[piratez] Buffing suggestions

[Dioxine]

So in short, what I see from this analysis, debuff buckshot (from 22x8 to 20x10 perhaps), and buff mil and heavy shotguns (perhaps by bumping their Snap range to 8, so the slugs work better - the hv. shotgun fires 28x3 slugs which is already equivalent to a rifle's autoshot). Combat shotty is too weak with 20x5, maybe up to 22x5. CAWS might use a slight range increase too.

[Boltgun]

The military shotgun range has proven to be good enough, with slugs you could hit target on a moderate distance without exposing yourself too much.

Quick question, does each pellets do their own fatal wounds?

[Dioxine]

1) So I thought, but that strongly depends on soldier's Strength. Also it's supposed to be an overall bit better weapon than all these shotguns (except Blunderbuss and CAWS).

2) Yes.

[Eddie]

Dioxine, before you think about nerving buckshot, maybe you should try it out first to see what it does. It is fine the way it is.
The double barrel is also used quite often by enemies. Right now it is a threat. If you reduce the damage, gals in warrior armor will just be laughing at it.

Balancing the shotguns with accuracy won't work. Shotgun pellets don't hit the same way normal bullets do. Even if you have >100% accuracy on the shot, lots of pellets will miss at a distance of 8 tiles. Compared to a 3 shot auto on a rifle with 100%, where all bullets hit.
I did some more testing, firing the heavy with slugs at a distance of 8 tiles with over 100% accuracy. 1 pellet will always hit. about 30% of the time 2 pellets will hit. haven't seen all 3 pellets hit so far.

So no, the heavy slugs are definately not the same as a 3 round auto from a rifle. And if they where the same, why use a shotgun and not the rifle?

[Dioxine]

Show me that rifle with 100% autofire accuracy. You'll get maybe 50-60% with maxed out stats. Otoh 100% acc is nothing special for a shotgun, you can even get 200%. Also the Warrior armor was specifically designed to stop such low-powered projectiles, and the Buckshot is supposed to be 'average' as far as shotguns go, not 'good' or 'excellent'.

Also don't insult me with phrases like 'you should try it out first'. Who the f*ck do you think I am, a kid who just started playing with rulesets? Who didn't play his own game? I need to balance shotguns towards other types of weapons too. If I make them too powerful, it's a slippery slope - then I'll have to buff pistols, then rifles, then machine guns, etc.

The aim was to recreate shotguns in some way resembling reality. It is true that tactical situations found in Piratez rarely favor shotguns, but this is not an argument for buffing shotguns. Which weapon is better and which is worse is determined by the realities of a conflict. Looks like the conflict currently described in Piratez does not favor shotguns.

[Eddie]

Dioxine, I do no mean to insult you. But when you are saying buckshot needs to be nerved I wonder why you think it it overpowered. The fact that it is better than other weapons that suck don't make it overpowered, just useful.

The problem with warrior armor is that any bullet that does less than 22 damage is harmless. Beeing invulnerable is not fun. You may like it, but I do not.

Someone else said it already. Guns should kill.

[Arthanor]

Guns should kill and armor should protect. Hum.. balancing a mod is tricky, and Dioxine has the trickiest of them all to balance.

In this case, buckshot is supposed to be bad against anything in some kind of armor. It's there to take out unarmoured enemies. The solid slug is supposed to be for armored target and if the buckshot is better than the slug, then it is not right. That's why Dioxine wants to lower the damage but increase pellets: a move that leaves damage unchanged against unarmoured enemies but lowers the damage against armored ones. He's trying to make the shotgun behave like he envisions it in his mod.

[Eddie]

Show me that rifle with 100% autofire accuracy.

Easy. Stand next to your target, you have 100% accuracy.

Read the discussion here: https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Firing_Accuracy_Testing
(assuming openxcom has similar firing mechanics)

Accuracy displayed is not actual accuracy. A rifle that has a stated 45% accuracy actually has 68% accuracy at range 3 tiles.

On the flip side, a shotgun with 100% stated accuracy does not hit all bullets at range 3 tiles.

[ivandogovich]

@ Eddie: on the flip side, the proposed change to buckshot up to 10 pellets, may increase the rate of stunned enemies now, due to the buff on stun results to damage taken.  

I think Dioxine's desire to tier the shotguns, and your field testing are going to yield good results.

As far as not wanting invulnerability... there are simple solutions.  Just don't play with armor.  Or limit yourself etc.

[clownagent]

Another comment on the shotgun discussion which is similar to this comment.

Edit: Many shotguns are not very good because armored targets resist them easily and in the situations were they would help, a machine gun or a rifle will work equally well without its drawbacks. It shows in Meridian's LP and myself I only favor the blunderbuss.

Shotgun stats look good on paper. So I tried them out a bit initially, but found they are not so good for the following reasons:
1. The long range gals get heavy weapons, sniper rifle or similar. Much better accuracy on long range than any shotgun.
2. The short range gals for storming ufos or buildings get usually a strong melee weapon, which deals much more damage than any shotgun.
3. For the rare cases where you would need a medium range weapon like shotgun there are plenty of good alternatives like ninja stars, fuso knives, heavy pistols, powder bomb .... Those alternatives are light and fit easily into the quickdraw slot of every gal, which does a shotgun not.
So in the end, there is not much need for a large dedicated medium range weapon, even if the stats were a little bit improved.

Of course everybody has his own playstyle, but with the current balancing I see no reason to equip a shotgun on any gal (which is no problem, because there are dozens of other cool weapons). Maybe if the shotguns had a special ability like discussed above: TU, stamina, lots of stun, or morale damage would be an interesting selling point.

[Dioxine]

If you criticize invulnerability, you'll always have a field day in this mod - with this many tiers of weapons and armors, you will always find armor big enough and a weapon weak enough to prove that something is invulnerable to something.

Also rifle's accuracy 100% from 1 tile is inconsequential - you're able to rack up far more damage with even a small melee weapon if you're that close (even if not all attacks hit), not even mentioning axes, maces and rapiers.

Shotguns will have more uses if I ever manage to make the 'origins' project I'm starting now - basically, you start out sooner, with much less stuff, and face much more lower-level challenges, where lack of armor on both sides will make these fights extra bloody, and shotguns very killy. There also will be some enemies especially weak to shotguns to make more room for a place for a shotgun specialist in a party. But that's in the future. For now, all starting shotguns below Blunderbuss are already outdated since Day 1, that's the truth (with the CS getting sweet Fire ammo being an exception). So yes, most of them was meant to 'suck' in comparison to the best stuff you currently have on Day 1.

I might also reduce all gal's armor by 5, if the feeling of invulnerability is too strong.

[yrizoud]

I think setting a blanket game rule like "every attack of power>0 reduces the armor by 1" would do a lot of good for the invulnerability cases, while being nearly invisible in the many cases where a character gets killed by 1 or 2 attacks anyway.
Seemingly unkillable characters could go down after enough efforts. Shotgun blasts against armored units may still cause no immediate health damage, but will be helpful in the longer term.
Even for player armors, it's a good thing because the pressure will go up during long battles, as the "tank girls" defense gets lower and lower.
(A bottom limit could be set, like 33% or 50% of the original value)

[Dioxine]

Well it can't be set to a value, the damage will continue until armor = 0. If I added armor damage to shotguns, they'd wear down even a powered armor rather quickly. Not sure if this is how it should work. Unless the whole armor mechanic was reworked to be based more on Resistances and less on Armor Values.

[yrizoud]

I was thinking a hard-coded change (additional case) in BattleUnit::damage(), the same way there is the vanilla rule that damages armor when the target loses hit points. An additional rule, since the cases are exclusive.

I'm sorry if it's a stupid idea, I don't even know the full range of armors and damage of Piratez, so I can't be sure if it would make sense.

I just checked, it's more than the few lines of code that I hoped it would involve, because apparently BattleUnit doesn't expose the original armor values directly. The data would need to be taken from the BattelUnit's _armor->getFrontArmor(), _armor->getSideArmor() or _armor->getRearArmor()

[Dioxine]

No, definitely not a stupid idea, I wasn't saying it was. But I try to base the mod on the codebase that is present... Also, while this seems interesting, it'd add another variable to balance out Another way of doing this would be some sort of Armor Damage Threshold - any attack stronger than it would do normal armor damage (like a penetrating shot would). The example formula (that'd replace current damage formula if the threshold is defined) would be something like:
Armor damage = 0.1 * (Attack Damage - Armor Damage Threshold)
Instead of: Armor damage = 0.1 * (Attack Damage - Current Armor Value)