[martinchaen]

Very cool!

Using your formula, I've replicated the exercise for my own character.

Firing the following weapons;
1. Cyber-SMG (19 DP, DV7, AP0)
2. AK-97 (17 DP, DV10, AP-2)
3. Remington 950 (14 DP, DV12, AP-4).

These are my results, against:
1. Critters (AV0)
2. Gangers and organized crime outfits (AV9)
3. Police and corpsec (AV12)
4. Elite corpsec (AV18)

Code: [Select]

Weapon AV Acc Reg CS_Reg Gel CS_Gel SnS CS_SnS ExEx C_ExEx APDS C_APDS
Cyber-SMG 0 6 10.03 10.64 10.03s 10.64s 8.13s 8.88s 10.98 11.51 10.03 10.64
Cyber-SMG 9 6 7.18 8.00 6.86s 7.71s 6.86s 7.71s 8.45 9.17 8.45 9.17
Cyber-SMG 12 6 6.23 7.13 5.91s 6.83s 5.91s 6.83s 7.50 8.30 7.50 8.30
Cyber-SMG 18 6 4.33 5.37 4.01s 5.08s 4.01s 5.08s 5.59 6.54 5.59 6.54

AK-97 0 7 12.64 12.17 12.64s 12.17s 10.80s 10.54s 13.57 12.98 12.64 12.17
AK-97 9 7 10.49 10.27 10.19s 10.00s 9.57s 9.46s 11.72 11.36 11.72 11.36
AK-97 12 7 9.57 9.46 9.88s 9.73s 8.65s 8.64s 10.80 10.54 10.80 10.54
AK-97 18 7 7.73 7.83 7.42s 7.56s 6.80s 7.02s 8.96 8.92 8.96 8.92

Remington 950 0 9 12.94 10.94 12.94s 10.94s 11.24s 9.61s 13.79 11.91 12.94 10.94
Remington 950 9 9 11.52 9.83 11.24s 9.61s 10.11s 8.71s 12.65 11.61 12.65 10.72
Remington 950 12 9 10.67 9.16 10.39s 8.94s 9.26s 8.05s 11.81 10.05 11.81 10.05
Remington 950 18 9 8.98 7.82 8.69s 7.60s 7.56s 6.71s 10.11 8.71 10.11 8.71
Not sure if my results are correct; it seems a little odd how evenly APDS and EX both even out the higher armor gets.

[Xenon]

...

Code: [Select]

Weapon APDS C_APDS
Remington 950 12.94 10.94
Remington 950 12.65 10.72
Remington 950 11.81 10.05
Remington 950 10.11 8.71
Not sure if my results are correct...

Almost look like the loss of your 4 dice give you ~ -4 DV (and then you gained +2 DV from hitting vitals for a net -2 DV).
That can not be correct, can it?

[Top Dog]

I should note that the formula originally noted that it doesn't account for negative damage after armor, and that might change the effects slightly. You can account for that by checking the chances for negative values. I think you can change the formula to account for it too but I failed yesterday (anydice doesn't have the clearest error messages in the world and it was getting late; also it didn't matter much for my values). I doubt it if mattered much; it only matters for those cases where the defender gets an extraordinary amount of successes on his armor test, and those are, by definition, rare. For your cyber-SMG versus 18 armor, the chance of getting a negative is 0.3% for the Ex, or 0.17% for the APDS ammo. That means the result for Ex is lower then it should be. Considering the difference, it's pretty negligible, but it's there. It'll get less for the high-damage weapons (it's 0.00 for both for the Remington, rounded), and more for higher resistance dice pools.

For other cases, it matters if armor is low; if it would dip below 0, it instead stays there (you have to manually do that in the formula, just use 0 if you'd otherwise go negative for armor). It also matters if armor is high enough for the damage to become stun, but anydice doesn't model that, only giving total damage, irregardless of stun vs physical. APDS would be better if you want to do physical to high-armored targets; it'd be interesting to model exactly how the chances behave but for now that's unanswered.

I can't seem to replicate the Remington's result completely (I'm unsure what values for defense dice and body - if any - were used). However, getting ~-2 DV for -4 dice does (roughly) correlate to what I'm seeing for those dice pools. Going 14 dice versus 6 defense, or 10 dice versus 6, increases your chance of failure significantly (15 to 33%). That has a large effect on the average damage of called shots; it just happens to be around -4 for his Remington's dice pools.

[SichoPhiend]

Not sure if my results are correct; it seems a little odd how evenly APDS and EX both even out the higher armor gets.

Does not seem that odd to me, as the main effect of armor is to add dice to the damage resistance test.

What I'm thinking is that as long as the armor has a higher rating than the AP value, than EX and APDS are effectively the same.
The reason I say this is that on a truly average roll, 3 dice = 1 success, therefore

1DV = 3 Armor dice

As EX rounds add 1DV and -1AP, the effect is 1 less armor die to roll and 3 armor dice are used to counter the +1DV while
APDS are simply -4AP and remove 4 dice from the armor roll, if 3 dice = 1 hit, than APDS effectively = +1DV (from 3 armor dice that do not reduce the DV of the attack) with 1 more armor die removed.

As an example we'll take an 8DV; -0AP base attack, against 13 armor dice (for this example I'm ignoring body dice)

EX becomes 9DV, -1AP, target rolls 12 dice against 9DV, truly average roll gets 4 hits, final DV = 5
APDS becomes 8DV, -4AP, target gets to roll 9 dice against 8DV, truly average roll gets 3 hits, final DV = 5

These numbers are based off a single attack, your chart is based on average numbers for many rolls, but the end result of APDS = EX against high armor values would theoretically be the same (as your chart shows).

Now this does not account for when armor converts to stun damage, APDS is far more likely to get through the armor and cause physical damage, and here is where APDS and EX differ, but again as armor values get exceedingly high, even that difference should go away.

Sorry bout being, probably far to, long winded in this post, got very little sleep last night, if my thought process is confusing to you, feel free to say and I'll try to explain it a bit better

[Godwyn]

This post is still excellent for determining which types of ammo to use in what situations.

[samoth]

I've been thinking more about Gel vs. SnS for non-lethal attacks and wanted some opinions.

Assume an attacker has 18 Automatics die and no modifiers, and is attacking with a Remington Suppressor (6 Acc 7P -1AP).  Gel rounds change the damage to 7Stun -0AP; SnS make it 5StunElec -5AP.

Attacking against a generic 3 body 12 armor goon, assuming the attacker gets the full 6 hits that the accuracy of the gun provides, Gel rounds will be doing 13P and SnS will be 11PElec against 7 AP.  Chances are either attack will flat out kill the goon.  Assuming you want to deal stun damage only, which round would truly be better? 

[Kanly]

Electric damage has it's special effect of initiative debuffing etc, Gel knocks the targets over. I think this should be your major deciding factor. On average they both do the same amount of damage. If your weapon already has some AP, Gel will do more damage since the base AP is wasted with SnS!

Also, electricity is P against drones and vehicles which can be very helpful.

[martinchaen]

samoth
In your example, both round inflict stun damage and will not change their DV to physical (even if they exceed AV); check page 168:
"If the modified Damage Value (DV) of an attack causing Physical damage is less than the AP modified armor rating, then the attack causes Stun damage instead of Physical damage."

As you can tell, the reverse is not true. So, you're not going to kill the goon if you use gel and SnS rounds, merely incapacitate him.

Furthermore, the 13S and 11S(e) DV values are resisted with Body 3 + AV 12 / 7 respectively, and the mook has 8+(3/2,roundup)=11 condition monitor boxes; in both cases, your assumptions are a little flawed, statistically. Allow me to elaborate.

First off, hit probability for Gel rounds. Using Insaniac99s hit probability generator, and assuming the mook has all attributes at 3, we see the following: http://anydice.com/program/3395
Probability of attacker scoring the maximum 6 hits: 58.78%
Probability of defender scoring 0 hits: 8.78%

Attackers hits on average: 5.21
Defenders hits on average: 1.98
Attacker's net hits on average: 4.02

Average DV before soak 10.64
Average DV after soak: 5.93

As you can tell, your chances of disabling the mook is statistically not that high with a 7P weapon, as the target gets to dodge and soak. He'd still be knocked over, though, as the physical limit of the mook in this question is 4, and gel rounds reduce this to 2.

Now, let's take a look at SnS rounds, http://anydice.com/program/3396:
Probability of attacker scoring the maximum 6 hits: 58.78% (unchanged)
Probability of defender scoring 0 hits: 8.78% (unchanged)

Attackers hits on average: 5.21 (unchanged)
Defenders hits on average: 1.98  (unchanged)
Attacker's net hits on average: 4.02 (unchanged)

Average DV before soak 8.75
Average DV after soak: 5.62

The Electricity damage is a little lower on average, but you can also count on it's secondary effects of slowing the target down and making the target worse at doing everything for a little while.

[samoth]

Awesome work, thank you for taking the time to stat this out!  I totally forgot that Stun didn't convert to Physical like you said.

[Michael Chandra]

Another reason to use SnS is Spirits: Each 2 armor knocked off means not just 2 less armor dice but also 1 less auto-hit on the soak.

[Top Dog]

While that's sort of true, spirits in my mind tend to call for APDS. Preferably in heavy weapons.