Discussion Ship Upgrades - Revisiting the Math

thehappybub

Wanted Pirate
Having just started playing, I am nowhere near getting lvl VI upgrades on any ship, but I'm the kind of person that likes to plan the future of my grind pretty intensely, so I started investigating the damage outputs and pros/cons of the different final upgrades for ships.

From my research it seems like the two "best" upgrades for damage output and just generally sinking stuff are copperhead and storm chaser.

In terms of pure damage output, I came upon this thread: https://piratesforums.co/threads/strongest-upgrade-for-a-warbrig.21205/page-3.

People who are much better at math than me came up with seemingly solid calculations for how copperheads dish out about 40% more damage per broadside than a storm chaser. This thread was the most clear method of explaining damage output, in my opinion. The thing is that this was done before the whole copperhead limited to a maximum of 1 explosive shot thing was around. I would try to calculate the new damages myself, but statistics was never my strength and the incorporation of the 15% chance of an explosive shot with a max of 1 shot makes the math harder for me to wrap my head around.

Anyone who is more statistics savvy want to revisit this whole discussion?

Ultimately, I'm sure it will be hard to arrive at which one is "better" because of their different qualities (armor and speed/maneuverability), but with the 1 explosive limit, it seems to me that the following scenarios are important to consider when determining which ship is "stronger" ...

(1) Against AI ships the copperhead should win out because it could just keep dishing out the damage, and explosive shots are bound to come into play the more broadsides you fire. This is scenarios I see where a copperhead more consistently one shots higher-level ships than a storm chaser.

(2) However, in a svs scenario, it seems like the storm chaser might be better because not only is it more maneuverable, but it has the chance of unleashing a seriously thunder-packed volley that the copperhead can't with its 1 explosive round (which might not be present at all or might miss). This is where I have heard of (though not personally experienced) instances where a storm chaser 1 shots a copperhead in svs, but not the other way around.

I wonder what people think about this.
 
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