Q: Does anyone use 'Silo' Batteries when building?

[SilverRat]

I have been playing around with my ship designs and feel that perhaps using Many guns rather than a few of largest mount available may be preferable in battle, and I want to ask what experiences other players have noticed.
What I am talking about is setting up a series of weapons in order to fire (ie: LmountPPB followed by Hmounted PPB followed by MmountPPB then repeating the series with a LmountPPB etc 5 or six times) so that when multiple targets are encountered the weapons can engage and destroy several (more) targets (allowing more 'shots' by NOT using all MassiveMounts).
Does this make sense or am I redoing someone elses mistakes?

[Will]

It would depend, but I wouldn't do it. Most likely you will not be destroying another ship with even a single salvo of massive mount weapons, so attempting to "save" shots is fairly meaningless. Also keep in mind, you can miss, which will mess up any carefully calculated damage balances.

Your best bet is to just throw as much damage as you can for a particular weapon, so there are very few situations where you would use, say, a large mount on a Dreadnaught.

Some exceptions: in stock, you might want to use more small mounts for weapons like Ionic Dispersers, to make sure you aren't doing overkill on engines, or for the Allegience Converter; anything over 100 is useless, since the damage is the conversion percentage.

[scJazz]

Your approach has one huge advantage most notable when the enemy race has a huge to-hit advantage. Namely... your going to get more chances to hit the target. If the enemy warships are using emissive armor/shield regen/armor regen then your idea has some problems. Otherwise it works out fine. Generally, I think you'll notice that the large weapon mounts do more damage than the equivalent tonnage in smaller weapons so your overall damage per turn will decrease.

[Suicide Junkie]

The to-hit chance really does not matter...
You will do more damage per kt per turn with a larger mount regardless of accuracy.

Hitting more often with smaller shots is not an advantage unless the enemy has fewer hitpoints than the shot damage... and that dosen't happen in Stock SE4.
Any sort of regeneration / crystalline / emissive effect hurts the smaller hits far more as well.

-

That said, there are mods out there in which smaller weapons are useful.
In such mods, the large mounts do not provide such huge power increases, and will have downsides such as accuracy penalties.

[scJazz]

Suicide Junkie said:
The to-hit chance really does not matter...
You will do more damage per kt per turn with a larger mount regardless of accuracy.<SNIP>

Strictly speaking yes of course you are right. However...
given the scenarios where hitting the target at all, leaky shields and armor ala your own CB mod, is likely to BreakStuff(c) then if you are having accuracy problems it is better to use lots of little guns in order to make sure that you get a chance to BreakStuff(c) every turn.

If you manage to BreakStuff(c) then the enemy ship likely has less of a chance to BreakYourStuff(c) when his chance to fire comes up. Either because he can't move, lost his targetting systems, or better still doesn't have any guns left because he went the one huge gun route and you broke it.

[Fyron]

Having more weapons also means you have more chances to miss. If you have 50 heavy mount weapons and a 25% to hit rate, you will on average hit with 12.5 weapons. If you have 100 unmounted weapons and a 25% to hit rate, you will on average hit with 25 weapons. If the first set of weapons is doing 1.5 times as much damage (as heavy weapons in stock do), you will do 37.5x damage (where x is damage from one unmounted weapon). Now compare to the 25 unmounted weapons that hit, you do 25x damage. Which is better?

If you only have 3 or 4 ships, you might occasionally see a return with the mix of weapon mounts. But when you get any size of fleet, it averages out to make the unmounted weapons less than useful.

[Suicide Junkie]

In the case of leaky shields, small damage amounts tend to do absolutely nothing.

Consider the case of the first battle in CBmod; I warped a shielded (~40 points) carrier through a warppoint into a fleet of about 10 frigates with 40mm lasers.

They managed to damage one single crew quarters (5 hp) in the whole battle (hitting for 300-500 damage overall), while my interceptor fighters picked at their unshielded hulls.


Aside from that, you will on average break more stuff first using the large mounts, thanks to the fact that they do more damage.

You would have to have a chance to hit low enough that the heavy mounted guns are unlikely to score a hit but high enough that more shots from the smaller guns will likely score a single hit.
And, you would have to be almost guaranteed that the first small hit will deal a critical hit to the enemy.

This only happens if they have very few hitpoints compared to the weapon damage (IE the heavy guns are overkill), or if the mod gives some critical components the armor ability (hit first) just to be mean.