanoid's few organs and spears' pierce strike, they're still preferable to longsword/mace. I actually don't mind using specific weapons for specific enemies. You're still gonna down a tribal/bug/mechboi with a plasteel melee weapon.

topace3000

XeoNovaDan, can you explain or share the devmode modification that allows you to spawn pawns with specified equipment, etc?

XeoNovaDan

Quote from: topace3000 on July 12, 2018, 03:55:30 AM
XeoNovaDan, can you explain or share the devmode modification that allows you to spawn pawns with specified equipment, etc?

It's just a quick harmony patch. Alas it doesn't quite allow for spawning pawns with specific equipment, but it does allow for spawning weapons and apparel with specific quality and stuff when using settings like 'try place near', or 'spawn apparel'. You'd configure the quality and stuff through mod settings.

I've attached it if you also want to play around with it, with the source code included.

[attachment deleted due to age]

mndfreeze

You still taking requests?

I'd like to see Thrumbo horn vs some misc stuff.  Cents/Sythes/people.

I got one on a trader really early on in my tribal game and my melee pawn is wrecking house with it.  Most hits on normal raiders are one shot done kinda stuff.  It would be nice to see just how much more effective than spears and stuff it really is or if its actually less so against mechs for example.

XeoNovaDan

I have somewhat burnt out on 1v1 testing over the past week, so I haven't really done any testing over the past week or so. However, I did decide to revisit the Melee vs. Mechanoid topic since mechanoids now have a bunch of internals and the 'stabbing' damage type has been nerfed, as well as the reworked tool weights since I last tested.

No charts for this one since I'm not motivated to make them, but tables are still here since they're easy to just put into image form. That being said, roll on the results.




Melee vs. Scyther

Build 1959:


Build 1969:





Melee vs. Centipede

Build 1959:


Build 1969:


Note: I did forget to normalise the quality for centipede weapons for the 1969 testing, and only noticed this after gathering two sets of results; 7 centipedes have normal quality weapons and the other 3 have poor quality weapons. As a result, the results are technically slightly skewed in favour of the people.