Very interesting read / discussion about "Continuous AA"!

[Leo_Apollo11]

Hi all,

 

Very interesting read / discussion about "Continuous AA"!

 

Quote

The problem with continuous AA (it's math)

 

In some CV threads lately, I've seen people saying that the new AA system is the same or better than the old system, and the only difference is that WG nerfed the damage values. Surely it's better now that planes have hitpoints, instead of AA being pure RNG?

 

But I don't think it is, and the new continuous damage rules are part of the problem.

 

In the old system, planes didn't really have hitpoints and AA guns didn't really do damage. The game used the AA guns' damage value and the planes' durability value to calculate a probability of killing a plane. As far as I know, this probability was simply durability/dps - it did not depend on the number of planes in the squadron. Every second (or so), there was an RNG roll, and if it succeeded the CV lost a plane. Unless the CV loses planes, there's no cost for flying over a ship.

 

Since the CV rework, the hitpoints are real. Every second, the AA guns choose a plane and deal their dps value in damage to that plane. This is modified by the ship's hit chance, but in practice the difference between something like 300 damage/66% hit chance and 250 damage/80% hit chance isn't important - both of them just do 200 dps. Except for heals, the damage is persistent, so even if AA doesn't shoot anything down it reduces the health pools for allied ships.

 

So far it doesn't sound like too much of a difference.

 

But if you pay attention, the RNG is still there. The AA guns randomly choose which plane to shoot. And it turns out that this is very different from the old system.

 

In a world with no RNG at all, you'd expect that a ship with 100 dps AA would take 10 seconds to kill a 1000 hp plane. The old AA more or less followed that - the actual time it took to kill a plane was random, but 100 dps gave you (more or less) a 10% chance of killing a plane per second.

 

With the rework AA, the damage is applied to a random plane, so it's more or less evenly spread across the squadron. Very few planes will die early, until the damage gets high enough and all the planes die in quick succession.

 

Here's a graph of how it works out. In the old AA system, ships kill planes at a constant rate (the graph gets flatter as time goes by, but that's because there's a chance that all the planes are already dead by then). In the new system, it takes the same amount of time to do the same amount of damage, but most of the planes die at the very end.

 

 

edit: actually this graph understates it, I'm not going to remake it but the line for 'old AA' should be above the line for 'no RNG' (thanks /u/Carrier_Hosho)

 

What does this mean in practice? It takes a CV the same amount of time to bomb a low AA ship as a high AA ship, so generally if the ship has half as much AA it'll do half as much plane damage. But unlike the old system, in the new system half as much plane damage doesn't translate into half as many kills. If a ship has enough dps to do half the squadron's hp in damage, it can only expect to kill maybe one plane.

 

And this is compounded because plane damage is irrelevant unless the plane dies before returning to the CV, and plane kills are irrelevant unless the planes die faster than the regeneration rate. Having 50% of the AA required to kill the whole squadron isn't 50% as effective, it's very nearly useless.

 

It's not any better from the CV's point of view. In order to have effective AA against tier 10 CVs, a ship needs to do almost enough damage to wipe the squadron. Tier 8 CVs have lower plane hp because of tier progression, and the right half of that damage versus plane kills curve is steep enough that that reduction in plane hp can mean the difference between losing a few planes and having the whole squadron wiped before it can drop.

 

This isn't just an issue of 'feeling irrelevant'. With the pre rework AA mechanics, adding 10% AA dps led to killing 10% more aircraft, unless the AA was already good enough to kill all the aircraft before they finished the attack. Now, adding AA dps does basically nothing until it reaches the 'critical mass' where there's enough AA to kill all the planes, and then after that the effect is much bigger.

 

(but in general against same tier CVs, the only way to reach that critical mass is by stacking AA from multiple ships)

 

It's hard to see how you'd make a balanced tier progression of both planes and AA with this mechanic. Just tweaking the numbers doesn't work, because the plane kill rate is a result of how AA damage is applied. If higher tier planes have noticeably more health than lower tier, and higher tier ships have enough AA to matter against those planes, then undertiered planes will have a very hard time against AA and vice versa.

 

Planes dying slowly early on and faster after being in AA for some time does arguably introduce an element of skill for the CV player, but I think it would be much easier to do that that by making the AA damage itself ramp up with time. The continuous AA damage mechanic doesn't actually punish staying in AA, rather it punishes using heavily damaged planes.

 

A few possible ways to mitigate this:

• Make AA damage and plane squadron health almost constant across tiers. But then you need a different way of making higher tier CVs an improvement over the lower tiers.

• Make AA do enough damage that all planes die in just a couple hits. This is how games like Navyfield and Steel Ocean did it, and also how the flak burst mechanic is balanced. But the WoWS flak bursts just serve as a skill wall for CV players and are ineffective against reasonably skilled CVs, and in Navyfield and Steel Ocean most of the AA damage came from manually aimed guns that were sort of a skill contest between the CV and ship players.

• Make damaged planes matter. Doing half a squadron worth of damage might not mean killing any planes, but if taking 50% damage on your squadron were as bad as losing a few planes that wouldn't be an issue. The tier progression in AA damage and plane health also wouldn't have to be as drastic if damaged planes mattered.

• Make continuous AA prioritize damaged planes. It doesn't need to shoot the most damaged plane every time, but the less evenly damage is spread across the squadron the more linear the damage/kills curve is and the more uniform the value of a 10% AA boost is.

 

 

tl;dr: I think the CV rework continuous AA mechanics were poorly thought out and they make it really hard to have a sensible tier progression of CVs versus AA.

 

Source Reddit (author "AvrilTagine")

 

 

Leo "Apollo11"

[DFens_666]

Well id say, if the AA would focus one plane at a time, then it would be easier to balance atleast. Also you could pretty much guaranteed say, how fast you will lose a plane against ship X's AA.

[salva_barbus]

It's fantastic to see someone who has researched in-depth something that was bothering me but couldn't put into words. It bothered me to see that plane kills were following that exponential curve with continuous damage (none at the start, pop like flies at the end).

 

I don't know if it would be balanced, but I prefer the solution in which continuous AA would prioritise the most damaged plane, or just choose a plane and fire at it until it dies, and then choose the next plane.

[veslingr]

Single ship AAA is fine, i get peoles would like AAA on single ship that would "stop" full strike of a CV.....but that is what WG wanted to change (we had that)....because if you put 4-5 of those kind ships in single game, CV can just exit game.

 

also passive skills should never be able to full stop player.

[lup3s]

Thank you for this info @Leo_Apollo11; a "quick fix" could indeed be to make AA prioritize damaged planes more.

[invicta2012]

22 minutes ago, veslingr said:

Single ship AAA is fine, i get peoles would like AAA on single ship that would "stop" full strike of a CV.....but that is what WG wanted to change (we had that)....because if you put 4-5 of those kind ships in single game, CV can just exit game.

 

 

Sorry. Couldn't resist. 

[veslingr]

3 minutes ago, invicta2012 said:

 

 

Sorry. Couldn't resist. 

you can not overcome no flying zone and 100% immunity, WG was avare of that problem in "RTS" but than CVs could overcome by hughe alpha they could deal in a second...so they need couple of seconds of oportunity to overcome small gap in AAA.

 

now with torps dooing average 2k dmg and with fewer droping planes need to attack many times to do competitive dmg, and with stronger AAA they could not do that.

 

that is why you can not have RTS AAA and todays alpha.

[Makoniel]

There's another thing I'd like to add with that. 
I find it really dumb that damaged planes are not automatically assigned to the attack formation. To maximize survivability, they should be allowed to be part of the next run and then fly away asap, keeping the intact planes in reserve for laters runs. 

I know, it wouldn't help with this exponential curve, yet, it'd be more logical... I mean, if you know you're gonna die if you stay too long, you'd want to act right now. 
 

[Beaker71]

I presume I've seen this when playing in a Kidd. Rack up huge amount of tick damage (for a DD) - zero plane kills, then 2 seconds later, the ribbon bar goes mental and i've got 5+ kills (unless it's a flak burst - but I don't think it is, as the counter goes up rapidly one at a time, not a sudden jump to +5)

[Verblonde]

Thanks for posting that @Leo_Apollo11 - I'd wondered why the planes kills behaved as they do, but had been too lazy to make the effort to find out.

[Xevious_Red]

24 minutes ago, Beaker71 said:

I presume I've seen this when playing in a Kidd. Rack up huge amount of tick damage (for a DD) - zero plane kills, then 2 seconds later, the ribbon bar goes mental and i've got 5+ kills (unless it's a flak burst - but I don't think it is, as the counter goes up rapidly one at a time, not a sudden jump to +5)

Its also the reason why you do a ton of plane damage with no kills (and therefore no XP), then the planes fly over a BB, all 12 die, and the BB gets a bunch of XP.

[LemonadeWarriorITA]

I've read it, pretty well written! 

Focussing on one plane will make it for CV players more difficult to drop their load on ships, since it will be more likely that they will lose planes during a drop. 

 

[veslingr]

11 minutes ago, LemonadeWarrior said:

Focussing on one plane will make it for CV players more difficult to drop their load on ships, since it will be more likely that they will lose planes during a drop. 

 

This....and it would lead to drop in DMG done .

 

if wee look at average DMG of CVS we see :

 

- on t8 they are not topping DMG meters and todays CV do smaller dmg than RTS ones 

- on t 10 we see same picture, only 1 cv is in top 9 dmg ships

 

conclusion is that CVS dmg is not out of proportion and increase in AAA is not needed

 

 

[Mad_Dog_Dante]

Thank you. This shows why planes get killed on their way out more often then on their way in, which is backwards as a game experience to me, both as a surface vessel as well as CV captain. I hope they will adress AA issues like this in the next adaptation of the AA system.

[Beaker71]

21 minutes ago, veslingr said:

This....and it would lead to drop in DMG done .

 

if wee look at average DMG of CVS we see :

 

- on t8 they are not topping DMG meters and todays CV do smaller dmg than RTS ones 

- on t 10 we see same picture, only 1 cv is in top 9 dmg ships

 

conclusion is that CVS dmg is not out of proportion and increase in AAA is not needed

 

 

 

Why does everybody do this! Total damage done, does not indicate if a class/ship/player is powerful/op.

 

I could do 50k damage in a gunboat DD, all against other DDs - yet a conq might do 150k against a couple of BBs. So using raw damage as a measure - the BB is somehow 3 times more valuable than me?

 

No of course it's not, and the battle results will indicate this more often than not. Experience is a more useful indicator of "useful damage".  Good CV players do a lot more damage to DDs than they ever used to with the RTS version. Their total damage might be down, but their XP, and overall influence on the game has gone up.

[veslingr]

10 minutes ago, Beaker71 said:

 

Why does everybody do this! Total damage done, does not indicate if a class/ship/player is powerful/op.

 

I could do 50k damage in a gunboat DD, all against other DDs - yet a conq might do 150k against a couple of BBs. So using raw damage as a measure - the BB is somehow 3 times more valuable than me?

 

No of course it's not, and the battle results will indicate this more often than not. Experience is a more useful indicator of "useful damage".  Good CV players do a lot more damage to DDs than they ever used to with the RTS version. Their total damage might be down, but their XP, and overall influence on the game has gone up.

Well here we talk about change in AAA that would lead to drop of DMG for sure.

 

This "problem" does not affect spotting or problems with DDs been too vulnerable to CVs. 

 

 

Experience is not very good parameter because it is not base exp so if you have exp modiificators you will have more EXP even if my base (without premium) is higher than yours. Also some of ships have different EXP modifiers (built in ships stats) than others. 

 

also i could not disagree more about dds....good cv player with 3 TBs crosdrop would kill dd much faster than it can today

[SkollUlfr]

this explains why tier difference made more difference than ship class in the plane vs ship game.

[Beastofwar]

Explains perfectly why 2 plane squadrons ( or less then half full squadrons ) have a low chance to attack a ship and hit it. All those AA complainers better remember that when they wish to beeeeeh about "limitless" respawning planes again. Alternating full continuous AA damage between 2 planes = zappp so having 2 respawned planes in a squadron  is equal to being deplaned with 0 planes. Although you could stil spot or drop a consumable if you still have them.

 

The mechanic i dislike is that planes that are attacking/disengaging after a weapons drop are not the most damaged ones. You get to keep the orange and red ones that will not live for another attack run. In any realistic situation you would send the badly damaged ones home as long as they still can....

 

I did not know AA was alternating between aircraft, it appeared to just spread it's damage over all aircraft in the squadron. But it makes sense as there are often red damaged ones and still green ones. Would not happen that frequently with evenly spread damage over all planes, so my assumption was bodged, but i never gave it much thought.

 

So thanks clearing that up. Will make no difference in game, but now we know how it really works.

 

 

 

[El2aZeR]

Just to clarify RTS AA wasn't a complete RNG fest. It was rising chance over time up to 90%, base chance and the rate at which it rises was determined by a plane health - AA calculation in some way. After several 90% ticks a plane would get destroyed guaranteed (Fara called this the "pity timer"). The squad also received a health buff/debuff if a plane was destroyed early/late respectively (the buff you could counterplay by turning your AA off and on again).

 

Likewise AA DPS doesn't seem to target randomly either. I believe it prioritizes healthy planes first, basically guaranteeing you at least one successful attack.

[DFens_666]

52 minutes ago, El2aZeR said:

Likewise AA DPS doesn't seem to target randomly either. I believe it prioritizes healthy planes first, basically guaranteeing you at least one successful attack.

 

I rather wonder if certain ships target low-HP planes, because some ships seem to get all the planekills - especially the ones with weaker AA. Today ranked 60k planedamage with SAlem, but only 18 shot down. The GK/Conq which were hugging me, got 45 combined

[El2aZeR]

28 minutes ago, DFens_666 said:

I rather wonder if certain ships target low-HP planes, because some ships seem to get all the planekills - especially the ones with weaker AA. Today ranked 60k planedamage with SAlem, but only 18 shot down. The GK/Conq which were hugging me, got 45 combined

 

They don't. It has more to do with the individual tickrate of AA guns. Faster ticking guns are inevitably better at killing low HP planes than slower ones.

That and Salem has no close range AA, meaning after a certain distance you stop dealing damage completely.

[DFens_666]

11 minutes ago, El2aZeR said:

 

They don't. It has more to do with the individual tickrate of AA guns. Faster ticking guns are inevitably better at killing low HP planes than slower ones. 

That and Salem has no close range AA, meaning after a certain distance you stop dealing damage completely.

 

Yeah i know, but he hardly ever attacked me (even less so with bombs). So my AA should have been working most of the time. And Salem AA tick isnt really slow... well neither is Conq Mid, just checked, but their DPS is lower than mine

[El2aZeR]

6 minutes ago, DFens_666 said:

Yeah i know, but he hardly ever attacked me (even less so with bombs). So my AA should have been working most of the time. And Salem AA tick isnt really slow... well neither is Conq Mid, just checked, but their DPS is lower than mine

 

Well, it's entirely possible that BBs actually get priority over cruisers if they both happen to tick at the same time.

Personally I found that BBs are usually the ones to get the most plane kills even if there happen to be other ships in the area.

[DFens_666]

Just now, El2aZeR said:

Personally I found that BBs are usually the ones to get the most plane kills even if there happen to be other ships in the area.

 

Same - thats why i was wondering... would fit WGs BBaby agenda perfectly

[Tyrendian89]

it's not just weird, it's actually broken... as brought to you by the ever-excellent LittleWhiteMouse and her science team...

 

https://forum.worldofwarships.com/topic/192541-continuous-aa-dps-explained/