Hello.
Cap injectors don’t produce very much value with lower cap consumables. It is possible to remain cap stable with 400s in a frigate despite the reload times involved per cycle than it is with 200’s, which to me seems a bit hard to understand. This remains true all the way up to battleships which have nearly completely forgotten to use 800s at all in lieu of 3200.
As you can see here despite having only one injector, the 3200 injected hyperion is more capstable (better sustain) than a dual injected 800’s hyperion, using bigger guns and gaining another web for its trouble. Otherwise the fits are the same.
How did this slip through testing? This phenomenon means that while in edge cases where you’re facing a heavy neuting pressure a dual injector fit might have an edge - it just isn’t true in most cases. The problem is so bad that actually when fighting each other, the cap lifetime unheated for the dual injector drops to 4 minutes, it remains stable for the 3200. Play around with the ship stats any way you feel like, I think that this injector setup is a poor trade for most battleships and we have seen the trend towards ALL ships using 3200s, ALL cruisers using 800s, ALL frigates using 400s for a very long time.
The only benefit for the dual injector is that you can store extra charges in the injectors themselves giving you a marginal edge in total actual available injected cap. Do ships die without using all their 3200s? Sure. Probably all the time. If they cannot leverage their 3200s then why would anyone expect that dual 800’s would perform any better?
So my proposal is to lower the cycle time for injectors, perhaps even relative to the size of charges loaded. 800s should obviously be worse than 3200s for burst but should sustain better. 400s in a destroyer should obviously be better for burst but 200’s x3 should be better for sustained operation. Over the course of many cycles, the sustained cap rate for lower charges should not be at such a disparity in performance. I’m not enough of a maths expert to know where the breakpoint is but I feel that this is a low overhead change that can open some options and perhaps even make frigates want to load up with cap booster 50’s for some kind of extreme fringe application instead of the current era where people forget these exist.
Really interesting and well thought-out article. I like the suggestion of reduced cycle times for smaller charges (assuming Navy cap boosters would have slightly less). +1
Did you do a price comparison between the two? Manufacturing cost ideally as the actual cost in the market is driven by supply and demand. Not that I think balance should be overly impacted by cost, but it is a factor. You generally don’t want the signifantly better option being cheaper.
plz, do the Graph again without the 500er MWD running all the time, because that is a highly unusual scenario. Having to deal with extreme cap pressure of course favours the 3200er injectors over dual 800s, because 3200 simply is twice the boost amount of 1600, even with the reload time. At least as long as you have cap and aren’t neuted dry constantly by hostile forces so you can’t activate your reppers and guns anyway.
What your graph also doesn’t show but what is extremely useful in combat is having smaller boost amounts but the ability to boost more often for instantly activating your repper a single time. That is nessessary if unter heavy neut pressure so you go dry and are constantly kept dry again. Using one Rep Cycle on each 800er is by far more useful than using one rep cycle on each 3200er.
I did cover the possibility of wanting smaller amounts when under heavy neut pressure. I specifically stated this. And it depends too, because 400gj activation cost for reppers and if you’re getting attacked by enough things you might go under that, timing your injection alongside a 3200 can help with the risk that the surplus gets neuted out.
Thank you for your effort. If I interpret the picures correctly, the 800s come into trouble at the 5 minute mark. Now as someone having seen a lot of PvP fights I can ensure you nobody can overheat his reppers or neuts for 5 minutes straight, so we can safely assume that the red line would - even after 5 minutes - be very comfortable somewhere along the 2000cap line. Which would be somewhat around peak recharge if I am not mistaken, so it is still not a horrible position to be in.
Yes, thats on paper less than the 3200er line, but keep in mind the following:
A Hyperion can carry at most 9x 3200er Navy Cap boosters, 1 in the Injector, 8 in cargo when using 2x Medium Standard Containers to store them. The rest of the Cargo you will probably need for some Ammo, you will want to shoot at someone, right? That means your green line would de-facto end at around 200sek and then you are out of boosters anyway. Thats a total cap of 28.800 you can inject and you won’t even reach the 5 minute mark with them, where the 800ers get into trouble.
The same Hyperion can carry 44x 800er Navy Cap boosters (6 each in both injectors, 16 each in 2 Medium Standard Containers). Thats a total cap of 35.200 you can inject over a longer time. You sacrifice a medslot and some PG, but you gain a lot of additional cap injected and can stretch that over a longer time period to pulse your reppers/guns.
edit: ah I re-read your opening post and found your proposal for a change. Well, I don’t think it’s that bad of an idea, but the adjustments would have to be tweaked pretty carefully, because the current balance doesn’t look that bad to me. If you tweak too much, we might end up again with one solution being far superior to the other. Maybe also take a look at the Capacity of the Capacitor Boosters, some can’t be fully loaded with certain boosters, leaving unused capacity in them, which feels pretty unsatisfying for the user. Could be another screw to tweak besides cycle time.
Again thanks for a well thought idea, it’s rare these days. Good luck!
Yes the maximum cap time is 200s for this hyperion, but lets not forget that a hyperion is not the only target you could be fighting. I presented the ship only as a demonstration that in a 1v1 the 3200 has a strong argument that it is better by virtue of having more mids open and an easier to micro manage cap system (whereas with 800s dual injected you need to be injecting from second zero as we can see because you WILL cap out, ergo injecting from the start of the fight is required to not cap out too early).
Here’s another way of looking at it, depending on starting cap amount ships either do better or worse with the 3200 not risking capping out. I decided to modify the dual injector to running dual neuts and see if it was possible to cap out the 3200 ship before it would use all of its charges, which didnt appear to be possible without using EV900 drones (which noone takes for obvious reasons). Not to mention that the 3200 will do more DPS than a dual neuting hyperion because its taking heavy drones of one flavour or another and you’re using dinky little EV drones…
So in conclusion, if a dual neuting hyperion running dual injectors and a full flight of EV drones is unable to cap out a 3200 injected hyperion before it uses all its charges up, while taking 450 dps more than he is, while dual webbed, then what is the bloody point of 800s as they stand currently. And you can extrapolate these results outwards I think - because in any scenario where these dual injected ships will win stems from them not being in material danger of taking too much DPS in the first place. Dual injector is about cap lifetime but you don’t get that benefit unless the enemy caps out and dies before you do.
Dual injected fits aren’t useless but I think the tradeoffs aren’t there. Having faster rates of injection could perhaps afford you taking a 3rd repper and running a full rack of neutron cannons, giving you back some dps while still having enough reps to eat the damage from a 3200 injected ship for the 3 minutes it takes for him to cap out.
Could be another screw to tweak besides cycle time.