New "Time-To-Kill" Calculator

PSA/Guide

Introduction

Hey guys, Whitesushi here. In a lot of my other posts, people have been bringing up the idea of time-to-kill being a more accurate indicator of how good weapons are and I definitely agree. However, I have put it aside for the longest time due to not having any husk health data nor evolution damage increase (I will touch on this point later)

That being said, I still do not have those values. If you know what they are or how they are calculated, do comment down below. Otherwise, I would like to introduce my rather incomplete, yet sufficient "Time-To-Kill" calculator over at my spreadsheet (more on how to use it in below sections).

The Table

If you look at this image you will notice a new table (highlighted in red) which did not exist before. This is the new calculator I've been talking about. It lets the user input

Husk Health (This will eventually change to a power input where the health values will be derived but for now, health is what we have to work with)
Number of Targets (How many targets you think you will be shooting up)
Reaction Time (up to the player's discretion)

Once that is done, the table will generate the time-to-kill (in seconds), for each of the weapons entered. You can most definitely play with the accuracy values as well as reaction time etc to try and make your calculations more accurate but of course, number simulations will never be precise to real experience

The Formula

This is probably going to be very math heavy but I feel the need to post my formula so the more math savvy guys can help me verify and improve it. Feel free to skip this section if you're not keen. Here's a new screenshot with all the columns and rows marked for reference.. and the formula as below

=iferror(ROUND(($H$47-1)*$I$47+1/(C37*(1+C46))*ROUNDUP($G$47/G38)*$H$47+(ROUNDUP(MAX(ROUNDUP($G$47/G38)*$H$47*C41/ROUND(C38*(1+C47))-1,0))*(C39/(1+C48))),2),NIL)

Before you panic, here's the formula in "english"

= Reaction time between targets + Time to shoot all rounds + Total time to reload

All the "ROUND"-ing is merely to improve the accuracy of the formula. Let's now go into each of these sections to help you guys understand better

Reaction time between targets

($H$47-1)*$I$47

This is the easiest section to understand. We simply take the user-input values of "# Targets", minus 1 from it and multiply it by the user-input values of "Reaction Time". We need to -1 because we don't need a reaction time for the last target (since we're not moving onto another target). Pretty straightforward I would say.

Time to shoot all rounds

1/(C37*(1+C46))*ROUNDUP($G$47/G38)*$H$47

This is slightly more complicated. We're essentially looking at the following being

Time taken to fire each bullet*Total number of bullets needed (rounded up)*Number of Targets

To find time taken for each bullet, we're simply taking 1/fire rate. In this instance, C37 would be the base fire rate whereas (1+C46) is the multiplier based on the weapon perks.

To find total number of bullets needed, we simply take total health which is the health for each husk and divide it by the damage/ shot which would be derived from my original calculator. The value is then rounded up because we can't fire 3.7 of a shot for example and it would instead be 4. After that, it is multiplied by the number of targets. By rounding before multiplying, we prevent the calculator adding half shots on top of each other between multiple targets

Total time to reload

ROUNDUP(MAX(ROUNDUP($G$47/G38)*$H$47*C41/ROUND(C38*(1+C47))-1,0))*(C39/(1+C48))

This is possibly the most complicated section of the equation. As such, we will be breaking it down into 2 parts, namely Number of reloads and Time taken per reload. The prior looks something like

MAX(Total number of bullets needed (rounded up)*Ammo per shot/Magazine Size (rounded)-1),0

Once again, we round up the number of bullets needed (explanation earlier) and we round off magazine size as well to avoid getting 2.x shots which is impossible. We then -1 from the entire formula because you don't need to reload on your last clip. The value is the filtered through MAX such that in the event we take <1 clip to kill the target, we do not end up with negative number of reloads. Once all these are accounted for, we multiply it into the next part of the formula being

(C39/(1+C48)

Which simply derives the total time spent reloading. Putting all 3 sections together, we will be able to derive our final value for "time-to-kill"

The Examples

Now, let's see if this calculator actually works as intended by running it through a few scenarios and checking if the values are actually correct through manual calculations. Ignore the perks used because that's not the point for contention here

5000 Husk Health, 1 Target, 1 Reaction Time

image

	Super Shredder	Hydra	Grave Digger
Total Reaction Time	0	0	0
Number of Shots	16	20	65
Reloads Needed	1	1	1

Reaction time should be 0 across the board because we're only shooting 1 target. Each weapon has their number of shots needed rounded up and reloads needed are calculated based on number of shots to magazine. Now, let's evaluate them and see if it matches up with the calculated values show in the image

Super Shredder : 16 shots take 16 seconds at the Shredder's 1 fire rate plus the reload which takes 6 seconds, we should obtain 22s which matches the image
Hydra : 20 shots take 8 seconds at the Hydra's 2.5 fire rate plus the reload which takes 1.878 seconds, we should obtain 9.878s which rounds up to the range matching the image
Grave Digger : 65 shots take 8.125 seconds at the Grave Digger's 8 fire rate plus the reload which takes 2.1 seconds, we should obtain 10.225 which rounds up to the range matching the image

5000 Husk Health, 2 Targets, 1 Reaction Time

image

	Super Shredder	Hydra	Grave Digger
Total Reaction Time	1	1	1
Number of Shots	32	40	130
Reloads Needed	3	3	3

So it's clearly easy on a single target, but what if we now have 2 targets? Reaction time is now 1 because we need to switch target once. The rest is calculated per normal and the evaluation looks something like

Super Shredder : 32 shots take 32s with 3 reloads taking 18s. Finally, we add 1s from reaction time to derive 51s which matches the image
Hydra : 40 shots take 16s with 3 reloads taking 3 x 1.878 = 5.633s. Finally, we add 1s from reaction time to derive 22.633s which rounds down to the range matching the image
Grave Digger : 130 shots take 16.25s with 3 reloads taking 3 x 2.1 = 6.3s. Finally, we add 1s from reaction time to derive 23.55s which matches the image

I could go on and test more permutations but it is too much work so I shall leave this job to you guys to find the errors and let me know here.

Other Factors

So remember when I mentioned at the start why I held this off for the longest time possible? There's the idea that the time-to-kill value is meaningless if we can't fully replicate a weapon's stat. Here's the formula for obtaining a weapon's damage value obtained from u/xeri-star's post a while ago. This dude has been a great help with all my formulas when I first started writing guides for this game. Anyway, it looks something like

Damage = ( BaseDamage + EvolutionDamage ) *  
         ( 1 + (WeaponLevel-1) * 0.05 ) *   
         ( 1 + Offense/100 + SurvivorBonuses ) *   
         ( 1 + HeroDamageBonuses + WeaponDamageBonuses )

So far, I've been able to obtain every single value with the exception of Evolution Damage. If you look at my table, you will notice "Offense" and a hidden section which you can enter the weapon's level to but I did not mark it image. However, I simply can't seem to find a pattern for Evolution Damage and is on the verge of thinking it's hard-coded which would make implementation too tedious. That being said, I will likely look into it again once I have more time on my hands.

The Limitations

There are inaccuracies with weapons that can reload individual rounds. Take for example the Super Shredder which is able to reload individual rounds at 0.75s/ round. This essentially means that the Super Shredder wouldn't have to spend a full 6s reloading its last clip, thus real time-to-kill will be shorter
Weapons which are capable of hitting multiple targets would technically be a lot better in this calculations but we do not have the means as of yet to determine that. Eventually I should have a check for it.
You also can't calculate for a group of husks that comprises of varying health values (since I simply do not have the option for that)
Right now % shots missed is factored into the Damage/ shot and not "Time-To-Kill" but it should still be fairly reliable to my knowledge

Conclusion

There has been quite a lot of requests for a time-to-kill calculator but mine in its current iteration is far from complete. However, you can surely get a rough idea of whatever you are looking to calculate with sufficient knowledge on husk health. Do definitely try it out and let me know if I made any mistakes somewhere. I would strongly advise against taking the time-to-kill calculator in its current state as benchmark for an absolute comparison unless you are 100% certain of what you are doing

TL;DR Partial complete "Time-To-Kill" calculator now available on my spreadsheet

Posted Oct 28, 2017, 8:42 AM UTC