Penetration and damage

[Guest]

My clan mate said that he thinks that when shotting a target, if you just barely penetrate you do reduced damage and you actually have to penetrate by a significant amount to do the full damage of the shot.

Is this how penetration mechanics work. And also how does penetration work with bleeding damage through to structure?

If it is true long cannons>medium cannons when it comes to dps.

[Guest]

Ok thanks. What determines structure damage bleed through? Cause sometimes theres no bleed through and sometimes half the structure is gone by the time the armor gets stripped.

[Aster]

From what I can tell if it pens it does damage, lower pen does not reduce damage otherwise double shot would do less damage due to less pen. Damage does drop off with range though.

[Guest]

27 minutes ago, Aster said:

From what I can tell if it pens it does damage, lower pen does not reduce damage otherwise double shot would do less damage due to less pen. Damage does drop off with range though.

Does it? Could it not be that increased range reduces pen and therefore damage.

It feels like a threshold where if you overpenetrate by 10cm you do 100% damage but if you only pen by 1cm you do 50% or something.

[z4ys]

Back during the shotlogger days. A shot that pen did 50dmg while a nonpen shot only did 1.2dmg.

I believe you can still experience it. Use a big carronades shot at an angle so it bounces (best against a ship that has low Max hp like most shallow ships so losing hp gives visual feedback)and you will experience a small hp drop.

But don't get fooled by unsync hits. Those visual hits generate splinter but don't do dmg.

Edited October 10, 2018 by z4ys

[Christendom]

why don't we have a shot logger in game anymore?

[Guest]

54 minutes ago, Flinch said:

Ok thanks. What determines structure damage bleed through? Cause sometimes theres no bleed through and sometimes half the structure is gone by the time the armor gets stripped.

That's the amount of penetration. Something like a 42 lb long gun will cause damage on the side, middle, and maybe even a bit on the opposite side of small ships. A 4 lb gun won't make it that far, and won't hurt anything except the original side, until the side is nearly gone. You see this a decent amount with close range Carronades, because they have high pen at close range. 

I remember this was obvious when dueling Hatchi one time, him on Trinc, myself on Endy. My 24lb guns we're doing a decent amount of structure damage (minimal bow/stern raking, mostly from broadside damage) and his 18s we're not doing much structure damage to me. In a long fight it begins to make a difference. He was down 3 bars after a while, and it began hurting his speed.  

[William Death]

1 hour ago, Christendom said:

why don't we have a shot logger in game anymore?

Because AI can use double shot/charge in carronades and we're not supposed to know about it. Hence "shotlogger is not accurate and was removed."

Seriously though, we should have a shotlogger.

 

And no, from what I can tell, if you pen, you do full damage. No pen = no damage. 

Same with demasting: if you have mast thickness 122, but I can pen 124 at the range I'm at, your mast is coming down. But if you had 125cm mast thickness, I'll never make that mast fall. Well, I could, doing 1.2 damage (or whatever the non-pen value is these days....not much) per non-penetrating shot....which, for a 1000HP mast (or hull) would be.....~834 hits. Assuming 17 cannons on the bottom deck of a Santisima, and I get 100% hit rate to that mast (nobody does). Thats approximately 50 reloads @ ~60s per reload means its going to take pretty much the whole fight for me to destroy 1000HP with cannons that are under pen by 1cm. And then there's a repair every 12 minutes....yeah not gonna happen. 

As far as over pen...best I can tell is if you have big enough guns, you can basically punch all the way through the ship, taking out both sides and the center bar by simply shooting one side. I noticed this in some frigate duels where I had 24s, or in 4th rate duels where I sailed Ingermanland. Firing point blank into the enemy's side would take down all three bars.

 

And always, long cannons or carronades. Leave mediums to casuals and crazy captains with ridiculous builds (full reload + some pen mods on a fast ship with mediums equipped). Every time I try medium cannons, I regret it. They don't have the pen to demast, they don't have the accuracy or pen to fight at range, and they don't do enough damage to justify picking them over carronades for short range stuff. Oh, and the couple seconds faster reload is laughable. Much, much better to simply run carronades with lots of accuracy mods. Maybe a pen mod or two and you'll feel like you have mediums for the effective ranges you can fight at. As it stands, carronades are good to about 250-400m depending on class....I can't justify picking mediums to extend that range by a little more, while doing significantly less damage and still no ability to demast.

[Tomasso il Fortunato]

Don't angle to the enemy and after shoot ...

I don't see problems. 

[Norfolk nChance]

On ‎10‎/‎11‎/‎2018 at 12:32 AM, EliteDelta said:

I remember this was obvious when dueling Hatchi one time, him on Trinc, myself on Endy. My 24lb guns we're doing a decent amount of structure damage (minimal bow/stern raking, mostly from broadside damage) and his 18s we're not doing much structure damage to me. In a long fight it begins to make a difference. He was down 3 bars after a while, and it began hurting his speed.  

@EliteDelta

You make a really good point here. The long fight adds or expands his attrition rate yet they the stats don’t look overly different 10% +/- your power over his. I was just looking at these numbers from the wiki so out of date but interesting...

Endy 14x 3-24-L at 250m penetration 106 dealing 55 damage total 770 broadside. His Trinc 14x 4-18-L at 250m 94 dealing 53 damage total 742 broadside.

 

 

 

BASE Side thickness 57cm on the Endy and 57cm on the Trinc. The Hit Points also very similar.

 

 

If you hit him at 250m, 106 is > than 57 so you dealt 55 damage to the thickness planking. You’ve over penetrated by 46%. The Ball must have gone through to the Internal Structure.  Would you then deal 46% damage of 55 so 25 dmg then to his Internal Structure...?

Then 46% of 25 is 12 dmg to the far side amour’s health...?

Something like 55+25+12 dmg dealt from one Ball showing the overpenetration.  This looks excessive but a reward is needed for delivering 46% over pen. Without the ALT+L it's hard to tell

 

 

Edited October 16, 2018 by Norfolk nChance

[jodgi]

4 hours ago, Christendom said:

why don't we have a shot logger in game anymore?

From memory:

It was put in as a debug tool. Didn't get updated along with mechanics changes and gave incorrect data in some cases. Was pulled out to avoid annoying and disinformed bug reports. That's my diplomatic version.

Remember when they pulled mast pen feedback? I bet shotlogger was pulled for similar reasons. We're not supposed to know, it gets in the way of the sandbox experience, puts too much power in the hands of players with a clue, affects mod and tactics choices too much, mystery and fog-of-war guesswork is replaced with skill... It just won't do.

[Norfolk nChance]

3 minutes ago, jodgi said:

From memory:

It was put in as a debug tool. Didn't get updated along with mechanics changes and gave incorrect data in some cases. Was pulled out to avoid annoying and disinformed bug reports. That's my diplomatic version.

Remember when they pulled mast pen feedback? I bet shotlogger was pulled for similar reasons. We're not supposed to know, it gets in the way of the sandbox experience, puts too much power in the hands of players with a clue, affects mod and tactics choices too much, mystery and fog-of-war guesswork is replaced with skill... It just won't do.

It worked in Legends I think because they used the old ship models to start with. But PvP Pen and angle values were all wrong. I'm surprised it shows up in the TEST BED controls so I'm hoping for a return, just like I am with legends...

 

NnC

 

[William Death]

4 hours ago, jodgi said:

From memory:

It was put in as a debug tool. Didn't get updated along with mechanics changes and gave incorrect data in some cases. Was pulled out to avoid annoying and disinformed bug reports. That's my diplomatic version.

Remember when they pulled mast pen feedback? I bet shotlogger was pulled for similar reasons. We're not supposed to know, it gets in the way of the sandbox experience, puts too much power in the hands of players with a clue, affects mod and tactics choices too much, mystery and fog-of-war guesswork is replaced with skill... It just won't do.

Yep its "not accurate" (yet it worked 100% of the time to tell me if my shots were penning or not). And "fog of war" to make it more realistic while we rebuild our masts and construct new sides of our ships every 12 minutes.

 

In addition to your speculations, I'll provide mine:

Ctrl + L was removed at the same time as epic event patch was added. Now, its only anecdotal evidence, but the "42 pd cannons" on the bottom decks of those epic first rates hurt my Live Oak Floating Battery Santisima A lot more than any player's 42 cannons have ever done. I'd not be surprised if they're really using the same long cannons the towers use, or some other, heavier loadout like that. 

I also seem to recall hearing that some AI Victories on the testbed version of that patch were running 42/32/24/18 for their loadout, or something like that (but I can't confirm this). So perhaps the shotlogger is hidden from us to hide hard evidence that AI is sailing better equipped ships than us . 

Also, admin told me to learn to play when I sent my bug report of AI using double charge through carros and said that AI never cheats. Yet I did the final exam on an alt the other day and the Cerberus I captured had double charged carronades in the stern.... But absolutely not. AI has no ability a player doesn't!