You guys are saying anti-fighters like flak or defenders are good against lrms simply becuase of their damage type?

Has anyone actually looked up what their DPS is compared to other frigates, though?.. That seems pretty damn important because 25dps*2 is less than 51dps*1.

A TEC light frigate has one bank (front) that does 52.25 damage on a 5.5 second cooldown. A flak frigate has four banks (one on each side) that do 25.25 damage each on 4.5 second cooldown.

Most of the TEC Capital ships are refitted civilian vessels - hence the slightly uneven weapon placement.

Explanation on armor:

A ship with 1000hp and 0 armor has 1000 effective hp.

Every point of armor adds 5% more effective hp, this was gathered in the same way (there's another thread about it) as the data on the damage of capital ships in this thread.

Using that info we get:
A ship with 1000hp and 1 armor has 1050 effective hp.
A ship with 1000hp and 5 armor has 1250 effective hp.
A ship with 1000hp and 10 armor has 1500 effective hp.
A ship with 1000hp and -6 armor has 700 effective hp.

Also, in regards of fighers vs bombers.
The damage gathered from the files is per volley. We only have the data on how much damage each does per volley, and nothing about how their fire rate is. Someone need to go ingame, and get the dps stats, if they have equal dps, then the figher will shoot twice as fast as a bomber.

It doesn't matter if the bomber does twice the damage if a fighter can shoot three times for each time a bomber can shoot.

Actually, the weapon cooldown time is in the entity files, under "PreBuffCooldownTime". The DPS stat given in the game is calculated by Damage / PreBuffCooldownTime. For the record, fighters are 12 seconds and bombers are 13.5.

Also: I don't know anything about armor, but why would there be seperate tech paths to increase armor and to increase hull strength if all armor does is increase hull strength? It seems like there has to be more to it than that.

I cant seem to find where damage of each ship is found. What entity files are these in ?

wouldnt it be difficult for the fighter to break through the shields ? or are these damage bonuses related to shields also.

TECBomber BaseDamage = 44.4 /13,5 = 3,3 dps.
TECFighter BaseDamage = 19.5 / 12 = 1,6 dps.

DAMAGE TYPE...VS...CAPITAL...VERYLIGHT...LIGHT...MEDIUM.....HEAVY...VERYHEAVY

Fighter.....................0,4 dps....1,6 dps...3,2 dps..0,4 dps...0,4 dps...0,4 dps
Bomber....................2,5 dps....1,65 dps..1,65 dps.1,65 dps..1,65 dps..3,3 dps

Well, after modding and testing it a bit, the 5% increase in effective HP per point of armor seems more or less correct. Volley damage definitely has nothing to do with armor.

Small question - regarding chance to hit - as it's only listed against bombers / fighters - is it 100% against everything else ?

Ahh, nvm - found in reference files

Also, while digging into those files, I've found intersting entity - CanFireAtFighter. The only ships having it set to 'true' are: fighters, bombers and flak frigates. Every other ship seems to have it set to false.

Is it what I think it is ?

Bombers should have it set to 'false'. They are not supposed to be able to fight other strikecraft - only fighters and flak can shoot at strikecraft.

Well, bombers have it at 'true' as well. I converted and compared bomber/fighter entity files to the ones in game (1.02) - they are identical. Still, with 10% hit ratio, not far away from 'false'

It annoys me to no end that developers hide information like this. Why? Whats the point? And many of the ship descriptions are not good enough. Like flak doesnt have any description of having a good kill ratio vs lrm if you just read the description. Everything should be visible. Where the guns are.. What dps they have. (Damage and rate of fire) etc.

Well, I started a little bigger table. Initial png:

Thats slightly misleading. A fighter squadron carries more strikecraft than a bomber squadron in all factions. So a fighter squadron also does more DPS against very light than bombers.

What Race are all those ships based on, I don't see it listed in there.

Edit: Nevermind I see it's TEC

msoltyspl: That chart is spectacular. A couple things, though: you obviously got the data from the TEC ships, might want to label that, since weapon damage varies greatly by race. Also, Flak Frigates don't do 21.25. They do 21.25 per bank, and there's four of them. That's 85 damage per volley if all the guns are firing.

And although I've never played around with the CanFireAtFighter variable, I'd bet that it's exactly what it sounds like.

Good call. I pulled up some numbers for reference:

Vasari Bomber Squad Size: 3
Vasari Fighter Squad Size: 4
Advent Bomber Squad Size: 7
Advent Fighter Squad Size: 9
TEC Bomber Squad Size: 5
TEC Fighter Squad Size: 6

It looks like fighters always build a little faster, too, so they should get replaced quicker in combat.

If armor does indeed work in the way mentioned it does have one advantage over increasing hull hp. It means that you take less damage for each shot and although your total pool of hp is smaller, a heavily armored ship can last as long as a much bigger one. The advantage is that there is less hp to restore with repairing stations/abilities so it requires a lot less time and effort to heal something lower hp / heavier armor.

If you had a ship that had no armor but totally relied on a high hp count that hp would just dwindle away and it wouldn't really matter how much you had if you can't retain it. If my ship has say 10 armor and only 500 hp according to the post above that is a relative hp count of 750. Then say another ship has 1000 hp but only 2 armor (both ships have same armor type and weapons/damage). That ship with 1000 hp has a whole lot more to begin with. If both ships had a repair ship standing by that could say repair 100 hp every 5 seconds the difference can be seen in the long run. Everytime the repair ship repairs the 10 armor ship he gains a relative 150hp to where the other only gains 110 relative hp.

I hope that made sense. If not, its no surprise to me. I'm a very confusing person.

One question about overtime weapons - does the damage is in any way affected by duration ? i.e. counted as 'duration'*'damage' (excluding modifiers) or counted as a single shot lasting 'duration' time.

Very informative post, thanks OP ^^

As far as I'm concerned it's more or less what I expected from the in-game descriptions, save for the flak frigates damage against light frigates

With armor being such a small stat I figured for sure it was a per-volley damage negator, doesn't seem like too terribly important a stat compared to more shields or hull, yet the armor techs for everyone(?) are futher along the tech tree than the hull tech, which is right from the beginning, little odd (but hey, 5% more hits times 2000 pts. of ships is still desireable)

Also, even though the info files suggest heavier ships cannot target strike craft, I'm pretty sure I've ever-so-slowly fought off enemy fighters with no fighters or point defense ships. Besides, why else would those other damage types have the to-hit listing versus strike craft?

Hm. Maybe it just means they won't auto-target them, but they'll still fire back if no other targets are in range. Worth looking in to.

Nice preliminary table. We are working on the same thing for the community clan site. If anyone into doing the grunt work like this (no coding experience needed) wants to get involved we can use the help.

The site URL is: ClansOfSin.com

Words can't describe how much I agree with you. One of the greatest things about Civ IV is that almost all game mechanics are throughly explained either in popup windows or in the civelopedia. This simple feature makes the game so much more fun to play (for me at least and I assume that for every die hard strategy fan).

I too, cannot understand why developers - both for Sins and GalCiv - cannot understand that this is crucial information for players.