Squad Leader Archive

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steady aim is still a little annoying though.... it needs to last more then one shot with the timer it is on.

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Message Edited by Sylow on 06-23-2005 03:54 PM

The problem I see with steady aim is the pace of most battles. I mostly end up in groups of people I dont know very well because I interact alot with people. The hard part is that they usualy dont know to pace themselves or watch for the SL icons, so they try to go through everything realy fast. So, by the time Steady aim is used on the previous target and is warming up for the next round, the next target might already be down and that use of Steady aim just times out or is used on after shots on a corpse. It's a tricky business trying to find a lull in the battle to warm up Steady Aim for the next target.

Kinda, yes. For me, steadyaim is simply a failure from a mathematical point of view.

With the execution time, i am loosing at least3 attacks. Assuming that my team is all about the same level and damage potential, you loose 1/8th of the combat power for3 attacks, while gaining only about 4% (1/25th) of striking power for one attack. Of course, the 1/25th multiplies by 8, as the full team gets the bonus. Still you'll end up with an effective LOSS (!!!) of 9% of your firepower.

Not only that you don't get any benefit fromusing steady aim, you burn a lot of action while using it and at the same time decrease the total damage your team inflicts on the enemy.

This of course assumes that your team is all of lv. 80 and has rather equal equipment. To be fair we have to take some more factors into account.

1. the current model assumes that all teammembers have a similar level. Results will differ if this assumption is not true:

• the level of teammembers is lower than the one of the SL. This definitely indicates that they have only one combat profession and perhaps not even mastered those. In this case, the teammembers have a higher gain in actual damage than calculated here. Unfortunately this also most likely indicates that the teamleader by default has a higher damage output then the rest of the team, thus the loss of inflicted damage is even higher for the team.


• the level of the teammembers is significally higher than of the teamleader. This sure can happen, the SL can spend his other skillpoints in artisan, image designer and tailor, if he wants to. The steady aim then sure improves the firepower of the team a lot, while not firing his CDEF for a few turns won't make any difference. Anyways, i would advise the SL to also get a decend combat profession... if you only want one combat profession, SL is not the way to go.

2. there are other classes than yours involved.

• if you are rifleman, then this just meansthat the loss for the team will be even higher. We speak of pure damage inflicted, few teammembers will ever be able to compete with you.


• if you are not rifleman, the other riflemen, firing slow and doing high damage per shot, will make best use of steady aim. If you lead a pure team of riflemen, the increase of damage might actually reduce the damage loss of using steady aim. (Though, when i tested, i came to an increase of 4%. This testing was done on a friend with one full combat profession and a tiny bit of dabbling. Due to diminuishing returns, i would expect a Master Rifleman / Master Bounty Hunter to get a max. of 2% increase, perhaps less...)


• If your profession is pistol-based, the whole comparison might even lead to an even result, your damage output generally is lower than the average of the team. Of course, this still does not account for the action you spent and that you in that time were not able to use other crowd control abilities on the enemy, which would have been much more helpful than steadyaim.

The total of my thoughts on steadyaim lead me to the conclusion, that this ability actually has only one situation where it can give the team a tiny advantage: when applied before the team attacks a target. Unfortunately this means in PvE, that the team has to wait for the SL to give the command, while they could have inflicted significant damage on the target, so there again is no actual benefit to be found. Matters only change in PvP, when the first attack makes more of a difference while compared to the time before the attack and even here can only be used in a decent way when you are on the offense.

Thus the ability seems to be of very little and limited use to me and i really consider it to be broken. Rally gives the same bonus on offense, at the same time gives a bonus on defense, has similar activation time and action use and lasts for some time. As rally definitely is no overpowered ability, i dare to say that steadyaim is badly broken.

And on the volley fire, it's been confirmed by several people, it gives 15% more damage on the target and is considered to work perfectly.

Message Edited by Sylow on 06-23-2005 05:54 PM

Just thought I'ld chime in here with possibly some more concrete numbers...

Let's take a best case scenario:


8 players that all do 100damage per attack, and are speed capped at 1 attack a second. Their accuracy is not capped, so that steadyaim's +15 gives a +15% damage bonus.

As the SL starts steadyaim, that takes him out of action for 3s (3 attacks), but gives the remainder (7 players) of the group a +15. That means that over the 3s, your group does 100*7 + 100*7 + 115*7 = 2205 points of damage. Without steadyaim, you would over the same time deal 100*8 + 100*8 + 100*8 = 2400. You lose 195 points of damage, or 8.125% damage output.

Now let's take a slightly more realistic approach:

Assume your team only hits an average of 75% of the time. The extra bonus from SteadyAim makes them hit 90% of the time. So from the 8 shots fired by an 8-man team, only 6 would hit before, but 7 or 8 would hit now (I'll use 7.2). From a 7-man team, only 5.25 would hit before but 6.3 would hit now. Doing the same math:
Without steadyaim: 100*6 + 100*6 + 100*6 = 1800
With STeadyaim: 115*6.3 + 100*6.3 + 100*6.3 = 1984

So now you see the difference (If my understanding of a few core systems is correct). With a near accuracy-capped group, yes Steadyaim is actually a bane. But with a group that misses occasionally (As almost all groups do), SteadyAim is actually a boon.

So doing a little more math to solve for the accuracy breaking point...
3*100*(8*x) = 115*(7*(x+0.15)) + 2*100*(7*(x+0.15))
2400x = 805(x+0.15) + 1400(x+0.15)
2400x = (805x + 1400x) + 120.75 + 210
2400x - 805x - 1400x = 320.75
195x = 320.75
x = 1.6

Which means you have to have 160% accuracy, which isn't mathmatically possible (over 100% doesn't make sense). Which means that the bonus to more connecting shots (accuracy) is where the true bonus applies. Provided that the +15 bonus to accuracy scales to an extra 15 points of damage & an extra 15% accuracy...

So I'll let others explore the details further...

Message Edited by Yeraze on 07-02-2005 06:07 PM

yeraze, sylow

get working on a new SL FAQ!

Darth Sushi could use our help in that and those two post definitly would fit nice into one!

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Heck... i got to scream now, i had it all writen together and the IE ate it... so, i have to write it again, it seems...

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Their accuracy is not capped, so that steadyaim's +15 gives a +15% damage bonus.

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Whilt accuracy is not capped, it has diminuishing returns, which unfortunately means that a medium-leveled character sees about 4% or damage increase, not the mentioned 15%. For a fully built MBH/MRifle i would expect even less of an increase as returns fall even further behind.

Would be worth to get such a person into team and run a test occasionally.

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Now let's take a slightly more realistic approach:

Assume your team only hits an average of 75% of the time. The extra bonus from SteadyAim makes them hit 90% of the time.

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Again, diminuishing returns. I just used Kodan's profession calculator to build a MBH, MRifle, MMarksman, a few points left to dabble in some other combat profession. (I know, this is a close to optimum configuration, but there are plenty of people with this around, usually with the rest in pistoleer, to make it a valid example.)

You'll end up with:
general ranged accuracy: 185
rifle accuracy: 85

Now i dare to say that your model has a problem here. If you hit 75% of the time with a cummulative accuracy of 270, then you won't get a hit rate of 90% with an accuracy of 285.

The fact of diminuishing returns more likely make a difference of 1 to 3% than the mentioned 15%. I can't give you hard numbers on that as the accuracy formula would require long-time testing on a specific target, where the defense value of the target is well known. (Means, one person who plays target with one build, wears no armour and takes several hundred shots, both with and without steady aim on the shooter. After this test, you'd need another target with the same combat level but other defensive modifiers who takes the same number of shots. That testing is very time-intensive and i'd know of no volunteers to actually do that...)

To make the calculation a bit easier, i dare to assume that an accuracy +15 actually gives an incredible increase of 5% of hits and damage on target, which by all experience and knowledge of the system is noticeably over the actual benefit. (Here i found another error in your model. You just calculate 3 shots of the team while the SL fires not at all. As the SL also gains the accuracy bonus of steadyaim for one shot, you have to calculate for 3 non-augmented shots of the teammembers and 1 augmented shot for the complete team. Note that this works in favour of steadyaim, ignoring the fact that the SL also gets the bonus actually makes the special look worse than it really is. ) Then you'd end up with an average damage of:

- without steady aim: 8 * 4 * 100 * 0.75 = 2400
- with steady aim: 7 * 3 * 100 * 0.75 + 8 * 100 * 1.05 * 0.8 = 2247

Due to the increases in the hit chance, the loss of inflicted damage would be lower than on my first calculation (6.4% instead of 9%), still you would actually loose in damage potential.

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So doing a little more math to solve for the accuracy breaking point...
3*100*(8*x) = 115*(7*(x+0.15)) + 2*100*(7*(x+0.15))

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Moment... you calculate here that damage is only increased with one of the 3 shots but accuracy is increased with all three. Correctly (also with 4 shots taken into account) it would be:

4 * 100 * 8* x = 115 * 8 * (x + 0.15 ) + 3 * 100 * 7 * x
Simply calculating it out, you'd end up with:
3200 * x = 920 * x + 138 + 2100 * x
180 * x = 138
x ~= 0.77


The breaking point this is at 77% of chance to hit. To confirm, and see the behaviour (it's a linear function, so we don't have turning points) check the numbers:
x = 0.85:
2720 > 2705
x= 0.60:
1920 < 1950

This makes it obvious that steadyaim with the given (very optimistical) numbers gives an advantage when your chance to hit is at 77% or lower. While a to-hit chance of 77% already is significally below what i personally experience in combat, things move further against steadyaim when you take into account that the tested increase of steadyaim doesn't give 15% of damage increase. Taking the still optimistic approach of 5% increase, the breaking point moves down to:

4 * 100 * 8 * x = 105 * 8 * (x+0.15) + 3 * 100 * 7* x
Which results in:
x ~= 0.48

Now i assume we all can agree that hit-chances in SWG definitely are over 48%. And even this breaking point at 48% is not the bottom-line, as the formula still assumes that an increase of +15 on accuracy results in 15% higher to-hit chance. (So, the first 270 points of accuracy would give a total of 48% while the last 15 points would add 15%, this is way off scale.) If you still include this fact into the formula and rather assume an increase of 5% (still more than it probably does), you'll end up with a base to-hit chance of below 16%, where steady aim actually gives you an advantage.

My first calculation missed the point of increased chance to hit, i have to thank you to point this out to me. Still i dare to say that the new formula, which now includes the chance to hit, proves that steady aim in most situations is contraproductive to the teams cumulative damage output. Only in the rare situations where windup time doesn't matter (which happens, though rarely) or where the target has extraordinary defences and you absolutele depend on inflicting a state on the target with the first shot (which in theory can happen, though i never heard of anything like that yet), steady aim might be useful, but these situations are so rare that i dare to say that using steadyaim actually is a disadvantage for the complete team.

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yeraze, sylow

get working on a new SL FAQ!

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Right now we go over the maths. I think we now covered it all, but perhaps somebody still finds a mistake in my concept and model or just some messup in my calculations. I don't want to make "final" conclusions unless it's crosschecked. So i now wait for Yeraze, if he can find any flaws in my theory and still can correct me. If not, i'll try to find the time the next days to put my the info from my testing into one big and coherent posting which then could be part of the FAQ which we urgently need...

Message Edited by Sylow on 07-03-2005 07:03 PM

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Sylow wrote:
Moment... you calculate here that damage is only increased with one of the 3 shots but accuracy is increased with all three. Correctly (also with 4 shots taken into account) it would be:

4 * 100 * 8* x = 115 * 8 * (x + 0.15 ) + 3 * 100 * 7 * x

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Wait a minute... I thought it was already proven that STeadyaim only applies to a single attack? So it would only apply to the first of the 3, correct?

So, just repeating the calculations with smaller differences....

(+5% accuracy, +5% damage)
3*100*(8*x) = 105 * (7*(x+0.05)) + 2*100*(7*(x+0.05))
2400x = 735(x+0.05) + 1400(x+0.05)
2400x - 735x - 1400x = 36.75 + 70
265x = 106.75

x=40.28% is the breaking point in this situation (according to my math, open for peer review )...

So, (I think), that when the accuracy of the group exceeds 40%, steadyaim is actually a cummulative loss of damage output. So, it only seems to apply to a) low-level groups, or b) very high-level baddies..

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Sylow wrote:
Heck... i got to scream now, i had it all writen together and the IE ate it...

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Using IE leads to the darkside!

It causes anger, and anger leads to hate and hate leads to suffering.
Ask Yoda.

Now back to topic, this discussion would fit perfectly here in the Star Wars Wiki as well as that a stand alone copy should go to the DEVs to show them that steady aim is currently worthless.

These mathematical mindgames are something they are (at least it looks like) not capable of, thus hence the always forth and backwards nerfing of various professions to balance them to each other.

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