Weapon and ammo stats readability

[Deadlock989]

I don't often play with biters enabled, even with a playtime in the low thousands of hours, and it's only now that I realise how little I know about combat in Factorio and how I never really understood the difference between ammo types and even weapon types. So I took a closer look and ... I'm still a bit mystified.

When I look at piercing ammo I see this:

Damage: 8 + 12.8 physical

What does that mean? Does it do 20.8 damage? Does it do 8 damage of some unspecified kind and then 12.8 damage of physical damage?

When I look at a submachine gun I see this:

Shooting speed: 10 + 15 /s

It's even less clear what this means. Does it shoot 25 bullets per second? How does that relate to ammo - will a magazine of 10 will be gone in 0.4 seconds?

Shotgun shells are the worst:

Projectile range: 15
Damage: 12 x 5 + 8 physical

What? The shotgun itself says it has a range of 20. So how far do shotgun shells go? What is the actual DPS of a shotgun, is it (12 x 5) + 8 or 12 x (5+8) or something else?

Then there are the various research upgrades which increase speed and damage. I think the "+ number" in those stats is coming from those.

And then there's the rockets with explosive variants which break everything down into damage, "piercing power" and area damage, and just like the other ammo types, each of these three to six stats is further broken down into X + Y statistics. So an explosive uranium cannon shell throws 7 numbers with varying levels of indentation at you. Flicking back and forth between two variants of rocket, it's very difficult to get any sense of which one is going to hurt the average house-sized insect more.

Suggestion: show an actual DPS statistic of some kind, averaged, fluffed, whatever. Or show the base stat without upgrades and then, separately, what you'll actually get with your current research state.

[Koub]

Left part of the + is base damage, and right part the upgrades you have researched. I agree it could be more explicit.

[Deadlock989]

Left part of the + is base damage, and right part the upgrades you have researched. I agree it could be more explicit.

So shotgun damage really is 12 x (5+8) ? Years of being drilled on order of operations in maths makes me read it as (12x5) + 8.

Then there's this. What's going on here? I think maybe it goes bang?

Untitled-1.png (48.89 KiB) Viewed 3682 times

[Chao]

I'd suggest put brackets around the numbers leaving the units outside which should make it a lot clearer. Right now it looks like the units relate just to the righthand number.

To use the examples in the OP compare:

Piercing ammo:

Damage: 8 + 12.8 physical
Damage: (8 + 12.8) physical

Submachine gun:

Shooting speed: 10 + 15 /s
Shooting speed: (10 + 15) /s

Shotgun shells:

Projectile range: 15
Damage: 12 x 5 + 8 physical
Damage: ((12 + 8) x 5) physical

Note that for shotgun I also rearranged as I think that's what you're actually implying with the numbers, that it's a base damage of 12, with a bonus of 8 per projectile, of which there are 5.

As a secondary point, it would perhaps be a good idea for bonuses to have a different colour, this would go for all bonuses not just military (eg production speed).

[Xeorm]

So shotgun damage really is 12 x (5+8) ? Years of being drilled on order of operations in maths makes me read it as (12x5) + 8.

Then there's this. What's going on here? I think maybe it goes bang?

Untitled-1.png

Yea. It looks a little weird, but it's a difficult problem to solve. Reads better once you're used to their other ammos. Like reading normal ammo you see the damage is 5. Research a +damage upgrade and you'll see the + damage on the icon. Look at the shotgun and you'd see that 12x marker. Shoot and you'll see a lot of bullets.

Overall it's not clear what it does and takes some inference based on other mechanics to see what's going on.

The nukes are weird. I wonder if they have it that way to encourage people to fire one just to see what happens. Then you see what happens and it all makes sense. You fire a nuke and in the radius there'll be a lot of little explosions. Each explosion I think does the damage that you read. Net result though is that everything dies in the radius. If you're fully shielded and only catch a single explosion way out on the edge you can live I think, but yea. Everything in the nuke's radius is deader than dead.

[bobucles]

Players generally aren't interested in intermediate math steps. The only two values they are going to care about are final damage and # of projectiles. If they need more detailed stats that probably belongs in a more detailed stat screen.

[McDuff]

What about:

Damage:
25 physical
- base 10
- weapon research level 5 + 15

[Deadlock989]

I don't see the need to show the boosted damage from research as an actual number at all. What is "12.8 damage" anyway? Doesn't tell me much.

Machines (assemblers) etc. show just one absolute number for crafting speed, pollution, productivity etc. and then the modification percentage from research/modules in brackets. For ammo and guns that would look like this:

Damage: 10 physical (+25%)

[Pi-C]

What about:

Damage:
25 physical
- base 10
- weapon research level 5 + 15

Sounds good, but could be misunderstood: Is that level 5, or is that the term "5 + 15"? Something like that would make it a bit more clearer, perhaps:

*****
Damage:
25 (physical) = 10 (base) + 15 (weapon research level 5)
*****

Or
*****
Damage:
25 physical
- 10 (base damage)
- 15 (bonus: weapon research level 5)
*****

Or even
*****
Damage:
25 physical
- Base damage: 10
- Weapon research level 5: 15
*****
This would prevent people to read "10 (base damage)" as product of a multiplication.

[bobucles]

How little information does the player need to get the point across? That's all you need for a good clean UI.

Bonus damage acts exactly the same as base damage, so there isn't any real need to show them as separate attributes. It only matters for stat hogs who want to see the math behind everything.

[McDuff]

There are some advantages to it, perhaps, in terms of what bonuses the research is giving you, thus calculating what the use of the next research is.

But alternatively it could be in a tooltip or something.

[Darinth]

There are several competing issues at work here. In a lot of games, I'd say to just display the final number and be done with it, but factorio's player base is the kind where they like to see all of the numbers and the math, so I feel like it should be visible.

Beyond that, there's a question of screen space. Some of these examples are quite specific in their breakdown, but use up a huge amount of screen space to do so. I think some minor tweaks, things like appropriate parenthesis, are going to be the important bit.

Thus... "Damage: 8 + 12.8 physical" would become "Damage: (8 + 12.8) physical" or if we wanted to get a hairline more specific Wube could do something like "Damage: 20.8 (8 + 12.8) physical" or "Damage: 20.8 (8 * 260%) physical" but even that may run into problems of adding to much to fit on one line which is just going to look ugly.

[bobucles]

There is a screen made to display all the research related bonuses. If there is a place for messy math it probably belongs there. For most ordinary uses a player doesn't need more than the current level of weapon damage. Does it matter that the player has +4.8 bonus damage? Of course not. The important result is the weapon deals 9.8 damage.

Things get even hairier because the advanced shotgun provides a damage bonus on top of normal weapon damage. Should that bonus be displayed on the weapon, the equipped ammo or what? The total boosted damage is definitely an important stat to know.