DP and damage

[09090901]

The basics

the main two things that determine damage are:
- Piercing - based solely on velocity, greatly boosted by flails and burst motors
- Concussion - based on momentum, greatly boosted when in movement with your chassis (rammers, sns)

Damage is calculated using the combined speed and momentum of all weapons involved.

The DP formula:
In both 2.2 and Ironforge the DP formula roughly boils down to 2 concussion = 1 piercing. In layman's terms, concussion needs twice the value to deal equal damage to piercing. This is technically correct, however this is only in the case of burst motors, spinners and rammers are a different case, and it also ignores other multipliers such as flails.

How piercing and concussion actually match up:
Assuming both values are equal, piercing is in fact roughly twice as strong as concussion, but only when used on a burst motor. When used on a rammer or another bot that can use the weight of it's chassis in motion, concussion will end up being roughly twice as strong. Spinners however are a little bit more complicated as spinning mass and speed will vary from bot/meta. The best way that I can simplify it is that with unrealistically low spinning mass and high speed, piercing will be stronger than concussion. As mass starts to increase however, the lead starts to shrink, and even shifts to concussion at a certain point with enough mass.

Flails are another beast all together. I don't have 100% certainty on how they work, but from my experience they're roughly a x2 boost to piercing, while also reducing the amount of damage concussion deals on contact. As stated before, damage is done with the combined values, so flails will boost the damage for all piercing weapons involved

What this means for DP:
As said above, DP is only really accurate when dealing with burst motors (it's how click came up with the og formula). Because concussion needs twice the value to be considered equal to piercing under the formula, concussion will be nearly 4x times as strong as piercing on a bot that can use it's entire weight. On a spinner, things are once again more complicated. While it is true that piercing is technically stronger in theory @1:1, this was only with unrealistically low spinning weights. On any sort of realistic spinning setup, piercing does not have a x2 lead over concussion, and as a result concussion can be anywhere from 1.25x-2x times as strong on spinners after the DP formula.

Flails however are where piercing really shines. Even with concussion having twice the value in the DP formula, the boost from flails is still enough to give them the edge over concussion. This is the only reason piercing weapons had any use in 2.1 aside from popups, to be used on flails and also to counter flails. It's also why piercing weapons seem so poor in IF; there's just no real use of flails, and thus no real reason to counter with piercing weapons.


How it affects the metas:

In 2.1 you had somewhat of a triangle between all of the damage types.  Concussion would beat piercing, not because it deals more component damage, but because it was balanced at 1.839c = 1p. In return, concussion lost to flail piercing, and flail piercing lost to static piercing as flails would boost piercing on both sides, and flails would usually result in less total weapon weight.

In IF, crushing teeth and beaters are almost universally considered the best weapon to use on spinners. Pure piercing and other mixed weapons are easily de-weaponed with relatively minimal damage dealt in return. As said above, the lack of flails almost completely removes the incentive to use piercing weapons (the only real viable flail design that isn't banned are TRFBD's, and they get rolled by wedgeless VS which are arguably the strongest bot type in IF) and also that piercing is slightly weaker in IF as well (2p=1c compared to 1.839p in 2.1)


Why not as heavily affected, IRL does suffer a tad from DP formula favoring concussion. This is mainly just in the case of the beater bars post colored patch, and also the typhoons to an extent.

Why DP doesn't work:
Plain and simple, piercing and concussion perform differently based on what type of bot they're on. Also, concussion takes the total mass of the objects being struck together into account, and as such, scales based on how heavy the bots are. Piercing has no such scaling as it is based purely on velocity. There's no way to accurately combine all of these attributes into a single stat.

None of the DP formulas also take frequency into account, which as we've learned, can behave as a straight damage multiplier in certain scenarios.

Why heavy weapons suck/need an aggressive efficiency curve:
This is best explained with an example. Say a 7kg razor with 1000hp and a 70kg hammer with 10000hp hit each other for 4k points. The 7kg razor technically only takes 1000 points of damage as it only has 1000hp, while the 70kg hammer takes the full 4k as it has enough HP to spare. After this, the 7kg razor still has another hit due to fracture, and any damage it takes above its fracture is wasted.

This is kind of an extreme, and not really realistic example, but you should get the point. This isn't really a thing in IRL where weapon count is fairly small, but in a meta like DSL-S/IF, this is theoretically giving weapons spam bots an extra 30+ extra fracture hits compared to something that uses large, heavy weapons like sledges.


i still have more to add but this should be a decent start.

*the DP formula used for balancing is actually 1.839/2P and not C, but it's easier to understand it as concussion weapons being 1.839x/2x greater

this has all been known for over 10 years btw

[Mr. AS]

(((damage potential)))

[Naryar]

intredasting

so jugglers and face spinners and small disc spinners in general are better with piercing and heavy spinners and shell spinners better with concussion.

[09090901]

intredasting

so jugglers and face spinners and small disc spinners in general are better with piercing and heavy spinners and shell spinners better with concussion.

concussion will always be better in practice

if piercing and concussion were of equal values, then yes, piercing might be the better option for small disc spinners, but even then i doubt the weaker motors would be fast enough. in both dsl and IF,  because of the DP formula, concussion gets boosted by either 83.9% or 100% which makes it surpass piercing in almost all cases

as a test, both have 4 hexplates full of razors with the 2.1 equivalent of 420dp, but the one on the left has 4.2 concussion, and the one on the right has 2.28 piercing

that being said, i don't think this test is the most accurate thing ever. if I reduce it down 6 razors per motor, the difference between the two lessens, however the one with concussion is still the faster of the two

[Reier]

hey man. really appreciate all this testing you're doing. it helps us all out. heaven knows researching it myself is not really my thing but I know how vital it is.

keep it up chief.

[Naryar]

hey man. really appreciate all this testing you're doing. it helps us all out. heaven knows it's not really my thing but I know how vital it is.

keep it up chief.

+1, it's really interesting to see some science done on RA2 and see how it really works instead of assuming from our old preconceptions.

[09090901]

since the rest of the stuff posted is more about dsl-s/IF here's something i did that's relevant to stock

you know how some boomers always would say that irons are more damaging than maces, but maces are better than irons on HS because they protect the extenders better? this is true, but it's not just that, the maces are just flat out better than the irons

for the setup, i took AC and gave one modded maces that have the stats of iron spikes and left the other one alone. the extenders and motors are also invincible to make sure it was only the weapons that would affect the results.

the base AC would always win, usually with 6-8 maces still left (the worst result i had was 11 maces left)

[Reier]

I don't doubt this but I would rather see a setup with like a ton of tribars with just 1 weapon per tip just so we're not sure it's the placement of them hitting at slightly different times or something

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I don't doubt this but I would rather see a setup with like a ton of tribars with just 1 weapon per tip just so we're not sure it's the placement of them hitting at slightly different times or something

the timing shouldn't matter since neither weapon has normals, and damage is calculated using the combined speed/momentum

i can try it with 3 spikes per tribar, but tbh i think irons might be fairly equal/have a slight edge on that setup. there's less spinning mass which'll hurt the maces, and it'll spin faster which will benefit the more piercing focused iron spikes

[09090901]

ok i tried it. this only a 24hs with 8 motors btw

they do infact do better when it's only 3 spikes per tribar

and considering they have more reach, i would say that they are the better choice if you wanted to build an hs like this

also tested if my hypothesis on why the lower weight per tribar might benefit them/hurt the maces was somewhat true.

with 20kgs per weapon, the irons do far worse. so yes, irons are generally worse choice  if you're going to use more than one weapon per end

 none of the tribars that fell off had any spikes on them btw

[09090901]

1 and 4

more mass on the setup = less piercing damage which really hurts the razor, and more mass boosts concussion when falling from gravity (as tested here: https://gametechmods.com/forums/tutorials-and-tips/ghetto-testing-large-typhoons-vs-ripping-teeth/msg770084/#msg770084)

i suspect razors are still the most damaging with 3 razors or a lighter hammer arm. they also  retract the fastest, which tbh might still make them the best choice for most hammers

oh and the axe head setup can't retract after firing

[09090901]

man if you thought 2.2 was on the juice, whooh boy


fun fact: normals are messed up on almost everything in IF due to the fact that they all have normal = true and not false. almost every weapon can deal damage in every direction, aside from the sides/y axis

if you don't know how normals work, false tells the game to only deal damage in one direction, setting it to true causes it to deal damage in the opposite direction as well. for example, something like a dual sided icepick should be set to true, but a single sided pick should be set to false as it's only supposed to deal damage in one direction

looking at it, i guess it really doesn't make too much of an issue if everything is messed up, although it does take away some of the advantages that non normal weapons have, and single point weapons aren't getting any benefits from this either, so maybe not

[09090901]

drop test to see how the angle at which a weapon strikes changes the damage dealt

panel weighs 30kgs, has 5 concussion, and no normals

tldr it's always better to hit with a sharp point, then a narrow flat edge, and finally a wide and flat surface.