Kinda silly but it should work, at least until the armor mod adjustment is added to the nightly (Dioxine's piratez has me considering upgrading to extended+, but its a different beast im not familiar with yet).
Take Melee damage and turn it into "Antipersonnel" type, this being for things like a shotgun slug and so forth.
Make some melee weapons do armor piercing. These being ones that you'd expect to rip through armor. Even though the melee type is technically different most of the enemies have about the same resistance against AP as they do Melee. The weaker aliens and civilians just dont have enough health to start with for the increase to melee damage to really matter (for it to be lost). Most melee damage starts at 80+ points.
Armored targets and tanks take less damage against anti-personnel, you adjust it based on threshold modeling of what you want it to be able to negate (and which attacks you want it to still be able to "just do enough" to get through). This would also include creatures that take deep wound penetration to kill, as is the case in real life with big game.
Unarmored or otherwise soft targets take most if not all of the damage.
This way you make the Antipersonnel weapons do the damage you want them to. For a shotgun delivering a tight spread it could be done with a single projectile like 45 or 50 damage. And also useful for cutting weapons like knives and swords.
Since I removed the zombie capability from my tentaculats I think im going to do this to them and set it at about 180 damage (or 60 + strength applied). That way its killing unarmored and plastic aqua armor, but with about 50% reduction applied to tanks and power armor tier its just dangerous against them not outright deadly. I also made melee attacks take longer but thats a sidenote.
(They use their tentacles to find weak points (critical hit) and break people's necks so the damage is unrealistically high compared to their strength, but hardened objects still take time to break down)
