Gauss Mod 1.9
This mod adds a new line of items: gauss weapons, or "railguns", to be researched, manufactured and used by the X-Com.
An up-to-date version in the attachment.Gauss weapons are meant to be an alternative to starting tech for laser weapons, with a different profile but roughly comparable and also available from the start. The main reasoning behind this decision is that both real life hand-held lasers and hand-held railguns suffer from the same problem: it is impossible to build a power supply compact enough to make the weapon practical. If we assume that this problem was overcome for the lasers (probably thanks to early research on alien tech), then we can make gauss weapons too.
The mod adds the following items:
1. Gauss Pistol. A powerful, weighted side arm.
2. Gauss Rifle. A hypervelocity kinetic weapon, very effective against lightly armoured, big targets.
3. Gauss Sniper Rifle. An natural development of the Gauss Rifle, sacrificing mobility for greater accuracy and even more damage.
4. Heavy Gauss. Makes big holes, easily comparable to plasma weapons (at least when pitted against enemies with low resistance to Armour Piercing), but much more unwieldy.
5. Gauss Tank. A standard tank with a sligthtly modified Heavy Gauss.
6. Gauss Hovertank. as above, but mounted on a hovertank chassis. Has far greater mobility and thicker armour, but at a cost of less efficient snap shots (stability issues). Both require gauss ammo rounds to be used.
7. Gauss Cannon. This craft weapon has shorter effective range than the Laser Cannon, but it packs more power per shot (the rpm value is similar for both weapons).
8. Railgun versions for all the above.
It also adds relevant research projects, manufacture orders and ufopedia entries.
Most of you are probably wondering about the TFTD gauss weapons. They are irrelevant: these gauss guns have different stats and a different role. They are more powerful and more accurate than lasers, but they lack autofire and their damage type is Armour Piercing, which most aliens are more resistant to than to lasers. They require ammo clips, but the clips are generally large (since gauss bullets are fairly small). (TFTD gauss guns didn't seem to have anything to do with gauss weaponry whatsoever, but that's beside the point.)
In the future, I will also squash all the bugs that inevitably will appear, since I didn't test this as thoroughly as I should have.
And if non-standard grenade damage is enabled in OpenXCom, I would like to add gauss "explosives" with area damage (grenades and rockets), with Armour Piercing damage type.
With version 1.4, old weapon sprites (stolen from TFTD, with slight improvement by myself) were pushed out in favour of new sprites by GrandSirThebus, who was kind enough to donate his superior pictures for this mod. Here's the gallery of some of his works used in this mod:
CHANGELOG:
1.8b: Fixed the bug with some railguns not requiring Elerium to produce.
1.7: Adds a second tier of Gauss weaponry: the railguns, using GrandSirThebus' sprites and Kuisti's sounds. Normal Gauss weapons use TFTD sprites again. Fixed a bug with ammo sell costs. New bullet sprite for Gauss weapons.
1.6b: Fixed missing strings.
1.6: Fixed palette on clip bigobs. Moved sprites to sprite sheets (courtesy of Arthanor).
1.5: Fixed tank ammo category. Added missing French translations (credits: Ascadix). Added weapon entry to the tanks. Some cleaning of unnecessary data.
1.4: Completely new, absolutely stunning sprites and sounds for the hand weapons! Credits: GrandSirThebus.
1.3: Added Spanish translation (credits: Nightwolf).
1.2: Added Russian translation (credits: phobos2077).
1.1: Added French (credits: Aldorn) and Polish translations. Added new sounds (credits: Human Ktulu).
1.0: Added unique Gauss Tank and Gauss Hovertank turrets.
0.6: Fixed typos in this readme.
0.5: Added Gauss Pistol, Gauss Rifle, Gauss Sniper Rifle, Heavy Gauss, Gauss Tank, Gauss Hovertank and Gauss Cannon.
CREDITS:
"X-Com: Terror from the Deep": craft weapon sprites (slightly altered by Solarius Scorch)
GrandSirThebus: weapon sprites and sounds
Solarius Scorch: ruleset, Gauss Sniper Rifle and Heavy Gauss Clip sprites, icons for the Gauss Cannon (by playing around with TFTD sprites)
Plus, see the changelog for our brave translators!
Special thanks go to:
- Dioxine, for his advice on 2D graphics.
- Tyran_nick, for inspiration (this was at first supposed to be just a sprite update of his Railgun mod, before it went a different path).
- GrandSirThebus, for choosing this mod for upgrade with new awesome graphics.
