Hello fellow Piratez!
I'm sure you all know the hammer well, and either love it because it is so reliable, or dislike it because it "breaks" melee weapons by being so reliable. I know Dioxine has planned to nerf it in the next release, but I'm not sure what he intends. In the meantime, I decided that I'd take a stab (or a..? smash?) at it.
Basically, I am using the functionality of OXCE to define a melee attack with different attributes for a ranged weapon. The hammer (and pickaxe), keep their snap shot, except that now it only deals damage to tiles and items. It causes no health/stun/armor/wounds on hitting units. So it is only useful for smashing through terrain. So that makes it useless for actual melee fighting, obviously.
To go along with for that, the hammer and pickaxe now gain a melee attack, which means you can now hit in diagonals!
And it uses melee skill properly to calculate the chance to hit, and it trains melee skill on hits now instead of firing accuracy.
The only downsides are:
1 - You will miss a lot more: That's the point, since 100% reliable snapshots were too much. For the hammer, the calculation is now, as was in the mod for the accuracy that never really mattered:
0.6 * (melee/2 + 50)so at 100 melee, you have 60% chance to hit, at 50% melee, 45% to hit, at 0 melee, you have 30%. That's a quite significant nerf hit wise, and it would probably make sense to increase the base accuracy (
accuracyMelee in the mod), to something like 75.
2 - You can't use it to clear elevators anymore
3 - You can't use it to finish off unconscious aliens
Obviously, these are downsides of all melee weapons, and it exchange we get a melee weapon that behaves like one, but can also destroy walls.
Let me know what you think.
Also, since I finally looked into the OXCE modding stuff (and what marvellous customization options there are.. well done Yankes!), this opens up the possibility of an upgrade for the hammer: The thunder hammer