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The RTSC Guide to Dawn of War
DPS stands for Damage Per Second. Its a concept Relic seems to use to describe its units for its games, and DPS was used to show how powerful various spaceships were in Homeworld 2. Instead of smothering you in a shopping list of numbers describing all the turrets, missiles and point defences on a capital ship, players were presented with a single number that summarised the collective output of all the ship's weapons, averaged over one second of game time. It was both useful as a rough guide to how powerful the ship was, and completely useless in telling you anything really that useful. Mighty DPS values couldn't disguise the fact that a swarm of small fighters could nibble a Vaygr Battleship to death. DPS is something that is also big in serious Dawn of War fan circles. Its a golden number used to describe what the average amount of damage that this weapon actually does compared to what the game interface tells you. It's the result of calculating any given weapon's attack values, firing rate, accuracy, and penetration values against the different armour types (all fourteen of them) found in the game. Most of the DPS values known about the game have been generated by dedicated fans using the RDN modding tools or by homemade editing tools to unpack and then decipher the game's data files. The most famous DPS charts are Excedrin's, the player who broke the ice and created the first online DPS charts. They've been cited in balance debates (and a more than just a few flame wars) ever since. This Guide makes use of them, although I've spent a fair bit of time reading game files myself and then comparing them with other DPS charts to see if they're consistent. Numbers are all very beguiling, but not necessarily useful in an actual game. They only show a tiny aspect of the unit you're playing, and don't factor in unit behaviour, path finding, tactics or your own ineptitude! Dawn of War is a game that you still play largely by practice and feel. For the most part it makes some sense... kinda. You'll come across curious anomalies as you play, where units like Fire Dragons can melt concrete buildings and armoured vehicles very quickly but an entire squad can hardly touch a lowly builder. Never mind that their "Fusion Guns" spray a fire storm that looks like it'd vaporise a normal human into a puff of oily smoke, FIre Dragons have little discernable effect on regular infantry.
Base DPS This is how the game calculates basic averaged firepower of a Dawn of War weapon. Our example will be the Space Marine's basic Bolter Gun. Numbers for this weapon have been taken straight from the game files themselves. For the record, I used Spooky's RAT to break open the original Relic files and then Cucc's RGDEdit to read the actual .rgd data files themselves. These days, though, I'm switching to Corsix's excellent Mod Studio. Note: a lot of values in the tables have long strings of decimals after them; most of the data is edited and compiled by software, not directly established by hand. I'm rounding off all of them to one, or maybe two decimal places. Given the hands on, free-for-all nature of this game, its a futile exercise getting pedantic about exact numbers. |
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The GUI does reflect the updated effects of any research that permanently alters your base attack values. If you have Help messages turned on full, you can even see Relic's base DPS values for any Heavy Weapons you add to a squad in the Help text (also updated when permanent upgrades are applied). In the fan forums there's a fair bit of suspicion about how accurate the game GUI actually is. For the most part its accurate, but gives very little away. One thing that becomes obvious to anyone paying attention is the huge discrepancy between what's advertised on the GUI against what actually goes on in the game. Very few units do anything near the damage that is shown against their targets, except in rare cirumstances.
What is happening is that for every single weapon, there are fourteen different Armour Piercing values for all fourteen armour types in the game. These modifiers reduce the damage output of the weapon down to the percentage shown. And all of them are used, without exceptions, for every kind of weapon, however obscure, in the game. For our humble Space Marine Bolter, the armour penetration values look like this when tabled:
Actual DPS against a target reduces weapon damage to the percentage shown. If our SM bolter was shooting another Space Marine wearing their inf_heavy_med armour, it would only inflict 60.3% of its damage. (The number was actually 0.60333000, but it's rounded off and interpreted as a percentage) Thus:
Bolters might put out 18.78 DPS on average, but they only do 11.3 against other Marines (they're best target), a bit less against other infantry, and very little against anything else. Don't forget, if you have a full squad, all these numbers grow into more formidable values. A full squad of eight Marines is averaging about 80-90 damage a second, enough to skittle a Space Marine within a few seconds. This is especially true of light infantry like Guardians or Imperial Guardsmen, who seem to have minimal stats and yet can focus considerable firepower en mass.. Some armour piercing values are so low that the weapon does practically no damage. In these cases, the weapon defaults to its Min_Damage_Value. As mentioned above, for Space Marine Bolters, Min_Damage_Value is 2.5. The game engine will compare the actual DPS of a target against Min_Damage_Value, and use whichever's the highest.
Not that you ever see morale stats in-game, but they are quoted frequently in DPS charts and used as discussion points in some fan based strategy and balance threads. Its no wonder DPS charts are such a big hit with the fans. Fan DPS charts usually just give you a single DPS value, without showing how that number came about. (They seem to like singular, magic numbers) Even so, most of these charts resemble a small phonebook (that probably explains why!). But remember, DPS values are just averages. Averages are fictions; statistical creations. DPS doesn't mean a Space Marine Bolter hits for 11.3 against another Space Marine. There's a discrepancy between what the DPS average says and what goes on in-game, too. Bolters hits for only 8.5 to 10.4 per shot against the inf_heavy_med armour type, assuming it actually hit it in the first place. It still misses for 0! At 60% accuracy, and two and a half shots per second, it might just miss every shot in one second and do exactly nothing. Or - it might hit every time and do about 20 damage! For any ranged unit that fires rapidly, you can get a pretty good idea of what's going to happen. For our Space Marine Bolter it fires fast and accurately enough to get away with calculating a few DPS values and not being too surprised by the results in-game. But for slower moving, slower firing, more inaccurate units like the Orks, DPS can give you some highly misleading results. DPS can't factor in how a squad of waddling Orks navigates around a fight to swing their Choppas. While they do some great axe damage, they miss more often than not and tend to deliver less blows than their opponent. Really, this long sojourn into number heaven does nothing except give us an indication of how powerful or useful or useless a weapon might be compared against specific types of targets. And its still not taking into account bonuses, spells, and upgrades, your own unit micro and the many other things that can completely negate the effects of many of these numbers.
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Last modified Thu, Nov 16 2006 by Lindsay Fleay
