Some balance suggestions

[Eddie]

Some things need nerving.

Early game killer kombo: hunting bow and fuso knives.
The hunting bow is the early game laser rifle that trains throwing which then enables the fuso knives "I kill you" button.

Hunting bow
Main problem: still too accurate, fires too fast while beeing very compact. I equip everyone with it on the belt. If their throwing is not good enough, they can train that with the bow. The bow is light and compact enough that it can be carried just to train throwing, as the hunting bow is the best throwing trainer. With 75 tu you can get 3 shots out with a lowest possible accuracy of 45 (30 throwing * 150 bow acc) in a 15 tile distance. Fast accurate shots that arc with no ammo cost. You couldn't get a better training weapon.
And when your throwing skill reaches about 60, you do the same damage as your early rifles. Just faster, lighter, more compact, more accurate and without ammo cost. So, why use rifles at all?
The only "downside" of the hunting bow is the arcing shot, but the only situation where that really prohibits the use is for base defence.

Possible ways to balance:
- Limited clip of 12 to 20 shots. Enough that it won't bother you but will prevent spam.
- Increased tu for firing. About 40 seems good, would say even more. Bows don't fire faster than guns. If you want a fast fire bow, give it a fast snap and slow aimed fire.
- Reduce accuracy even more. Or give it a snap and aimed mode.
- Use 50/50 firing/throwing skill for accuracy and make the skill training a coinflip. The effective throwing training is what makes the bow so useful.


Fuso knives
With bow abuse, I got a lot of gals with 80+ throwing skill. That gives them 70+ damage with the fuso knives. More damage than a gauss pistol and faster and more accurate. Osiron security front armor? I don't care, you're dead. Provost? Actually need more than one gal now, but also dead. The fuso knives are my power armor busters. That is the point where it becomes ridiculous.

Possible ways to balance:
- +30% armor effectiveness, maybe reduce damage a bit.
- Reduce clip size to 4 or 3. Now you can't carry 18 on your belt + quickdraw. Powerful, but limited in quantity.
- Reduce effectiveness of throwing skill training with the bow as mentioned above

Comparing nerved knives to throwing stars: knives own unarmored targets but do about the samge damage as stars vs armored opponents. That gives stars more usefulness all around (longer range, faster) while knives obliterate unarmored things.

Side note: is it possible to put a damage cap on skill scaling weapons? Might have to ask Medidian or Yankes if they can implement it.


Light machinegun
Minor thing. I find the gun a bit lacking. To make it more competitive, increase the amount of autofire shots from 5 to 6. Increase clipsize accordingly from 50 to 54. At 12 shots per round, it is on par with the autogun. More damage, but less accurate.

[Dioxine]

Side note: is it possible to put a damage cap on skill scaling weapons? Might have to ask Medidian or Yankes if they can implement it.


Light machinegun
Minor thing. I find the gun a bit lacking. To make it more competitive, increase the amount of autofire shots from 5 to 6. Increase clipsize accordingly from 50 to 54. At 12 shots per round, it is on par with the autogun. More damage, but less accurate.

Quick answers to these two:
1. No but it allows writing a damage function which plateaus around some value (like dmg = x - y^2, by manipulating y you can make the damage to level off at some point)

2. Competitive with what? It deals a lot more damage than Autogun, with better accuracy at long ranges. Gyro-stabilized Autogun (which is an upgraded weapon) has better accuracy, but still less power.

About the bows and knives... first off, good to hear someone is actually using their brain when playing this Second, it's all good in principle but maybe OP in execution. If I nerf Hunting Bow too much, you will train using Combat Bow. Knives are completely pointless due to limited range, if they're not strong enough. I will think about this. I would also gladly hear opinions of other people on this.

[Meridian]

I would also gladly hear opinions of other people on this.

My opinion (about what Eddie said) is that if all weapons are nerfed to a point where it requires 10+ shots to kill my enemies, I will just stop playing the mod and invest my time into something that doesn't waste my time and nerves (that much).

Fact 1: Weapons kill.
Fact 2: Weapons, which don't kill are not weapons.

[Dioxine]

Fact 3: armor was devised to negate Fact 1

Just whoa, please keep this calm. No need for such bitter declarations. The point is not to nerf weapons into uselessness. The point is, do some weapons allow too unfair of an advantage.

[yrizoud]

When I see bows in action in long missions, shooting 2 times per round is a bit much. It's also a bit strange to see unlimited damage potential in such a low-tech weapon, while shotguns require reload very often.
5-arrow quivers (not heavy, but taking lots of backspace space) could limit the potential and make each shot important.
It would also give option for the Rambo explosive arrow, and punching glove arrow

[Arthanor]

I personally like that some enemies require some effort to kill, especially personal/power armor and the more advanced enemies (provosts, church exalts). It creates a situation where you have to sneak around and either wear them down with crappy weapons and acid flasks or hold/avoid them until you can bring the right thing to bear. Weapons kill, but primitive weapons shouldn't kill advanced enemies, at least not as well as advanced weapons.

As it is, weapons that scale outclass those that don't. We get so many missions that gals improve much faster than tech improves. This is assuming you manage to keep the gals alive, of course. But it is doable, especially once you get decent armors, more hp on them veterans and dog scouts. It is especially easy now that early game enemies have been nerfed and that you can raid awesome defender armors in the early game. (Note on raiding armor: I would make it so that only traders and academy can carry defender, and even heavy armor, with some decent crew to protect it that wear armor similar to what they transport. Spartans should carry camo gear, tac vests and tac armors. Raiding spartans for defender armor begs the question: If they can carry it, why don't they ever wear it? or at least the lower tier tac armor).

The way to improve guns damage is to research better guns, but that takes a LONG time. Let's take second tier ballistic weapons: You need the proper drops from enemies to acquire the guns in the first place (light/heavy/auto-cannon, LACC, CAWS, which don't drop that early in the game probably due to itemlevels) and then producing the ammo is non-trivial too. Eventually you get to tier 3 ballistic (with the custom/smart weapons) but these still aren't doing as much damage as the primitive bows and knives (haven't tried javelins yet). Since I don't want to play "prehistoric cavemen raiders in the future", but "Piratez of the future", I tend to go for gunz, and lately the super slow pace of gun improvement compared to the stat-wise tempting, fluff-wise uninteresting (to me) primitive weapons, has been wearing my interest down. (Yes, it is my own decision that makes it so and that's why I didn't mention it before, but you asked for opinions).

By opposition, the way to improve with bows and knives is easy: you just have to use them and you can bypass a whole lot of the tech. Eddie's claim that his Fuso Knives are better than a gauss pistol (at short range, of course, but they are both somewhat short range weapons) shows it is a bit crazy. Sure a ninja gal can do tremendous damage with a Fuso knife to the enemy's face/weak spot, but why can't a gal do that with a pistol shot to the same place? Throwing weapons also improve your ability to use nice long range explosive throws.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I agree that it makes sense for primitive weapons to scale with both accuracy and strength since you pull the bow further/throw the knife harder if you are stronger, while guns scale only with accuracy since your gun doesn't fire more powerfully because you're stronger (but hopefully you can carry a bigger gun, and actually you can handle the recoil better so.. better accuracy on some guns from strength? hum..!). But the current situation does not work very well with:
- Bows/Knives: Hit more with accuracy, hit more often per turn with TUs because of flat rates, more damage with both accuracy and strength while keeping the same weapon
- Guns: Hit more with accuracy, more damage only from changing weapon

Primitive weapons scale 4 times as much as guns for a given weapon! (actually, it is multiplicative, not additive, so it's even more). If gun damage also scaled with accuracy or reactions (and I know you are doing this for some), it would help.

Case in point: Bows get a whopping 50% bonus from accuracy and with a few research projects, you get an extra 40% str. Sure they start from zero, but it is easy to catch up. A longbow with 60 throwing accuracy and 55 str will do 60*0.5+55*0.4 = 52 damage, which is the same as a laser rifle with the best clip, it will also hit at pretty much the same accuracy (120% instead of 125% for the rifle), fire at a flat 40TUs (so eventually 2, maybe 3 shots) compared to 60% of TUs for the rifle (only one shot/turn ever), and it will never require ammo compared to requiring fancy ammo and lots of research. It also works really well combined with Fuso knives for short range which outdoes any pistol in damage by the time you get 80 throwing accuracy (at which point 0.75*0.025*80^2 = 120% to hit on snap shots if I read that right). Arcing shot is usually a good thing too, except for breaches (which are short range -> Fuso knives domain) and base defences (again, Fuso and melee work well here with hit and run).

All that to justify these suggestions:
1 - Buff guns a bit with some accuracy/reactions to damage, to help them keep up and represent the ability to aim at weak spots.
2 - Might be cool to play with gun damage and damage roll to make them more reliable than primitive weapons (ex.: +33% damage & damage roll 50-150% damage -> damage is now 66-200% of original damage instead of 0-200%).

I also agree with Eddie's suggestion of:
3 - Changing the primitive weapons formula so that they plateau after a certain point, to prevent them from outclassing high tech weapons (at 100 throwing + 80 str, a longbow does the same damage as a gauss rifle, can be aim fired for a similar TU cost as the rifle's snap shot but with way more accuracy. It's just missing the reaction fire)
4 - Making armor more effective against primitive weapons. An arrow or knife shouldn't have the penetration power of a bullet. Maybe it's going to hurt a naked target more (it's bigger afterall, and may have more momentum/energy from its larger mass despite its slower speed, but size is also a disadvantage when it comes to piercing armor where you need to concentrate the impact as much as possible)

[Meridian]

Fact 3: armor was devised to negate Fact 1

Just whoa, please keep this calm. No need for such bitter declarations. The point is not to nerf weapons into uselessness. The point is, do some weapons allow too unfair of an advantage.

Sorry, didn't want this to sound bitter, just voicing opinions. In my experience so far, I have not met a single weapon, which would give me unfair of an advantage. All weapons so far (May 2601) range between very poor and average, most of them between very poor and poor.

The armors are quite good... but that's probably because I have access to armors I should not have yet.

[Dioxine]

Now it's clear, thanks. Your assesment of the available weapons is fair and in line with what was intended. To advance to 'good', 'very good', and 'awesome' weapons will require a lot of climbing in the research tree (with a chance to get something very good fiarly early - especially a good chance with your research approach).

The 'OP-ness' of primitive weapons is in main part a function of relentless and boring stat training. They are also heavily disadvantaged by limited range. But I will take some steps to adress the knife, if not many - I want it to remain an effective weapon in veteran's hands. I also had an idea to add extra stun damage for all bullets, so the guns will get a small buff.

[Arthanor]

The 'OP-ness' of primitive weapons is in main part a function of relentless and boring stat training.

No, it is due to the fact that tech takes a long time to progress while fights are plentiful so stats improve fast, which makes weapons scaling with stats improve a lot faster than you can upgrade your tech to keep up with. Especially in the early game against the new easy not killy factions. You don't lose many soldiers so the training can add up early and give you a starting advantage when you encounter the other factions later. This is compounded by how easy it is to get good primitive weapons (longbow and Fuso knives). If you consider the kind of stats that allow primitive weapons to measure up to even laser weapons (~60 throwing, 60 str) to be dependent on "relentless and boring stat training", then I agree to disagree.

To me they only require regular use of these weapons, whereas regular use of guns will not net you the same benefits (you will get similar 60 FA and 60 str pretty quickly, but that doesn't translate in 56 damage except on sniper/reaper rifles). You don't need to do "silly tossing stuff missions" or "let's see how many handle/shotgun/hunting bow hits this panicked security guard can take before going down". You just need to go for every UFO you detect and take out everything. Trying to capture is actually the closest to training, since you can need many handle hits before a target goes down. The only stat that is hard to improve in Piratez is reactions (although I guess that's only true if you don't use the typical line up soldiers by a UFO entrance technique, which actually would be easy to use in Piratez since gals start with better reactions and enemies have worst ones).

I never purposefully train, or use crappy weapons with the intent to get more hits on a target. I will favour accuracy over damage on gals that have terrible accuracy as it is better to hit and do little damage than to miss and fail to do awesome damage. However, as long as I can get ~60% to hit on an aimed shot, I use as deadly a weapon as I can get/afford since I favour killing ASAP to remove threats and increase survival that way. Despite that, there are a lot of targets thus a lot of stat improvements and since my priority is survival, gals survive and those improvements add up, to the great benefit of weapons with good scaling. As a gun user, I love reaper rifles for that reason, but otherwise I'd be having a field day with bows.

[Eddie]

I would also like to mention that changing the damage range from 0-200% to 50-150% also reduces a weapons armor busting potential, without reducing the damage. So my take on the fuso knives would be 50-150% damage range, +30% armor effectiveness and a stack size of 4, damage formula unchanged. Same and more reliable damage vs low armor enemies while reducing armor busting potential.

A well balanced low tech weapon is the crossbow. It is useful enough while also having a weakness (long range). Another example is the fistycuffs. Powerful scaling, but their weakness is their unpredictable damage which often kills a target you wanted to stun. The bows have no real weakness.


Edit: regarding autogun vs light machinegun
They have the same accuracy in auto mode at long range. Autogun has 55% with 15 range and LMG has 45% with 20 range. Drop is 2 per tile so at range 20 autogun has dropped to exactly 45% accuracy. Autogun has 12 shots (3x auto) vs 10 shots (2x auto) for LMG, so the higher damage of LMG bullets is somewhat compensated. LMG has no snap and aimed, so no reaction fire. The tradeoff for no reaction and no aimed should be more than maybe 10% more damage. Just my opinion though..

[Boltgun]

Some weapons are good and if they weren't we would not be using them right? The bow is not a perfect accuracy weapon and the fact that it has an arc make it safe, at the same time, using a spotter and a sniper rifle is not much different.

You want OP? Portable lascannons. 80% accuracy, 110 laser damage, two snaps a turn, this step on many other guns and rockets against most targets. It implies using a kustom armor, but still it does everything afterwards.

[Eddie]

Portable lascannon needs research. Bow and knives are available from day 1 and are dirt cheap.

My take on primitive weapons would be that they are comparable in power to available gun tech, while beeing cheaper and having drawbacks. A perfect example of that is the crossbow. So you would use primitive weapons because you have no ammo for your guns or want to conserve ammo, but if you had all the ammo in the world you would use your guns. Dioxine may have a different vision though.

[Dioxine]

Once ninja weapons appear, there's no end of trouble... I'll up the TU cost of Snap with knives to the same as Aimed, add +30% armor effectiveness against them, and reduce stack from 6 to 5. A bit smaller nerf on stars (+2 TU to use, +15% armor eff.). This still allows to dish out a lot of damage. Hunting bow also +30% armor eff. The rest of the bows remain unchanged, I want 3 shots on Combat Bow and 2 on Longbow. I'll consider adding ammo for them, though (while reducing unloaded weight), but I don't like the idea that much...

As for Reactions, they're easy to train with Melee now.

EDIT: at the same time, I added the following buffs for guns:
- Piercing, Plasma, Acid munitions and all Concussive explosions cause thrice as much secondary Stun damage;
- All Acid weapons now cause extra armor damage (10% unless already higher); raw damage lowered accordingly
- All Acid weapons now cause extra morale damage
- All Piercing & Plasma munitions of 60+ base power now cause extra armor damage (5%)

[Cristao]

I am not too sure one needs to make changes yet. Once people start using Heavy Plasma, EuroSyndicate Laser then opinions would change again. Also once they meet Star Gods and other tougher enemies - it would change again.

However you are the designer so ..

I can agree on that guns should probably look at Accuracy as stat buff. Primitive weapons - strength and accuracy buff. Perhaps add a factor to the equation.

[Eddie]

Another way to improve bullet weapons is to introduce specialized ammunition. This allows to adapt your ammo to the target, getting better performance from the right ammo choice.

The standard bullet we have right now I will call full metal jacket (fmj).

New:
For soft targets, jacketed hollow point (jhp).
For hard targets, armor piercing (ap).

-- Now the tradeoff is that jhp is worse than fmj or ap vs hard targets while ap is worse than fmj or hp vs soft targets. --
(This is the important bit, that there is a tradeoff!)

To make that work ingame:
fmj (for comparison): 0-200% damage
jhp: +30% armor effectiveness, ToHealth: 1.0, 50-150% damage
ap: -50% armor effectiveness, ToHealth: -0.3, 0-200% damage

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.

Crunching the numbers:
I use a 30 damage weapon. Soft target has 10 armor, medium target has 20 armor and hard target has 30 armor. Average (av) damage and max damage:

fmj vs 10 armor: av 20.9 max 50
fmj vs 20 armor: av 13.4 max 40
fmj vs 30 armor: av 7.6 max 30

jhp vs 10 armor: av 34 max 64
jhp vs 20 armor: av 12.3 max 38
jhp vs 30 armor: av 1.4 max 12

ap vs 10 armor: av 17.7 max 38
ap vs 20 armor: av 14.6 max 35
ap vs 30 armor: av 11.9 max 31

As you can see the math checks out. Vs medium armor all rounds perform somewhat similar while jhp offers roughly +50% damage over fmj vs soft targets while ap offers roughly +50% damage over fmj vs hard targets. Soft target is armor ~1/3 of bullet power, medium armor ~2/3 of bullet power and hard armor >= bullet power. Note that ap does not kill armored targets fast, it just does reliable low damage.

It took me about 2 hours playing with the numbers to get them to do what I want, so don't change the modifiers unless you know what you are doing. Especially the 50-150% on the jhp is crucial, otherwise it would do way too much damage (+50% more!!!).

For game usage, I would not give every gun all ammo types. SMGs and low power guns should get the jhp option while high power and snipers get ap option.