Rating: Newbie
It's nice if you've done the Hardpoints tutorial before this one, though it's not essential really.
Note that Armour Piercing / Armour Value is capped at 1 and can't be larger. Also note that any damage modifiers from abilities etc. should be factored into this calculation.Originally Posted by DoW Player's Guide
DPS and damage is a important element of balance, but beware:Now, this may seem like an obvious tutorial to do but it's nice to have it all spelt out for you and people have asked for this before. So here's how you can fiddle with it.
To find out what weapons a unit uses first find their EBPS, their entity_blueprint. When you've found that expand "combat_ext" and then "hardpoints" and then search through each hardpoint for the relevant weapon files. Check this tutorial to find out what the hell is going on in this section of the AE.
Now you know which weapon files it's using go and find the one you want to change in the weapon section at the bottom of the AE. Got it? good.
Damage: a damage value is randomly generated between the minimum and maximum. This is the base damage. To find this expand "area_effect" then "weapon_damage" then "armour_damage". This is where the main juicy stuff is. "min_damage_value" (different from "min_damage") is the "weapon minimum damage" mentioned in the formula above. If, after all modifiers etc., the remaining damage is lower than this value then it overrides it, otherwise it's not really used.
Armour Piercing: to get to these expand "armour_piercing_types" from the same place as max_damage, then go and expand all those little tables. Each table has an armour type and a value. This is the AP mentioned in the formula. Armour Value is on the enemy and is found in the health_ext on the entity files; almost all units have armour 100 (but you can change this if you want, I've tried it, it works). Because of this AP/Armour Value can really be thought of as AP/100 - so just think of that armour piercing value as a percentage. Something with an AP of 50 will do 50%, or half, of the base generated damage to that armour type. To increase a weapon's effectiveness against a certain armour type just find that right one and bump the stat. Easy!
This calculation is capped at 1; the highest it can come out is 1 regardless of how big the armour piercing value is. So if all units have armour 100, then there's no point any units having Armour Piercing over 100 as the surplus will be wasted. If, however, you have units with more than 100 armour, then units with over 100 armour piercing come into play and are needed to get that max piercing. Also, when filling out your armour piercing tables just be real careful not to put the same armour type twice. It's best to set the armour table things in a parent .nil file once and let them all inherit if possible. Relic, for some reason, didn't think that this was a wise move.
And YES, it does get bloody annoying opening all those little table and NO there's no way round it! Sorry!
Reload time: this is found on the main section of the weapon file under "reload_time" surprisingly enough, 2/3 the way down. Obviously the longer the reload (in seconds) the bigger drain on the DPS. Simple. This can enhance the glass cannon nature of a weapon, like the Sentinel's laser. Reload times can only be in increments of 1/8ths of a second apparently. So 0.125, 0.25, 0.375, 0.5 etc.
Morale damage: is just a simple value that should've already spotted near the max damage.
Accuracy: This is a simple decimal at the top of the file. 1.00 = 100% accuracy. 0 = will not fire. Accuracy_reduction_when_moving, which is just below it, reduces the accuracy by that fraction. So 0.80 accuracy with an accuracy_reduction_when_moving of 0.50 gives an accuracy of 0.30 on the move.
Myths I've heard:
"accuracy_reduction_when_moving reduces it by a percentage of the original accuracy" - i.e. 0.80 accuracy reduced by 0.50 = 0.40. Wrong. Assault Cannons on Terminators have 0.65 and are reduced by 0.65, Terms ACs do not fire on the move, because they have been reduced to 0 accuracy. If the myth was true then they would still fire as they would have 0.4225 accuracy.
"1.00 accuracy still misses from time to time." - I've heard this said a few times and can neither confirm nor deny it.
"There's no point having armour piercing over 100." - I think that one is covered above: as it is there is not any point, but if you mess around with the armour values there is.
Other Balance Factors on the weapons file: don't forget that there's "max_range" and "min_range" kicking about on there and also the upgrade price and time in "cost". "Setup_time" is also an important one too for those heavy weapons.
So that's about it really.
