SE4 damage simulator

[Suicide Junkie]

And this will automatically calculate percentages for you given component stats.

It does assume that the ship is very large, so that a single weapon impact destroys only an insignificant fraction of the components on the ship.

That assumption is not very applicable in stock SE4, however in most Leaky armor mods (especially those with regular-QNP), it is true.

[PvK]

Would someone care to elaborate on the latest theory of how re-rolls are handled?

I assume you are talking about which components get hit, and what triggers the game to try to destroy a different component, instead of accumulating damage against a single component until it is destroyed.

Are you guys sure you know when that occurs? Is it once per weapon hit? Per volley? Per destroyed component? Per something else?

PvK

[Captain Kwok]

This is more applicable to leaky armor systems and not solid (hit first) armor.

When an armor or component is the majority hitpoint contributor and has a structure lower than the incoming damage, there is an increase in the number of re-rolls. The additional rolls lead to an increase in the chance that internal components will suffer at least partial damage.

In the event the majority HP contributor has a structure equal to or greater than the incoming damage, there is a lower chance of re-rolls and the damage is distributed closer to HP of component/total HPs ratio.

SJ designed two ships. Ship A had 6000 total HPs with about 90% from Light Armor. Ship B had 4000 total HPs with about 85% from Heavy Armor. His observations had Ship B winning nearly 70% of the time. The reason? Ship A tended to lose it weapons before Ship B, despite the fact that the ratio of HPs from weapons was much lower than ship B. You would expect the weapons to survive longer on Ship A right? But it doesn't happen.

The reason for this observation is that the light armor is only 10HP and incoming damage is around 100HP. Each time an armor/internal is destroyed, you get a new re-roll. The more re-rolls leads to a greater chance that the internals will take at least partial damage. You might get an average of about 8-10 re-rolls with light armor in this case.

On the other hand, heavy armor reduces the chance of re-rolls. If it is 50kT - you might only see a few re-rolls (2-3) at most.

In a spreadsheet I made I came up with the following data:

Ship:
Light Armor 40x10HP = 400 HP ~ 0.76 of total HP
Internals 10x10HP = 100 HP ~ 0.20 of total HP
Weapons 2x10HP = 20HP ~ 0.04 of total HP
Weapon Damage = 30 Damage

The chance that ONLY ARMOR components would be destroyed in a single weapon hit was 0.45, the chance that at least one internal would be destroyed was 0.48, and at least one weapon was 0.11. In this case there was no partial damage since all HP structure was 10HP for simplicity.

If we were using 30HP heavy armor (= to weapon damage) we should observe damage distributed by the ratio of HPs/total Hps. That'd be a 0.76 chance for only armor to be destroyed, 0.20 chance for an internal, and 0.04 chance for a weapon. Real observations would probably show a bit less for armor, and a tad more for the other two in the event that armor was not hit first (hence a re-roll was needed).

Overall we see about a 2x increase in the chance that internals will be hit in this scenario with light armor. The in-game effect would not be so dramatic since I'd expect armor actually represents about half of HPs on a normal ship design - so the factor would be closer to 1.5x.

[Captain Kwok]

Bump for PvK:

[Suicide Junkie]

Hit-first armor is completely outside this program's scope. Only non-armor internals, such as the "leaky armor" and weapons vs lifesupport and such.

[PvK]

Thanks Captain Kwok,

I think is how I thought it worked. Do we know if each weapon hit generates a re-roll or not, if no special damage types are involved?

That is: If a unit has one 90-structure component, and one 10-structure component, a 80-point hit has a 10% chance of destroying the 10-structure component. If eight 10-point hits strike the unit, are there eight 10% chances to destroy the 10-point component, or is there just one, followed by seven accumulations if the 90-point component was hit first?

PvK

[Fyron]

Every new weapon hit causes a new roll to see what component is damaged. This can be observed easily, with your example. If all comps have 10 HP instead of one that has 90 HP, the first hit might hit the 90 HP comp, but the second hit might hit a 10 HP comp. The rolls are still stacked rather in favor of the 90 HP comp though, so more often the second hit will hit the 90 comp than a 10 HP comp.