I have heard smaller ships have a damage cap. That for example scout class max damage dealt in a single attack is 60*

Has anyone tried doing the math on the ship classes to compile a max damage chart?

Looking for fairly concrete numbers to decide on being one or not and to help decide the kind of artillery i bring to battle. I find it pointless to be running a full attack setup that is only gonna do the same damage as a hybrid would do and take more damage than the hybrid.

( i mean full attack as in max guns and as many hulls and defense as i can fit past that in order to maximize energy to disable ratios VS. a more balanced attack defense build that would allow longer without repair and less damage taken overall)

Also feel free to expand upon this and give your opinions on Attack to defense to hull to shield ratios when you pvp and the reason you chose it.

paging ! paging .... NERD HERD TO ISLE 1, NERD HERD TO ISLE 1 PLEASE.

Ship Scouts usually install hull modules only and invest rank points into Tactical Officers or maybe Engineers.

thanks FerrusManus for that quote.

and Commonwealth <TK> i understand how they work i was just curious the damage caps and peoples setup on normal/large ships to combat this cap.

Larger ships will generally have higher hull.

Dan changed the cap system to make it even less attractive to run the small ship build (which was weak and flawed anyway before the cap). There are quite a few threads on this.

In short a small ship limits every factor of gameplay, and the higher the rank the more this becomes evident. For best all round play most all RP should go into decks until you have at least 2000.. minimum IMHO.

Yes, that is true, though if you really want to you can still go for minimum-damage cap by only putting 1 point into decks every level (unless you get Ship Bots). I don't particularly recommend it, but I don't do much PvP anyway, just giving the options.

wouldnt it be one deck every 2 levels?

No, because it's linear with half your rank or decks. It would be 1 deck every two levels if it was half your rank or your whole decks.

To keep the damage cap equal (thus minimizing it): .5*(rank+19) = .5*decks -> rank+19 = decks.

I believe you start with twenty decks, thus you will minimize your damage cap if you get 1 deck per level.

I believe the formula is the same as for NPC, but the cap is adjusted. This is true for most normal ships:

damage per shot = tanh(attack / (5*defense)) * (some modified trig function: 2/PI to PI/2) * (deck/2)

You must increase defense or hull/shield relative to deck size to make best use of the cap.

luckily this formula may help me min max my ship, 230 attack 54 def on a heavy frigate just aint cuttin it, taking way too much damage that i could be avoiding

small ships work, in fact since the update they work better since there is no penalty for increasing your ship size as you rank up, this allows for more hull modules or bigger hull modules as well as things such as Gentarr Transmitters

No. Those stats really wont. Heavy Frigates need at least 100 defense and 300 attack I believe. I'll have to check with my low ranking friend.

tanh(attack / (5*defense))

It's more complicated actually; shots are randomized, and that is the hard part to figure out. However, sampling damage under controlled conditions I have noticed the damage pattern to be (artanh) shape. Meaning that it is more like:

tanh((attack * (artanh(random(-0.9 to 0.9) / somefactor + somefactor)) / (5*defense))

Yeah, it does seem like the random part is applied to the attack. The important part is that it's the tanh of a ratio of attack to defense, then multiplied by the damage cap. This shows that you want to maintain a certain ratio and that you approach the damage cap, and that increasing the damage cap while maintaining the same ratio increases the damage.

Well, and also the shape of that randomization is non-linear, before I couldn't explain up to 5% of "crits" in my sample (even with no scan on), that did not fit my linear randomization theory. Now I know they are on the extreme ends of that function. What matters though is the average, and the vast majority of hits are roughly linear such that you do 0.63x-1.57x the average damage. I still do not believe that crits exist until Dan confirms how they work (ie, doubles attack for that hit), but it's not like I'm willing to run scan > 500 anyway cause I want to avoid certain irritating bosses (nexus/grids). It may actually be only a pvp mechanism.

Yeah, I just mean that there's not much you can do about the randomization anyway; just make sure to at least maintain the same attack/defense ratio and matched NPCs will get easier, and eventually those will be the only Commons besides Flamehawks, so that's useful information. It's also good to know how the damage cap fits in just so people understand it's not just there to hold them back, and if Dan did simply remove it from the equation we'd be doing either 0 or 1 damage per hit O_o

well for my rank and my decks i am minimum of 2 tiers ahead of the bt oponents and when in combat i run 3 hull and the rest are attack and def, which increases as i deplete energy to make more room from the lack of cores.


with all 3 cores equipped i sit at 173 energy (this set up is only until i burn enough energy to un equip them 1 by 1) with 178 of 178 decks 204 attack 55 defense ( thats with only 2 dom cannons .. 3 more kills for the 3rd so the ratio will be slightly better ) 245 hull.

ill have to full equip relays / def / att and let you know what my straight kill setup looks like ( rank 29 btw)

*edit*

270 att 70 def 60 energy 245 hulls with only 2 relays online which still makes the 100 def 300 att far from grasp even with the dom ill have in the morning

Class Decks DC Unless Rank is more than
Scout 10 5 1
L Frigate 50 25 30
Frigate 100 50 80
H Frigate 150 75 130
L Cruiser 200 100 180
Cruiser 250 125 230
H Cruiser 300 150 280
L Battle Ship 350 175 330
Battle Ship 400 200 380
H Battle Ship 450 225 430
L Dreadnaught 500 250 480
Dreadnaught 550 275 530
H Dreadnaught 600 300 580
Titan 700 350 630
H Titan 800 400 680
M Titan 900 450 730
Goliath 1050 525 780
H Goliath 1200 600 830
M Goliath 1350 675 880
Leviathan 1500 750 930
H Leviathan 1650 825 980
M Leviathan 1850 925 1030
Star Destroyer 2050 1025 1080
H Star Destroyer 2300 1150 1130
M Star Destroyer 2600 1300 1180
C Star Destroyer 2900 1450 1230
Galaxy Destroyer 3200 1600 1280
H Galaxy Destroyer 3600 1800 1330
M Galaxy Destroyer 4000 2000 1380
C Galaxy Destroyer 4400 2200 1430

I realise it is hard to read, but 1st col = class
2nd col = min decks
3rd col= min dmg cap
4 col= you will do more damage if they are a higher rank than