Warfare & Tactics

I'm sure the cool crowd will tell me I'm stupid. Perhaps I am.

I think this is my first forum post, but I'm bored and slowly fading from the game.

I've spent quite a bit of time training junior players to pvp. Here is where I start them:

Lesson 1:
The idea of maneuver mechanics is to fly your ship in a fashion that benefits you and hinders your opponent. In order to understand how you want to maneuver your ship, you must first understand how damage is transferred in this game. I call this damage mechanics.

There are two key lessons that I teach under damage mechanics: Missiles and Guns. They transfer damage differently, so one must maneuver differently in order to beat them.

The first lesson I start people with is missiles because they are a simple start to damage mechanics.

Damage is transferred by missiles by an equation which has 2 components (not counting the target's resists).

The two factors that determine how much damage is transferred by a missile strike are 1) speed and 2) size.

The size factor works as a comparison of the target's absolute velocity and the missile's explosion velocity. The principle is this... if you're going slower than a missile's explosion velocity, you take full damage. If you go faster than it, then you take reduced damage.

To determine how much damage gets through the speed factor, you simple divide the explosion velocity by the ship's velocity (*this factor can never be greater than 1). So, for an explosion velocity of 100, a ship going less than 100 will take full damage. A ship going 200 will have a factor of 100/200 or 50% damage. In this fashion, you can GREATLY reduce damage taken by missiles just by keeping your speed up.

The size factor works similarly. The idea is that if your ship "signature radius" is smaller than the missile's "explosion radius" you'll take reduced damage. If your signature radius is equal in size or larger to a missile's explosion radius, you will take full damage. An example of this would be if you had a missile with an explosion radius of 100 and a ship with a signature radius of 100 (or larger), the target would take full damage. If you had an explosion radius of 100 and a ship iwth a signature radius of 50, the target would take 50% damage based on size.

Now, once you get these two factors, you have to multiple them together to figure out how much damage gets to the ships tank. In the cases of our examples, each example factor reduced damage by 50%. Therefore, .5 x .5 = .25... so if those examples were true, damage would be reduced to 25% of the original damage.

The take away for maneuver mechanics will ultimately be that higher speed and smaller size will help you survive against missiles.

Lesson 2, Guns:

I am not teaching you the actual gun equation. Gun damage works on probabilities and is reasonably complicated. I am instead teaching you a simplified version of the gun equation that will help you make good decisions in fights. It accounts (pretty accurately) for what you'll see when you start fighting.

No, you cannot calculate actual damage outputs with it. Ther isn't a lot of value in calculating that during fights. You just need to know your factors.

For guns, there are 3 factors. They are 1) size 2) angular speed and 3) range

Size - The size factor works exactly like it does in missiles. It is a comparison of "gun resolution" and "signature radius".

ex: a ship with a signature radius of 40 being shot by a gun with a gun resolutaion of 100 would take 40% damage from the size factor.

Angular speed - This factor is a comparison of the "angular speed" of the target as compared to the tracking speed of the guns. Angular speed in this game is measured in "radians/second". You can display angular speed on your overview if you want to get familiar with it.

So, a gun orbiting at 2 radians/second around a ship with guns that track at 1 radian/second would take 50% damage.

An important note here is that the closer your orbit, the higher your angular speed and the lower your absolute speed. You've probably noticed that when you orbit at 500, you fly about half speed. At that range, your angular speed is as high as you can get it... great for protecting against guns... but you're vulnerable to missiles at the low speeds you will be flying.

The last factor is range:
From the tip of the gun out to optimal range... the gun will do 100% damage for the range factor. From optimal to optimal + 1.5x falloff, the gun damage reduces linearly to 0.

So, imagine you have a gun with an optimal range of 5k and a falloff of 10k. From 0k to 5k range, you do 100% damage. From 5k to 20k, your damage reduces to 0. At 12.5k, you do 50% damage. Make sense?

Now, just like missiles, you multiply those factors together. So if your size factor is 50% (sig resulution 50, gun resolution 100), your speed factor is 80% (angular speed 1 radian / second, gun tracking speed .8 radians / second) and your range factor is 20% (as described above)... then you would calculate that you should take .5 x .8 x .2 and get .08 or 8% damage.

So, to control inbound damage... you need to control one or more of those factors.

Generally speaking, when you're fighting close range guns you will want to control range and when you're fighting long range guns you want to control angular velocity.

ex: you're not going to circle a rifter fast enough to outrun it gun tracking, so you're best off trying to control range. If you're fighting a battleship in a frigate, it wont' be able to track you so you're best off trying to keep your angular high so it won't hit you.

Why on earth would people call you stupid?

Anyway, aside from this post not matching its title(or do you plan to make part 2 highsec specific?), I've a query on tracking.

The last time I saw the gun equation, I was under the impression that if you beat the tracking speed even slightly, you go down to a ridiculously low chance to hit, essentially zero. You seem to be implying that if I beat the tracking speed of a targets guns, they can still hit me for 99% damage, which, anecdotally doesn't make sense.

Can you at least post the gun tracking formula in brackets so that people can anaylyze it themselves :D

RvB would beg to differ. About 150 kills in the month I have been back. That beats any 2 month span out in null that I did.

And thanks for the missile tip. Now the next question... Which generally improves missile damage more... Reducing the target's speed or increasing their Sig radius?

Not that hard to get 150 kills in RvB.

Lesson 1) To the guy who asked about missiles: The determining factor in whether you want to increase sig radius or slow down targets is the explosion velocity of your missiles and the explosion radius of your missiles as compared to the target.

If your target is already maxing out your size factor, then slowing them down is the best way to increase damage. If your target is hideously slow but small (which would be kind of a strange situation), then make them bigger.

Every engagement is different. You just need to know the mechanics.

Lesson 2) You can take a look at the gun equation yourself. I came up with that equation as a way to simplify the involved factors. It won't give you accurate damage representations. If you want to check the actual damage equation, it's at the below link:

http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Turret_damage

I will try to post lessons 3 - 5 in the near future. Those lessons are where I start talking about high-sec specific things (like aggro timers). If my lessons aren't valid because I'm a high sec pvp'er, please disregard them.

In my opinion, the most skilled pvp'ers in Eve are high sec players. It is the most complex environment for pvp in the game (because there are more rules and more ways to screw with people). It's the only place left in the game where you can focus your engagements with small gang and individual tactics where small ships are still valid. But hey, everyone's got opinions, right?

You're talking about how to counter the above "run away from your target in a straight line, adjusting your speed to keep the opponent at optimum range" approach, where I'm in the rocket frigate?

If he's as fast as me (thus I can't close on him if he's running away), and if I'm using rockets (thus don't really have any more range than his autocannons), should I manually fly at a 45 degree angle to his running-away-from-me route, thus at least increasing angular velocity somewhat?

Lesson 4 - Tank

The question in this lesson is "How do I select my tank style."

There are two primary tank styles: Buffer and Rep
Rep tanks are tanks that heal themselves. This includes purger passive tanks and active boost tanks.
Buffer tanks are tanks that just have large quantities of hit points.

So, how do you know which one is better?

Imagine you're selecting between a buffer tank of "100,000 effective hit points with 0 rep "and an active rep tank of "1000 hit point per second rep and 10,000 effective hit points."

Imagine that each tank is subjected to 1000 hit points per second. The Buffer tank would last for 100 seconds, the active tank would last forever, right? In this case the active tank is better, right?

However, if you imagine that those two tanks to 2000 hit points per second, the buffer tank would last 50 seconds and the active tank would last 10 seconds. In this case, the buffer tank is better, right?

The point of this is that buffer tanks are better against uncontrolled large quantities of damage. That makes them preferable in fleet fights and large scale station games (in many cases). Rep tanks are better against controlled/small quantities of damage (often better on speed tanks, 1 vs 1, stuff like that)

Now, armor or shield?

Armor tanks have a speed disadvantage and have no effect on size..
Shield tanks have a size disadvantage and no effect on speed.

Because of this, I recommend armor for close range tactics where webs and slow speeds will be prevalent (close orbits result in slow speeds). The chances of the armor penalty causing any change in the damage taken in these scenarios is reduced because of the already very low speeds.

I recommend shields for speed tactics (usually longer ranges) because they don't reduce your speed. Most speed builds are very vulnerable when caught, so the armor speed penalty is not preferred on such builds.

Bravo!

This is probably the most helpful combat thread I have ever read.

You my good fellow have a knack for providing in layman's terms a clear vision of combat despite the the fog of Eve's mechanics.

If you leave, it will be a genuine loss to the game, so please don't.

Lol...Go back to Wow.

Edit: Props to the OP. Such goodposting is rare on eve-o.

It is obviously a child or an immature adult typing this comments, grow up ;) man (or woman) whoever you are :)