Note: Due to the weapon energy changes that have occurred since I wrote this guide, the information below is now out of date. See this post for a more up to date guide on Weapon Power.
Part I: The Principles Of Weapon Energy Use
Note: All of the information below only pertains to energy weapons. Mines and torpedoes require essentially no power to operate, and their damage is not impacted by your energy level!
A) The Basics Of Weapon Energy Drain
One misconception that some people seem to have relates to weapon energy drain. All weapons after the first draw 10 energy when fired. For example, if your power is set to 100 and you fire one beam, your power will remain at 100. Firing a second beam results in your power dropping to 90; a third to 80, and so on.
While a weapon is active, the energy it uses it locked and cannot be recovered regardless of your energy regen rate. Once a weapon goes into cool down, only at that point can the energy it was using be recovered.
I am pointing this out because a popular misconception is that more EPS flow regulator consoles will allow you to support more weapons. EPS flow regulators only help once a weapon has stopped firing. At that point, if your EPS flow is high enough, you will recharge to maximum energy before your next shot. Beyond that point EPS flow regulators will have no effect one way or another in terms of your damage output. If your regeneration is sufficient, you should instead try to increase your overall weapon energy, instead of running with an excessive amount of EPS flow regulators.
B) How Energy Drain Affects Damage
So, you might be wondering, why does your weapon energy level even matter? The reason for that is it directly impacts the amount of damage your weapons generate. At 100 energy, your weapons do 100% of their potential damage. At 80% energy, their damage is only 80%; at 50% you're only doing half damage; if your energy its zero you will do no damage, and so on. It's also possible to do more than 100% damage-- up to 125% damage by raising your weapon power up to the cap of 125.
As you can probably see, this makes your weapon energy levels very important, and it is this factor which is central to the performance of multiple weapons, which is what the focus of most of my testing here.
C) Firing Additional Weapons Results In Diminishing Returns Due To Increased Energy Drain
If you fire a single weapon at 100 power, it will do its full damage*. However, the additional energy drain of each weapon you add after that, reduces not only its own damage, but the damage of all of your other weapons.
*Technically it's been pointed out that weapons actually do their base damage at 50, and twice as much damage at 100. Consider what is being discussed here to be percent of your potential damage, which is actually double the base.
Here is a
simplified example of how this works (don't stop reading after this example or you will not have the full picture):
If you fire one beam at 100 energy, it does 100% damage. If you add a second beam, energy drops to 90, so both do 90% damage. Still you have two beams, so you're doing 180% of the damage you did before. With three beams, energy now hits 80, each beam only does 80% damage, for a total of 240% of what a single beam would do, as opposed to 300% if there were no energy drain.
We're starting to see diminishing returns already. Now, let's scale all the way up to six beams. Energy is reduced to 50, while all the beams are operating. That means each only fires at 50% effectiveness, for a total of 300% damage-- not all that much more than the 240% provided by only 3 beams.
If you keep adding more beams you can theoretically end up doing less damage than if you had fewer weapons. At eight beams, power is reduced to 30%, for a total of 240%, the same as only using 3 beams.
Don't panic though, at least up to 6 weapons, my testing has shown that you will always do slightly more damage by adding another weapon, provided you are set to at least 100 Weapons Energy. Also, this only applies to weapons firing at the same time.
Here is a
chart that shows an actual example of this diminishing returns effect. You might notice that the numbers are not quite as bad as you would expect from the simplified theory above. I'll explain why in a minute.
D) Decreasing Weapons Power Results In Even Worse Weapons Performance
The negative effects of firing additional weapons is
much worse if you run at power levels less than 100. If you fire six weapons at 50 power, your energy will be reduced to zero, meaning none of the weapons produce any damage (you'll see results of zero in your combat results).
If you are going to run with weapon power at 50, then you shouldn't fire more than one or two weapons (if necessary, manually activate a couple of them, instead of using fire all)!
E) Increasing Weapons Power Means You Can Support More Weapons
Conversely, increasing weapons power above 100 means you can support more weapons with less of a downside. If you want to see some basic math examples of this, check the theory thread above. But a major point that needs to be made here is the benefits of increasing weapon power beyond 125. Yes, it is possible, and it does make a difference.
While your energy level is capped at 125, the cap is applied after taking into account weapons drain. As a result, if you increase your effective energy level above 125, you can fire additional weapons at higher power levels. If your energy level is 135 with bonuses, then you can fire up to two weapons without dropping below the 125 cap, or you could fire six weapons without dropping below 85 energy. The difference this makes for damage output is immense!
Theoretically if you could increase your weapons power to 195, you could even fire eight weapons all at 125% effectiveness!
There is one odd quirk you will encounter when you run with power over 125. When you first activate a weapon your power will momentarily drop, but then it will almost immediately regenerate. I think this may be because the initial energy drain is subtracted from the capped value, but the actual "locked" energy is calculated from the total energy level.
F) In Actual Practice, Things Aren't Quite As Bad As In Theory
Now, for a couple of reasons, things don't work out exactly like in the simplified example above. As a result of this, the diminishing returns from firing additional weapons are slightly less drastic than the numbers presented there. Please note, I said
less drastic: the decline in effectiveness is still very real! The good news is, you can pretty safely add up to 6 weapons without worrying about actually
reducing your damage output (although the utility of the 6th weapon can be borderline).
First of all, when you activate all your weapons, they don't all fire instantaneously, instead they fire one after another. Also, it appears that energy doesn't drain out immediately. As a result, the first couple of shots will fire at full power, the next shots will be slightly reduced, and the next still further until your energy has bottomed out. Beyond that point weapon energy has been drained and all shots will be made at reduced damage until the end of the cycle. Here is a
link to a graph of one of my combat logs, where you can see this "stair step" pattern.
Secondly, not all weapons will be active at the same time. Due to limitations of the "fire all" command, or the timing of when the button is hit, your weapons fire will end up being staggered somewhat. Some will be firing while others are in cool down, and thus your average weapon energy level will be higher. Beam weapons are only in cool down approximately 20% of the time, so the impact this has for them is fairly limited. With Turrets, their faster cycle time means they are in cool down a full third of the time, so there we see a greater impact. In practical terms, what this means is that turrets are slightly more energy efficient, and have a lower average energy drain over time.
Ideally, one would try to stagger weapons fire so that the least amount of weapons fire at once. With three turrets, for example, you could theoretically fire one each second and have it so that only two are ever active at the same time, reducing energy drain by a third for each of them. Realistically, doing that manually would be extremely difficult, so you would have to use some sort of macro. Whether that is something you want to do, I make no recommendations one way or the other.
G) What All This Means
While the drain from additional weapons is slightly reduced by the factors I mentioned, the general principle is still sound. Especially as you get up to 7 or 8 weapons you run the very real risk of actually lowering your damage output by adding weapons.
Another consideration is that adding a weapon with low base damage, such as a turret, can potentially reduce the damage of a dual beam build, because the turret adds less damage than its drain subtracts from the higher base damage of the beam banks.
One thing to keep in mind is that only weapons firing at the same time will drain your energy. If you equip a dual beam bank in the front, that won't fire when you are broadside to the enemy, so it won't drain the energy of your side arc weapons. A beam equipped in the rear also won't fire in your frontal arc, etc.
Along those same lines, cannons, due to their global cool down, will never fire at the same time. For energy drain purposes, cannons can be considered to be only a single weapon.
The general principle of just slapping as many weapons on your ship as possible may not work out that well. If you don't want to take the time to think it through and work out the consequences, I would not recommend going over six weapons. Up to that point, it doesn't look like you can actually
lower your damage by adding weapons-- provided you are running with at least 100 power!-- but beyond six you start to collect enough rope to hang yourself with. On the other hand, If you often find yourself running with only 50 or 60 in weapons, you may want to limit yourself to only 3 or 4 weapons.
02-19-2010, 01:41 AM
Comprehensive Weapon Energy & Build Testing
