Some balance suggestions

[Arthanor]

I don't know if Piratez can benefit from even more ammo.. There is already a LOT of them, although proper armor piercing ammo could be cool

[Meridian]

I just don't understand why so many people feel the urge to constantly nerf something.
If it continues like this, we'll be fighting only with bare hands (and cattle prods), 'cos the weapons will be weaker than a human (sorry mutant) punch.

What is the point of having 100+ starting-level weapons, if I am struggling to find even a few, that are effective. And when I finally find something, it gets nerfed within 2 weeks...

Please stop nerfing our side to oblivion (and start buffing their/both sides if you don't have enough challenge).

Or much better, impose restrictions on yourself!... vanilla xcom has TONS of cheese, which you can exploit... but you don't have to give everyone a psi-amp just because it's the most effective way. Different people play differently.... and if you think the bow is OP, don't use it!
There is a reason why vanilla xcom has been nominated for the best game of all times in several top X lists... and places at least within top 10 in most others.

[yrizoud]

Welcome to the Hell of game balance :/
Vanilla UFO had enemies which only used three weapons, basically (blaster and stun attacks were normally rare)
It's predictably much harder to balance a game with hundreds of weapons, when you can't even control which ones will become available at which moment (the huge randomness of factions, player research choices, and random interrogation results).

Note that Piratez also swarms with new ideas and experiments.

[Arthanor]

The idea is not to always nerf the best weapon, but to create a situation where weapons of a given period are all of some use. For a game that takes as long as Piratez, I define:  early/mid/late game, and early/mid/late sub-periods of these. So mid-early game is the middle of the early game period, early-mid game is the early part of the mid game, etc.

As it currently is, primitive weapons (something I would class early/early game since they are easy to research) outclass guns (mid-early game for good gun drops), even with advanced ammo(making them late-early game) by the time you get them, by virtue of the training the gals get and the excellent scaling these weapons offer. If fact, they can relatively easily compete even with laser weapons (early-mid game weapons, I'd say).

Dioxine seems happy with guns. Since primitive weapons outclass guns, and guns are where Dioxine wants them to be (ish, see slight buff by adding some stun damage), the proper thing to do is to bring primitive weapons (and their supra-linear improvements with stats) down (either by nerfing the scaling, or adding other nerfs -> improved armors against them) so they are comparable with guns.

Another way would be to buff guns, which is what I actually am advocating (since a long time), by adding some accuracy stat scaling to them too, but that doesn't seem to be the favoured solution.

[Yankes]

For the jhp round, the "ToHealth: 1.0" doubles the damage that gets past armor.
For the ap round, the "ToHealth: -0.3" adds health, effectively lowering the damage that gets past armor to 70%. I hope that actually works as intended ingame.

1.0 is default, 100% damage.
0.0 is no damage to health.
-0.3 will HEAL enemy.

[Dioxine]

@Meridian: I haven't noticed you using Hunting Bows, or really using Fuso Knives other than a few times. The only time you could say a nerf really changed your tactics was with the Hammer (which has been de-nerfed a bit since then).

The fuso knives should still be deadly with Throwing*0.9 damage. That's 63 damage with 70 Throwing. Frontal carapace armor is 50, gets buffed by +30% to 65, knives still penetrate it on a better than average roll. They're less effective against Powered Armor which was the point.

So please don't be angry, it's not like I have a personal vendetta against you.

[Meridian]

Just for the record: First was Hammer, second Fuso knives, third Cutlass, fourth Sniper rifle, fifth Combat bow.

I am not angry (I even agree with some changes, like sniper rifle), I am just saying nerfing is not the only way.
I humbly accept any and all changes you decide to make; and I will even gladly code support for more features for you... I wouldn't do that if I thought you were on personal vendetta, would I?

[Eddie]

1.0 is default, 100% damage.
0.0 is no damage to health.
-0.3 will HEAL enemy.

Ah, I seemed to have misundestood the use of "ToHealth". I thought it was additional to normal damage. Thank you for clarification.

Corrected values:
jhp: +30% armor effectiveness, ToHealth: 2.0, 50-150% damage range
ap: -50% armor effectiveness, ToHealth: 0.7, 0-200% damage range


I tend to agree with Meridian on the useless starting weapons, which I find is a shame. So many items and no reason to use them. Your muskets can fire one aimed shot per round, and all other early rifles do that too at roughly the same damage (the Blackmarch SMG beeing the exception with 2 aimed shots). Differences you would notice in close combat where autofire and more ammo have a huge impact, but whith all the melee weapons and higher mobility compared to vanilla (more tu and sprint), you don't need a gun for close combat.

Piratez also has the problem that it is not clear which weapon is good vs which enemy. I know, because I know where to look in the game files. For example, the blowpipe is the counter to Osiron security. One shot to their back armor can down them, and you even do good damage vs their front armor. Why? Blowpipe is acid damge, ignores 40% armor and Osiron take 140% damage from acid. But who knows that?

People probably also don't know that a black powder bomb (anarchy bomb) is pretty much a handheld explosive cannonball and can also kill a Osiron security in one hit.


I don't have a lets play, so I'll briefly recount my experience when first playing Piratez.
My first mission ended up with my meleemonster (I didn't know at that time) standing right in front of a Osiron security with fistycuffs. He went down in one hit, to the front armor. I though "wow, melee rules". Next mission was raiders. That is when I discovered that enemys can have dodge and guns are useful after all. Bording gun saved the day, plus hammer and chainsaw (they can't be dodged). Then I discovered the rapid fire bows that shoot three arrows while my rifles shoot once.
I like to keep using bows because I like the concept of a weapon that uses the throwing skill. And arcing shot is just so great...
Now I modded my hunting bow to have a 40 tu aimed and 30 tu inaccurate snap, so I feel less cheesy for using it.

[Dioxine]

Piratez also has the problem that it is not clear which weapon is good vs which enemy. I know, because I know where to look in the game files. For example, the blowpipe is the counter to Osiron security. One shot to their back armor can down them, and you even do good damage vs their front armor. Why? Blowpipe is acid damge, ignores 40% armor and Osiron take 140% damage from acid. But who knows that?

The carapace armor with all its vulnerabilities and numbers is fully exposed when you research 'personal armor parts', d'oh. So everyone who reads Pedia knows. And with the Black Powder Bomb, does it take a huge brain to guess a 60 HE is deadly?

The main point behind the current Fuso Knives nerf wasn't knives vs. guns. It was knives vs. Melee. Guns always win since you can slowly exterminate enemies from long range, like Meridian has shown in the latest couple of Pogroms.

Also maybe Piratez start not early enough tech-wise to really appreciate the starting weapons... I might change that before 1.0 yet.

[Eddie]

The blowpipe has a listed damage of 22. You wouldn't know without doing the math that it is actually a good weapon vs a 50 armor opponent. You don't associate armorpiercing with blowpipe.

Compare the situation to vanilla xcom and the cyberdisc. Many people complain about them beeing too tough. They just don't know you are supposed to use rocketlauncher to kill them. Now there are lots of guides telling the people "use rocket vs cyberdisc". There is no weapon guide for Piratez. Ok, I can write one...

[Yankes]

Maybe made muskets OP like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDYtxxRU_cY
1 shot and costly reload but you can kill many enemies with one shoot (reload could have longer time than normally),

[Dioxine]

AH, these! Tried to reproduce it with Clockwork Pistol, but it's kinda not there yet. It was done like this because past some point, making a musket ball simply bigger didn't increase armor piercing power, due to low velocity. So making muliple barrels was the way to go

[yrizoud]

Hilarous action replay at 22"00 of the video A gun which causes a physical wound to the shooter when firing. And this cloud of smoke, a nice trick to prevent the target from shooting back (because you can't see each other).

Eddie has a point about players learning stuff the hard way. More feedback on each attack's result would be very welcome, as was suggested/started in an other thread.

[Bloax]

Well if someone was so nice as to implement support for pain sounds and/or variable amounts of bloodsplatter.. :^)

[Dioxine]

Yeah, painsounds, and that's about it, because it's Piratez: the game, not Piratez: the dice roll displayer Discoveries like these blowpipes are the prize to a smart and experimenting player. I won't dumb the game down since it would hurt those who like to experiment. And if someone wants data REAL BAD, there are the rulesets.