I’m working on some code that will help me theorycraft fits for missions. Right now mostly to compare the rats in the mission to my fit and see what their likely damage application will be (and eventually my application on them, but PYFA does that pretty well for now). So I have a few questions around that topic.
A lot of the info I’m finding looks like it comes from old data dumps. For instance:
Is this data up to date? I believe you can’t pull this stuff from the client anymore but is it reasonable to expect that CCP has not drastically tweaked the stats on mission rats?
If those attributes are close enough to correct, does anyone have a breakdown of what they all mean? Most are very obvious (HP, damage mod, resistances, chance to web, etc) but there are few that aren’t clear to me:
maxDirectionalVelocity : No idea but appears only on rats with missiles.
minTargetVelDmgMultiplier: Also only on missile rats. Might be a cap on how much the target’s speed can reduce missile damage?
AI_TankingModifierDrone: Is I think an obsolete stat that gave rats a built-in drone resistance…not in use anymore, right?
Finally, I have been unable to find any listing of rat agility/inertia modifier. In other words how fast can rats accelerate and turn based on the game’s movement formulas. Does anyone know where this can be found?
Get them from the ESI. That’s the most accurate you can have.
What they mean
You need to understand what those term mean is : nothing
Those values are used by the game engine, most often when an effect is applied. The names are just the name of the variable in the code.
For example, when I use a webifier, I will apply an effect that is, to multiply target.maximumvelocity by (100 + module.maximuvelocityreduction× (100+ship.webstrengthincrease)/100) /100 (grossly simplified). So it only makes sense when you have the effect.
I don’t know about effects but they can also be found in ESI.
so maxdirectionalvelocity can be an attribute used by rats with missile… to limit their missile speed.
Agility
Again you need to understand that the Attributes are just part of the engine.
All attributes have a default value that is used when the attribute is not set.
for example this attribute https://esi.evetech.net/v1/dogma/attributes/70 has a default value of 0 . So for all that is concerned, any rat that does not have this attribute set to a value, is considered to have that attribute set to 0.
So first of all, thank you so much for letting me know you CAN still pull this from ESI. I will just do that instead of trying to parse some website’s HTML tables. I read in a forum post that you couldn’t pull this anymore and…just believed it instead of looking.
In fact, it turns out that the various stats I asked about particularly are marked “deprecated” in ESI, so that clears those up entirely.
I’m not sure what you mean when you say the terms mean: nothing. I do understand that the values are used as part of an engine calculation. But the names/descriptions are useful to figure out where it’s used…right? So https://esi.evetech.net/v1/dogma/attributes/70 is listed as “agility” and not “warblgarl.” Maybe I misunderstood what you were saying.
The default value is something I suspected must exist (for instance some ships have explicitly listed 0 values and others just don’t have the value) but now I can pull it from ESI when needed. Again, thank you.
One question that does remain is…WTF is going on with Imperial Templar Judgment which apparently has a 1-millisecond fire rate on its Scourge Cruise Missiles…
no.
They can be used to make an “educated guess” but that’s all.
Making a guess is not the same thing as knowing how it works.
How is the agility used on entities ? Why does the burner DD have a value but not zor ?
Remember that entities and ships have different mechanisms.
Those are the two effects the ship can apply : attack target and repair self. no missile.
Therefore this attribute is of no effect. it’s just irrelevant. Maybe it’s a mistake. Maybe it’s the remain of a previous entity.
Again, I told you : those attributes mean nothing.
And it’s literally the same for agility and co.
Ah, I see what you mean, yes.
“All models are wrong, but some are useful”
That’s good to know about the effect being necessary to perform the action. Or at least…that’s a good educated guess, right? Thank you.
Edited to ask: do you have a guess of how agility/turning/acceleration works for entities? Honestly motion is the least important part of my model since it’s too unpredictable but it would be interesting to know how people think it works.
Are the turret hitchance and other common formulas also guesses, or did CCP tell us how they worked at some point?
Both.
CCP explained IIRC how they work for ships, but not for entities. Remember that entities have very different engines.
for example, their capacitor usage formula is not known AFAIK.
even when effect look the same they may be different
Then even known mechanism have small differences . eg crit chance on a multiple turret ships are computed per turrets ; however the entities all have one turret, so when they crit it’s much harder : in effect, the standard deviation is much, much higher for entities and you need to account for that, even if the average DPS is the same the chance of piercing through a layer are very important.
I think I’ve read before that entities have some small amount of cap that can be drained, but it has 0 impact on their turrets, rep, or movement. Does that sound right? But yes, totally different from player ships.
This is the .01 probability of a 300% damage Wrecking shot, right? That does sound like entities are at least using similar hit/damage formula…
The agility question is quite interesting but probably not approachable without field observations. I looked at a list of what entities have non-default values and no standard mission/anomaly rats have it but burner rats do. That’s in keeping with the idea that burners are supposed to be more “player-like” in their stats, I guess?
No that’s not correct.
if the tohit value (0…100) is below 1 , then if the turret hits the damage is critical : multiplier is set to 3 instead of 0.5+tohit. It does not mean that the turret hits, which is what “1% chance of 300%” would imply.
Thank you for the correction. Just so I’m sure I understood,
If the random number is less than 0.01 (1% chance) a special case occurs, a perfect hit, these will always deal exactly 300% of the base damage.
I definitely had this explained to me as meaning that whenever something less than 0.01 is returned, the shot automatically hits. But that is not the case, you’re saying. So if the calculated chance to hit is, say, 0.0005 that means there is still only a 0.0005 probability to hit, but it will always be 3x damage rather than the normal .5-1.49x range?
precisely.
Note that it may not be totally true for entities, as people claim to have been hit by rats, with a crit, at distances several time the falloff of the rats I think it’s 500kmof a 50+20km range, so 20 times the falloff, ie one chance over 2^20 = ±1 000 000 . We don’t know, and there is no obvious reason why CCP would have made a specific engine for entities hit chance