Throwing this out there for any who might know the answer. What is the outcome of using the same Tactical Console in multiple Tactical console slots? I'm almost positive it's not a pure cumulative effect. But what can be expected? For example: I have a Federation vessel using Phaser beam arrays and I want to use the Phaser Tactical Console with critical chance bonus for all four of the slots on my vessel because using a specific energy type console is better than using the weapon type consoles, for example Beam Tactical Bonus Consoles, simply because of the greater percentage bonus.
Or...is it better to use the different types because the game engine sees them as unique consoles and therefore they have a more pure cumulative effect?
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Stick with the uniform damage type (i.e. phaser for phaser, plasma for plasma, etc).
Only resistances have diminishing returns.
There are different types of buffs for weapon damage. I think they are now generally called Category I, II or III types, and the new change to the [DMG] modifier basically created a fourth. Sometimes you will find names like "damage strength buff" or "damage bonus", these hint at the different categories. Other people know better what maps to what.
Anyway, the buffs in one category stack simply additively. So if you got a +50 Category I buff and another +25 Category II buff, it's the same as a +75 buff.
But the different categories are multipliers. So if you got a +50 Category I buff and a +25 Category II buff, it's not like +75. But it's also not 75 x 25, of course - the +X number usually is expressed as a percentage because it's actually only 1/100 of that value, e.g +75 % damage bonus means (if there are no other bonuses of the same category) +0.75, to a base of 1. (Since it would be bad if our multiplication began with values at 0).
So, a +75 Category 1 Bonus means 1.75 the damage than normal.
A +50 Category I Bonus and a +25 Category II Bonus would mean 1.5 * 1.25 = 1.875 multiplier.
The additional complication is that it's difficult to keep track of what all falls into one Category. For example, the damage that a Mark X weapon does? That already has a multiplier built-in, based on the fact that it's Mark X. The base damage that is used for all the calculations is basically the Mark I (or is it the Common Issue variant?) variant of the weapon.
That means just because somewhere you get a +25 % damage bonus does not actually mean you deal 1.25 as much damage. It will generally be a lot less, because there are already plenty of other bonuses.
Armor consoles work differently, for example. All the resistance bonuses are added as simply the value they appear (say, a +50 armor and a +25 armor mean a +75 armor). But that value is then put into a formula that provides the diminishing returns.
I believe the various other types of skills are even harder to evaluate. +400 Particle Generators might be a decent number, but what it really means depends on the specific ability you're looking at. For some, it might be low, for some, it might be big. It will get worse for stuff that isn't damage or healing - Graviton Generators for example.
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It's not really comparable, though, since damage reduction inherently is different than a damage buff.
Let's say it takes you 100 seconds to deal 100 damage. You add +50 % damage.
Now you deal 150 damage in 100 seconds, or approximately 100 damage after 66 seconds.
Now imagine that instead your target would add +50 % damage reduction.
Now in those 100 seconds, you deal only 50 damage, and you would need 200 seconds to deal 100 damage.
So for damage, +50 % means just that you an kill your enemy 33 % faster, but for +50 % damage reduction, it would allow him to live 100 % longer.
Now we start stacking. Let's add another modest 25 % to both sides.
Now you deal 175 damage in 100 seconds or 57 seconds to deal 100.
But if your enemy had another +25 % damage reduction for a total of 75 %, you would suddenly need 400 seconds to deal 100 damage. That means he quadrupled his survival time.
And if he would be able to get 100 % damage reduction? He'd be invulnerable.
That's why damage resistance must be implemented with diminishing returns - plus potentially a hard cap.
Damage bonuses basically provide the diminishing returns implicitly.
Damage Resistance is basically way to give a target more hit points. But if you do it without diminishing returns, those extra hit points spiral out of control and go towards infinity.
If Cryptic hadn't implemented armor consoles as damage reduction, but instead as bonus hit points, they wouldn't have needed diminishing returns, and no one would bat an eye over it - though in truth, that is what they did, just with a complicated diminishing return formula for damage reduction..
Consider that if you take 1000 damage per second, you'll logically need 1000 healing per second to counter it. Maybe you can only muster 800/s though, so eventually you will die if you can't kill the enemy first. With 25% resists, now you're only taking 750/s which means you can outheal it indefinitely. Were it simply giving you 5000 bonus hitpoints with no diminishing returns, you'd still die eventually taking 1000 damage per second vs your 800 healing per second, it would just take longer.