Higher Mark Railpods - Why upgrade?

[Draco18s]

MC cost of the golem is partially offset by the fact that it regens in 2 hours time.

Oh!  Its been a while since I used them.  A long while.  They didn't do that then.

[Bognor]

MC cost of the golem is partially offset by the fact that it regens in 2 hours time.

Oh!  Its been a while since I used them.  A long while.  They didn't do that then.

That was added in update 6.013.  The same update doubled their health and halved their build costs, reducing the cost to repair each hit point to one quarter of what it was.

[Draco18s]

That was added in update 6.013.  The same update doubled their health and halved their build costs, reducing the cost to repair each hit point to one quarter of what it was.

<3

[Chthon]

MC cost of the golem is partially offset by the fact that it regens in 2 hours time.

Oh!  Its been a while since I used them.  A long while.  They didn't do that then.

That was added in update 6.013.  The same update doubled their health and halved their build costs, reducing the cost to repair each hit point to one quarter of what it was.

So... taking this into consideration, is it more economical to use them in conjunction with railpods, or just using railpods straight.  That was my original question, and I think it's worth a look in this light.

[Toranth]

MC cost of the golem is partially offset by the fact that it regens in 2 hours time.

Oh!  Its been a while since I used them.  A long while.  They didn't do that then.

That was added in update 6.013.  The same update doubled their health and halved their build costs, reducing the cost to repair each hit point to one quarter of what it was.

So... taking this into consideration, is it more economical to use them in conjunction with railpods, or just using railpods straight.  That was my original question, and I think it's worth a look in this light.

Ok, Regen Golems and Railpods.  Regen Golems are still a bit of a complicated topic for me, because I'm never certain how repair works with them.
But anyways, I did some math and some experiments, and here are my results.

A Regen Golem will give up 90% of it's HP to regen units, or 360,000,000 HP.
A Mk I Railpod has 52,000 HP.
Therefore, a Regen Golem will revive 360,000,000 / 52,000 = 6,923.077 Railpods.  Rounding up means 6,924 Railpods Mk I.  That's 13,848 shots and 129,617,280 damage.

Repairing the Regen Golem - this is where difficulties cropped up.  According to the Wiki and my memory, repair costs are base 1/4 build cost but the Regen Golem gets a special 1/10 cost repair price.  The Build Cost of a Regen Golem is 10,000,000 each M/C, so the repair cost should be 90% of 1,000,000.  Unfortunately, and I repeated this several times, it consistantly took only 110,000 M/C to fully repair.  This was regardless of how long it took, or at what difficulty the repair was performed.

110,000 M/C at cost 26 M/C would produce 4,230 Mk I Railpods.  That's a lot less than the 6,924 the Regen Golem allows.  In fact, the Regen Golem is about 62% more efficient.

To verify, I did the experiment:  Used a full cap of Railpods to wear the Regen Golem down to 10% HP, and measured the shots fired at a Wormhole Guardpost.  I counted about 14,200 shots fired, which is very close with the math for 192 base + 6,924 revived Railpod's shots.

Since damage goes up Dam = Mk * base, and HP = Mk * base, the efficiency doesn't change.  So all Marks are identical when using a Regen Golem.  Dam/HP = 0.36, and Max Damage of Revived Units = 129,600,000.
However, because the production resource cost goes up superlinear, the improved efficiency of using the Regen Golem gets even better at the higher Marks.  A Mk I is 62% more efficient using a Regen Golem, while a Mk V is a whopping 150% more efficient (2.5x damage).  See the chart below.

Mk	Efficiency vs Production
1	1.62
2	1.56
3	2.08
4	2.34
5	2.49

So, yeah.  Railpods + Regen Golems is much better than normal production of Railpods.  Optimal strategy would be to use the Regen Golem to revive your highest Mark Railpods until it ran out of HP, then switch to max speed production of your highest efficiency Railpod (Mk IIs or Mk Is).

However, there are some quirks involved.  Railpods that die and are revived do *not* get their shot timer reset - so it still takes two seconds after revival until they shoot again.  This reduces the DPS of the Railpods by about 50%.  Also, a revived unit keeps the same target it had before, and AI units or shots in transit remain targetting the same unit.  The Regen Golem also does not regenerate itself during this - it seems the revive-sacrifice-damage counts as damage-preventing-regeneration-or-repair.

[Bognor]

!!SCIENCE!!

Someone needs to invent a Nobel Prize in AI War for Toranth.

[tadrinth]

Hrm, Toranth, your analysis seems to be purely about using railpods to convert resources into damage in real time.  I haven't gotten around to playing with them yet, but it strikes me that they might be useful for stockpiling resources to be turned into burst damage later.  IE, you don't just build them and let them shoot, you build up a bunch of them for when you need burst damage. 

In that case, you'd want to do things like build the higher mark railpods on your whipping boy whenever you have spare resources.  Wave shows up, gets blasted by the railpods, they get rebuilt between waves when you can afford them.  Same for stockpiling them for CPAs, exos, etc. 

On the other hand, there are lots of ships that don't just get better at high marks, but get dramatically better. Unlocking high marks seems like it should always be an obvious choice if you like what a ship type does and want more of it. 

Would it be better to support the use of railpods as an artillery battery that turns resources into damage, or support them as a way to stockpile resources in the form of future damage?  The former seems to be something a lot of fleet ships are good at, while the latter seems more like a Railpod niche.

Also, I get the impression that most spammable ships do more effective damage at high marks because they have more hp and thus last longer to do their damage.   A cap of low mark cutlasses could be destroyed as it closes where a cap of core cutlasses will survive to deal damage.  Railpods are sniping from far way and they destroy themselves in a fixed number of shots, so they don't benefit from extra hp in the same way.

[Toranth]

Hrm, Toranth, your analysis seems to be purely about using railpods to convert resources into damage in real time.  I haven't gotten around to playing with them yet, but it strikes me that they might be useful for stockpiling resources to be turned into burst damage later.  IE, you don't just build them and let them shoot, you build up a bunch of them for when you need burst damage. 

In that case, you'd want to do things like build the higher mark railpods on your whipping boy whenever you have spare resources.  Wave shows up, gets blasted by the railpods, they get rebuilt between waves when you can afford them.  Same for stockpiling them for CPAs, exos, etc. 

On the other hand, there are lots of ships that don't just get better at high marks, but get dramatically better. Unlocking high marks seems like it should always be an obvious choice if you like what a ship type does and want more of it. 

Would it be better to support the use of railpods as an artillery battery that turns resources into damage, or support them as a way to stockpile resources in the form of future damage?  The former seems to be something a lot of fleet ships are good at, while the latter seems more like a Railpod niche.

Also, I get the impression that most spammable ships do more effective damage at high marks because they have more hp and thus last longer to do their damage.   A cap of low mark cutlasses could be destroyed as it closes where a cap of core cutlasses will survive to deal damage.  Railpods are sniping from far way and they destroy themselves in a fixed number of shots, so they don't benefit from extra hp in the same way.

A full cap of Mk I Railpods costs only 5,000 M/C to build.  That's not saving a whole lot of time or resources - it's 11 seconds of income from your unimproved homeworld.
In the question of building them up to do burst damage, well, the full cap of Mk I Railpods does 0.5% of the total damage that would be done - again, an insignificant portion of the damage you get from spamming.
Even in the case of having full caps of Mk I-IV Railpods all built at once, you still get only 3% of the damage you do by spamming Mk Is.  A 3% increase in damage your reward for teching up to Mk IV?

If the cost of Railpods was much higher, then the advantage of having more built initially would increase.  For example, if a cap of Mk I Railpods cost 500,000 M/C, then spamming would only build you 2 caps.  Having one already built would therefore be a 50% increase in the damage you could do.  Having multiple mark-caps pre-built would increase the damage compared to spamming dramatically - which would make having the higher Mark units pre-built a significant advantage.
But as it stands, Railpods are cheap enough that you can build 200 Mk I caps.  201 vs 200 isn't much.