why don't you simply make a mod and set all other range to 0 and see what happens?
Well, that would probably be the most logical way to do it. I haven't played around with modding so far, but I might give it a try in the future. There's a lot of other stuff, e.g. variables affecting scatter calculation, that's a bit obscure to me and would probably way easier to understand using custom mods.
Can you retry with a reliable attack ground unit like the Stug E?
I also assumed max distance damage was 0.
Yeah I've actually done that already with the Command PzIV (equal results with the IS-2) and StugE. The latter is an example for a unit with equal r_f and r_max (4 m), though, so not much info can be gained here with respect to the damage drop off between r_f and r_max. However, it confirmed that dealing exactly 16 damage (= DMF_f) practically doesn't occur (as this would mean the model must stand exactly at 4 m from the impact). Out of 50 or so shots the closest hit to 16 damage I could see was ~16.2.
I've been fooling around with AOE damage calculations lately, and while the way AOE works in the game is pretty well documented understood I've run into a rather unexpected finding while doing some tests with cheatmod.
Now, as most of you will know, there are 6 base values that define the AOE of basically any weapon in-game: the near, mid and far AOE radii (r_n, r_m, r_f) and corresponding AOE damage values (DMG_n, DMG_m, DMG_f), respectively. These describe how much AOE damage is dealt to a target as a function of the distance between the point of impact and target, and a typical AOE-curve looks something like this:
So far so good.
However, there is another stat for the radius of the AOE circle that can be found in the attribute editor (from here on abbreviated as r_max), which can be equal or greater than r_f. In the first case, incorporation of this value doesn't have any effect on the resulting AOE curve. However, if r_max is greater than r_f (which it is for numerous ballistic projectiles), damage should evolve to the corresponding damage value at r_max (DMG_max).
Logically, one could assume that DMG_max should be zero, i.e. the AOE-curve linearly declines to 0 at this point (blue line), but since there seems no value for AOE_max to be defined in the attributes.xml it could as well remain at DMG_f (yellow line).
The way this is encoded in the game clearly has quite a drastic effect on how much AOE damage a unit deals on the outer edges of its AOE envelope, so the question is which case applies?
Unfortunately there isn't much info on this available, so I was left scratching my head for a bit until I decided to do some testing to find out.
Therefore, I used the IS-2 as an example for a unit with much greater r_max (5) than r_f (3) and made it fire near a sniper model at close to its maximum AOE and recording the damage done per shot via cheatmod.
To cut a long story short, while I expected an AOE-curve according to 2. to apply (blue curve), initial test results strongly suggest an actual in-game AOE-curve consistent with scenario 3. (yellow curve). So instead of dropping linearly to zero, the AOE damage remains constant between r_f and r_max, which means I (and possibly others) may have greatly underestimated the AOE performance of certain units (especially that of the IS-2!).
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Location of symbols for grenadiers/panzergrenadiers/assault grenadiers/volksgrenadiers and VSL grenadiers not match with each other. ->
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wow... i've never even noticed this, haha. gotta say your attention to detail truly is unrivaled, and i mean that in the most positive sense. great work and thanks to you guys for steadily improving the visual experience of the game.
very interesting read, thanks for elaborating a bit further on this. i've actually done something similar to estimate the aoe performance by calculating the volume integral of the area under the aoe-curve (in practice i dissected the curve into triangles and squares and added the volumes of the respective cylinder and cone segments , which turned out to be easier in excel). this should, in theory, give the same results than your methods, albeit mine seem to be quite a bit off (e.g. for the tiger i get an area of 170.7 DMG*m and a volume of 1314.3 DMG*m^2)
then, in order to factor in the unit's scatter, i've divided this volume by the respective scatter area at set distances (e.g. 10, 20 and 40 m) to get an aoe performance value for comparison.
however, as you've already pointed out, unit spacing add another huge layer of complexity to the actual aoe performance that would be very difficult to calculate precisely. i've done some numerical simulations with excel before concerning heavy tank aoe here.., which seem to correlate quite nicely with the theoretical aoe performance derived by the above method.
still, i'm also not sure about the exact way how scatter is calculated, so if you - or anyone else - has more info on that i'd be much obliged.
Got my calculation bat to feed some data into this discussion:
This is (if my calc is correct) how the approximate damage AoE curves look like:
"Functional area" is the area with 80 HP as a cap, since more than that are not useful and would scew the data.
I've done some more calc for better AoE estimation not only in the plot area, but the circle estimation.
This gives the following values (in damage*square meter):
Tiger pre 5845
Tiger post 5141
IS2 pre 6979
IS2 post 6359
Regarding AoE only (RoF is neglected, if someone has the exact values at hand please forward them to me), this means that post-patch the Tiger is 88% as good as the pre-patch while 'new' IS2 is 91% as good. The Pre-patch IS2 was 19% better than the Tiger, while this value goes to 23% post-patch.
Overall nerfs don't seem super drastic, but of course can be fine tuned. In the video it look like the Tiger is a bit weak, but it's hard to tell from shooting at two squads. Also it will likely look different in a real battle were models are already damaged by small arms.
first off, kudos for taking the time and sharing the aoe estimations! this kind of data is what the discussion needs imo, since actual in-game tests - as valuable as they are - always suffer from low sample size, huge variability and, in turn, often quite a bit of confirmation bias. that being said, please allow me some comments on the actual data:
looking at the aoe curves, it appears you have neglected the aoe_max radius (at which the aoe damage falls from aoe_far to zero), which adds quite a significant portion to the overall area under the curve. now i might of course be wrong on how the aoe_max is actually implemented in-game, so if you have more info on that i'd be glad to hear.
also, i'd be interested how you derived the dmg/area values, since i've done something similar myself recently to calculate some sort of aoe damage index, also taking the scatter area into account.
I'd give it more warning I think and increase reliability a bit. Kinda make it an onmap off map. Add a munitions cost to firing (say 50mu), when it fires give it a Sturm tiger tinnitus ring and when it hits widen out the aoe far aoe a bit. Now it's got more than enough warning AND an built in prevention for over use AND if you do use it, even a near miss will damage infantry. A bit better, more reliable but all the counter play in the world.
this would be pretty neat indeed. i've actually proposed a similar treatment for the sturmtiger some time ago, which would fit a lot better than the current implementation
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