It's diffcult to evaluate the value of this stat. Is it strong enough to win you battles otherwise you'd lose? Or is it just a bonus?
Exactly how good is ship fire rate?
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Its the only other easily accessible way to get the upper hand in combat versus a same size fleet. So it is very valuable.
The other 2 being fleet/weapon composition (early mid game) and damage repeatable tech cards (end game)
The other 2 being fleet/weapon composition (early mid game) and damage repeatable tech cards (end game)
If given a choice I prefer + weapon damage bonuses but I do value + fire rate. The more the better as long as you don't sacrifice too much damage or anything else to get there.
Generally you want to stack all the bonuses you can get a hold of, even if you're already better since it means you take fewer losses. Damage is also better at getting kills but fire rate is better at missiles vs point defense.
I played a game with it and it seemed to be effective, especially since it was so easy to stack. That said, the AI is currently pretty inept, so it's hard to be definitive about how well it will work in the future. Here was my setup...
20% Fanatic Militarist
10% Distinguished Admiralty
10% Supremacy Tradition
33% No Retreat (War Doctrine unlocked by Supremacy)
So, relatively early in the game you can have +73% fire rate after unlocking your first ascension perk. Alternatively, you could also add Fanatic Purifier for another +33% (although you can't be Fanatic Militarist). There are also various admiral traits and bonuses from cyborg / erudite that can apply per fleet.
20% Fanatic Militarist
10% Distinguished Admiralty
10% Supremacy Tradition
33% No Retreat (War Doctrine unlocked by Supremacy)
So, relatively early in the game you can have +73% fire rate after unlocking your first ascension perk. Alternatively, you could also add Fanatic Purifier for another +33% (although you can't be Fanatic Militarist). There are also various admiral traits and bonuses from cyborg / erudite that can apply per fleet.
Balance ratio 1:1 between firerate bonus and damage bonus is ideal for maximize damage output.
For example, fleet with 90% firerate and 10% damage bonus is significantly weaker than fleet with 50% fire rate and 50% damage bonus (1.9 x 1.1 < 1.5 x 1.5), though the investment in techs are "consider the same".
Overall, 5% firerate is worth the same as 5% damage bonus.
But, most of the time, damage bonus is much more rare than firerate bonus, so, in current game, damagebonus is more valuable than firerate bonus. Focus on damage bonus first in tech research.
For example, fleet with 90% firerate and 10% damage bonus is significantly weaker than fleet with 50% fire rate and 50% damage bonus (1.9 x 1.1 < 1.5 x 1.5), though the investment in techs are "consider the same".
Overall, 5% firerate is worth the same as 5% damage bonus.
But, most of the time, damage bonus is much more rare than firerate bonus, so, in current game, damagebonus is more valuable than firerate bonus. Focus on damage bonus first in tech research.
Plus fire rate is preferred over plus damage because it is not impacted by overkill.
Overkill is where a weapon does 100 points of damage but only 50 points were needed to kill the target. Doing 110 damage points does not cause any extra damage.
Firing every 9 sec vs 10 sec is always a straight 10% DPS buff. Or at least that is what my MMO brain tells me.
Overkill is where a weapon does 100 points of damage but only 50 points were needed to kill the target. Doing 110 damage points does not cause any extra damage.
Firing every 9 sec vs 10 sec is always a straight 10% DPS buff. Or at least that is what my MMO brain tells me.
Is it fair to say that +10% fire rate means +10% DPS? Or are there more factors than that?
Well, yes, but if the battle only lasts 11 sec, DPS isn't really the measure you want. Slow firing weapons still benefit from getting a volley in that much sooner, but the big thing you're looking for on those is high alpha. Small, fast weapons have smoother output, so DPS is a more useful metric and your logic works.
Fire rate is more usefull for winning the current tactical battle as you have less overkill and more hits, meaning you force the enemy into earlier emergency FTLs, weapon damage on the other hand means less hits to kill the enemy, meaning less chances for the enemy to emergency FTL, meaning more expensive destroyed ships on the strategic level, and bigger upfront damage, thinning the enemy out earlier.
It's not a trivial question which of both is better (and you usually don't have t choose between one or the other anyway).
It's not a trivial question which of both is better (and you usually don't have t choose between one or the other anyway).
Others have addressed the issue in good detail.
I would just add, if you haven't played a Fanatic Purifier game yet, you should give it a try. It is a real pleasure to watch fleet battles once you've stacked Militarist with Distinguished Admiralty & No Retreat Doctrine with the Supremacy and Harmony rate of fire increases. 33 + 33 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 15 = 111% rate of fire increase before any repeatable techs. With the FP boost to naval capacity, it's usually possible to bring equal or greater numbers as well. IMO, Fanatic Purifier built for ROF increase is one the most OP empire builds in the game. If you get lucky with Cloud Lightning, you can lure a FE into your territory early and wreck them with penetration weapons. It's a lot fun.
However you play though, yes, rate of fire increase is a significant bonus and worth acquiring.
I would just add, if you haven't played a Fanatic Purifier game yet, you should give it a try. It is a real pleasure to watch fleet battles once you've stacked Militarist with Distinguished Admiralty & No Retreat Doctrine with the Supremacy and Harmony rate of fire increases. 33 + 33 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 15 = 111% rate of fire increase before any repeatable techs. With the FP boost to naval capacity, it's usually possible to bring equal or greater numbers as well. IMO, Fanatic Purifier built for ROF increase is one the most OP empire builds in the game. If you get lucky with Cloud Lightning, you can lure a FE into your territory early and wreck them with penetration weapons. It's a lot fun.
However you play though, yes, rate of fire increase is a significant bonus and worth acquiring.
As far as I can tell, +X% fire rate means +X% DPS (over an unlimited time horizon). Raising your fire rate by 25% doesn't make your weapon cooldown 75% of what it was (3/4 the cooldown would be 4/3 the DPS, a 33.3% bonus), it makes your cooldown 80% of what it was (4/5 the cooldown is 5/4 the shots-per-time, which is 1.25x as you'd expect). This means that it scales linearly; getting from +90% fire rate to +100% fire rate doesn't mean your weapons go from having 0.1x cooldown (firing 10x as much as default) to 0.0x cooldown (infinite shots per second); that would obviously be incorrect.
However, modifiers to the same stat stack additively in Stellaris, not multiplicatively. This means that if you already have a +20% fire rate bonus (1.2x shots/sec) and get another 20% fire rate bonus, your total fire rate (relative to base) goes to 1.4x, which is only a 16.7% increase over the first bonus alone (1.4/1.2 = 1.1666...) rather than going to 1.44x (1.2 + (20% of the current rate of 1.2) = 1.2 + 0.24 = 1.44). However, fire rate and damage are different stats (even though both affect DPS) so they *do* multiply; if you have 50% fire rate bonuses (1.5x) but no damage bonuses, getting a +10% damage bonus is worth as much at that point as getting a +15% fire rate bonus, in terms of total DPS. As ComeradeKroo pointed out, if you have some total number of percept bonus to put into both specs, you should split them evenly for maximal total DPS.
With that said, as others have pointed out, there are times when one or the other is better. For some stuff, like point-defense, fire rate is the most important thing because you probably won't push a PD gun from "takes two shots to kill a missile" down to "takes one shot to kill a missile" through damage boosts, but if you raise the fire rate you can still shoot down more missiles in total. For other stuff, like spinal weapons and torpedoes, the damage multiplier can be a big deal because it may well change how many enemies you kill in your "alpha strike" (the first shot of the battle).
Let's compare two scenarios where you're fighting an enemy with 500 HP (for simplicity, assume all weapons do flat damage, no per-defense-layer modifiers). You have two choices of weapon:
Now, suppose the enemy has upgraded, and has 600 HP (20% increase). You can choose one upgrade yourself: +30% fire rate, or +20% damage:
Now, suppose you instead have 5 100 HP enemies. I'm not going to work out the full math of the different amounts of damage they would do to you over time, but trust me when I say that in that case the heavy weapon (needs five shots, four reloads, at either 120.1 seconds with the increased fire rate or 160 seconds with the base fire rate) is vastly inferior to the battery (needs the same number of reloads as the heavy, but they take either 15.38 seconds with the fire rate increase or 20 seconds with the base rate). In neither case does the bonus damage matter (it all goes into overkill).
Getting out of simplified-example-land and back to Stellaris, high alpha strike makes heavy weapons like spinal mounts and torpedoes much more effective than their raw DPS would indicate, and the higher the damage the better, in most cases. Even if the alpha strike doesn't take the enemy out entirely, it front-loads the damage for your lighter weapons (lets face it, most fleets have a mix of weapons) to finish the job. In some cases, though, a really heavy weapon like a perdition beam is mostly wasted on light targets like corvettes (assuming it doesn't just miss), and while boosting the fire rate will help you massively overkill individual targets faster, you'd still be better off with lighter, more rapidly-firing weapons that do less damage per shot but don't waste 75% of it. (Also, a caveat about torpedoes: they have quite nice damage per volley, but they also have travel time, so they are less effective for alpha strikes than guns or energy weapons).
However, modifiers to the same stat stack additively in Stellaris, not multiplicatively. This means that if you already have a +20% fire rate bonus (1.2x shots/sec) and get another 20% fire rate bonus, your total fire rate (relative to base) goes to 1.4x, which is only a 16.7% increase over the first bonus alone (1.4/1.2 = 1.1666...) rather than going to 1.44x (1.2 + (20% of the current rate of 1.2) = 1.2 + 0.24 = 1.44). However, fire rate and damage are different stats (even though both affect DPS) so they *do* multiply; if you have 50% fire rate bonuses (1.5x) but no damage bonuses, getting a +10% damage bonus is worth as much at that point as getting a +15% fire rate bonus, in terms of total DPS. As ComeradeKroo pointed out, if you have some total number of percept bonus to put into both specs, you should split them evenly for maximal total DPS.
With that said, as others have pointed out, there are times when one or the other is better. For some stuff, like point-defense, fire rate is the most important thing because you probably won't push a PD gun from "takes two shots to kill a missile" down to "takes one shot to kill a missile" through damage boosts, but if you raise the fire rate you can still shoot down more missiles in total. For other stuff, like spinal weapons and torpedoes, the damage multiplier can be a big deal because it may well change how many enemies you kill in your "alpha strike" (the first shot of the battle).
Let's compare two scenarios where you're fighting an enemy with 500 HP (for simplicity, assume all weapons do flat damage, no per-defense-layer modifiers). You have two choices of weapon:
- A battery of guns that deal 100 damage every five seconds (20 DPS total).
- A heavy weapon that deals 500 damage every 40 seconds (12.5 DPS total).
Now, suppose the enemy has upgraded, and has 600 HP (20% increase). You can choose one upgrade yourself: +30% fire rate, or +20% damage:
- Gun battery does 100 damage every 3.846 seconds (26 DPS) or 120 damage every five seconds (24 DPS).
- Heavy weapon does 500 damage every 30.77 seconds (16.25 DPS) or 600 damage every 40 seconds (15 DPS).
Now, suppose you instead have 5 100 HP enemies. I'm not going to work out the full math of the different amounts of damage they would do to you over time, but trust me when I say that in that case the heavy weapon (needs five shots, four reloads, at either 120.1 seconds with the increased fire rate or 160 seconds with the base fire rate) is vastly inferior to the battery (needs the same number of reloads as the heavy, but they take either 15.38 seconds with the fire rate increase or 20 seconds with the base rate). In neither case does the bonus damage matter (it all goes into overkill).
Getting out of simplified-example-land and back to Stellaris, high alpha strike makes heavy weapons like spinal mounts and torpedoes much more effective than their raw DPS would indicate, and the higher the damage the better, in most cases. Even if the alpha strike doesn't take the enemy out entirely, it front-loads the damage for your lighter weapons (lets face it, most fleets have a mix of weapons) to finish the job. In some cases, though, a really heavy weapon like a perdition beam is mostly wasted on light targets like corvettes (assuming it doesn't just miss), and while boosting the fire rate will help you massively overkill individual targets faster, you'd still be better off with lighter, more rapidly-firing weapons that do less damage per shot but don't waste 75% of it. (Also, a caveat about torpedoes: they have quite nice damage per volley, but they also have travel time, so they are less effective for alpha strikes than guns or energy weapons).
Missiles are also an interesting case because Point Defense shoots down a mostly static number of missiles, no matter how many you fire. That's not quite true of course because of how targeting works, but it's mostly true and means that if you fire 100 missiles and 50 hit the target, then any additional missile fired by attack speed is not subject to intersection at all. Add 10% attack speed and fire 110 missiles, suddenly 60 missiles hit the target - a damage boost of 20% (in this example that uses purely fictional numbers). The more you stack, the bigger the percentage of missiles that are not intercepted becomes.
It even better than you make it sound. Your assumption of a static number of missiles being shot down is very wrong in the current system. Unless I missed something (must admit I haven't played with missiles a lot), there is still only two cases with PD: Either almost no missile is intercepted or almost all are intercepted. Firing more missiles may easily move you from almost no damage to full damage.
@main topic:
does anyone knows what parts of the firing process are effected by fire rate? I mean there is cooldown, warm-up (and IIRC a third one of which I forgot the name).
To me it seems that the difference between kills and losses scales more than proportionally than the actual strenght of the opposing fleets. So, even a tiny bonus can make a BIG difference, lowering you losses and making the enemy taking much more.
Also, fire rate is very good because it reduces overkill.
Also, fire rate is very good because it reduces overkill.
Think of it like this: the fire rate is a reduction in enemy damage as well as an increase in your own damage. Presumably, if both fleets have exactly the same rate of fire, then each "round" all ships deal damage, then die. With an increased rate of fire, your fleet gets to do their rounds sooner, thus reducing more of the enemy fleet to rubble before getting hit (again).
I think interesting question would be how good is fire rate stacking? Like, if you are militarist, is that 10% more from fanatic worth sacrificing economic or research bonuses you'd get from other ethics, considering those would give you bigger fleet or potentially better weapons/bonuses from repeatable techs?
I value damage over fire rate specifically because it is more likely to result in kills: I believe a kill is far more valuable than the wasted damage of an overkill.
A ship that goes down to 25% hull and disengages will be repaired and fight you again in a later battle, but a ship that is overkilled to -25% is sure to stay dead.
My RTS brain tells me that wars are won by economy, and combat disengage chance is effectively a modifier to ship costs during wartime.
Wait... Rithral said that he values fire rate over damage because + fire rate is less likely to result in overkills than + damage. You're saying he has that backwards?
I'll preface by saying that I don't know how the RoF mechanic works in this game... I just don't.
My suspicion is that it works similar to how other timers work in this game.
For instance, when you settle a new colony, there is a cost of x number of months, and you progress at a rate of 1/month towards cost x.
When you take the expansion opener tradition, you gain "colony development speed +25%". What this means is not that you are shaving a literal 25% off the cost of the colony development, but rather your rate increases to 1.25/month. This also means, in theory, you can go beyond +100% and not break the calculation.
Again, I do not know if this is true, but my belief is that there is a similar cost and charge like settling a colony, just that it happens a lot faster. So if you had +110% fire rate, that would simply mean your "fire charge" is growing at 2.1/interval.
This is completely ignoring the added complexity of cooldown and warm up.
My suspicion is that it works similar to how other timers work in this game.
For instance, when you settle a new colony, there is a cost of x number of months, and you progress at a rate of 1/month towards cost x.
When you take the expansion opener tradition, you gain "colony development speed +25%". What this means is not that you are shaving a literal 25% off the cost of the colony development, but rather your rate increases to 1.25/month. This also means, in theory, you can go beyond +100% and not break the calculation.
Again, I do not know if this is true, but my belief is that there is a similar cost and charge like settling a colony, just that it happens a lot faster. So if you had +110% fire rate, that would simply mean your "fire charge" is growing at 2.1/interval.
This is completely ignoring the added complexity of cooldown and warm up.